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Todd Howard Explains How Game's 1,000 Planets Work

Fredrik

Member
How can game design not affect the game? The question is whether or not those design decisions will prove to be beneficial or detrimental, and to what degree.
Since we won't know for certain until the game is released and available to experience, is why I remain skeptical.


That's obvious enough, I doubt anyone is actually expecting them to handcraft 1,000 individual planets to the same level of polish.
There are limits to resource and time, as with any production.


As I said to the previous poster, those are the parts that sound compelling to me atm.
Again, I'm not complaining about there being options. If that were the case, then I would be asking for the game to be linear in its design.
I'm just simply expressing skepticism because I'm keeping in Bethesda's past games and how broken they often are in the retail versions relative to how they've showcased in the marketing leading up to launch.


I think procedural generation at that scale comes with an increased probability of repetition and derivative, boring design.
Which would make the exploration seemingly less enticing over a period of time.
Most of what comes to mind upon hearing 1,0000 (mostly procedurally generated) planets are mostly barren planets that would serve primarily as spots for resource gathering and mining, and the occasional skirmish with creatures and humanoids.

I hope they manage to strike a balance with the procedural generation elements so as to not diminish the feeling of discovery, but until then I remain skeptical.
That's my honest opinion, I don't know what you want from me lol
They haven’t explained if the procedural generation is done in realtime when you play it, like in NMS, or if they’re just using it to help modelling the 1000 planets. If it’s just a dev tool to craft the planet surface, and the vegetation, and they can go in a tweak and add stuff by hand, then I don’t see the concern. This was done in Oblivion which looked fantastic for the time. Guerrilla did it in Horizon. Probably used in many games without we knowing it. It doesn’t have to be bad.

They say the main quest is 30-40 hours and on a fraction of the 1000 planets, where I assume they use the bulk of the hand-crafted love and care. The rest of the planets could be more like NMS. I assume they have some procedurally generated dungeons or ruins or whatever for the planets without main quests. OP’s video say they’ve had that in the past which I didn’t even know. Might just mean we get less duplication like in Elden Ring, definitely doesn’t have to be a bad thing, the map layout just becomes less samey.

In NMS we get stuff floating in the air at times or things that clip into the ground. I assume Bethesda can work around this since everything have physics in their engine (which can come with it’s own issues as we know lol). Who knows, the final touches they’re doing might just be looking into the unfortunate quirkiness of procedurally generating things, should explain why they need 6-12 months of final touches.
 
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