Hacker News Reader

> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.

I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.

In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.

But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.

Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.

Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).

They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.

Case in point: dwarf fortress. Every world is procedural,and woven with interesting stories

https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cacame_Awemedinade

Bethesda had been doing procedural generation since forever though: Have you played Daggerfall? It's always been part of their studio's DNA.

Bethesda has always relied on top of the line technological innovation that makes us forgive all the jank that came with it. Whether it was a bad combat system, a level scaling mechanism that just doesn't work, uncanny graphics... this has always been there. It's the opposite of the old Nintendo Way, where the games always were less ambitious, but had so much polish that the games counted as mirrors.

We've reached a moment of much diminished returns though. 5, or even 10 year old games aren't so technologically inferior that they are uncomfortable. A very shiny things has more trouble covering for jank, and high budget games are just so expensive that neither coherent vision. nor significant innovation are likely. So the Bethesda way is just not workable anymore.

What I'd want Bethesda to do, Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom meets Morrowind/Oblivion, is just really hard to wrangle logistically. Getting anything done under those kinds of constraings just takes too long.

Procedural generation is fine. But you can definitely see that Starfield was intended to be a platform for user-generated content straight from the start, and I think they must have convinced themselves that they didn’t really need to care too much about the game itself, because those chumps - sorry, players - would add all the content for them on their own. It’s like Metaverse all over again. They forgot they actually needed to make something worth playing and users’ time investment before it would become a money printing machine. Also, probably like 4 people who worked on Daggerfall still work at Bethesda and most of their games between then and now didn’t use procedural generation much at all, so I don’t understand why so many people make this argument. Like oh it’s normal for me to put DSLs in my software projects, here check out this git repo I worked on 25 years ago when I was in college, our customers should have been prepared for the shit job I did with it this time.

Actually, I think I would be completely fine with Bethesda just churning out TES POI and storylines without trying to do anything significantly more complicated than what they did in Skyrim. Just focus on the world building and the story and do some simple gimmick that’s a little more creative than “shouts/dragonborn but in space”. I suspect most other players would be happy with something of similar scope.

> I think they must have convinced themselves that they didn’t really need to care too much about the game itself, because those chumps - sorry, players - would add all the content for them on their own

Were they wrong? Skyrim sits at 70k mods after who knows how many years. Starfield has 10k already. I’ll admit it might not go as far as Skyrim, but still.

I feel the fact they did procgen is not as bad as the fact that what was not was just slightly less compelling than usual.

> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them.

I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.

I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.

Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.

Starfield (and I speak as someone who put in a couple of hundred hours to the game) has a wealth of problems, but one of them is that they messed up the distribution of even the small-ish number of points of interest that they have.

They put some sort of cooldown timer on them, set way too short, so players see the same half dozen over and over again.

A modder discovered the timer and set it longer, and suddenly found a load more content that very few people had come across before.

> I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.

Minecraft isn't even remotely the same genre or even catering to the same audience as Bethseda games, so it's a really terrible comparison.

It's like telling a cyclist that the roads are fine you see, there's plenty of trucks on them.

I wasn't making a comparison, I was just commenting on procedural generation in general. It clearly can be fun and interesting if done well since some games have managed to achieve that.

Whether it's possible to do well in the kind of game Starfield is I don't know, I never claimed it was. I even said as much in the last line of my comment, that perhaps the kind of game Starfield is makes this approach not work.

That is a major issue with Starfield, but it also felt like Bethesda missed the improvements happening in other games in the last decade or so. Many games now are much more cinematic in their storytelling, often with full motion capture. A very recent comparison would be BG3, which is very cinematic despite being almost impossibly large.

In Starfield you have a mostly static view of your questgivers talking. Which was fine 10-20 years ago, doesn't feel as engaging today when many games do it much better.

It's also not only about this aspect, you can make engaging stories with old-school methods. But the writing could not save the aging presentation here, it appeared very bland and tired to me.

What absolutely didn't help was the persuasion minigame, where you essentially broke all pretense of having a story-based reason to bypass a certain check. Persuasion checks are very common in RPGs, I've never seen them done so terribly as in Starfield.

The environmental storytelling certainly was the highlight of previous Bethesda games. But the main and side stories often were engaging as well. In Starfield they felt aggressively bland and mediocre in a way I haven't really seen in other games.

They've always been terrible at animation. 10 or 20 years ago, their animations have always been the absolute worst by any contemporary standard (the art used to be too - see Battlespire for some terrible art - but they improved it). Maybe part of that was because of the engine, but I think they just never had the culture for it.

They clearly did try to improve their animations in Fallout 4 in 2013-2014, which is the timeframe the most development happened, so it's not like they're oblivious to their biggest shortcoming as a studio. So what they did in F76 and Starfield is just a regression.

Proc gen can be engaging if emergent content is complex, dynamic, and novel. But again that goes back to Radiant AI being a vessel for generic fetch quests in the newer games, while in a proc gen game you would think there would be a major, if not the major dev focus on fleshing out the system in other ways (from dynamic tribes and factions to more fully fleshed out STALKER-esque persistent fellow space travellers with agency). The final missing component would be inspiration in design of the pieces, so they interact together in interesting but emergent ways, which is of course another element that the game sorely lacks.

Starfield also specifically didn’t understand what makes a space version of an exploration RPG interesting. They couldn’t ship ground to space flight so they convinced themselves it wasn’t interesting and replaced it with cutscenes and fast travel.

The whole excitement of games like Elite, Space Engineers etc is the seamless takeoff to landing between long planetary distances.

In a space themed game the journey is the story not so much the smaller interpersonal interactions at the destinations, those things are the reasons for the journey.

Modern Bethesda didn’t understand what they were making.

I recognize all of that as true to some extent, but still I have 230 hours in Starfield, and I haven’t even finished all the quests.

Does that truly constitute a failed game?

As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.

Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.

Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean the game doesn't have problems, or it didn't have a negative affect on BGS's image. The reviews vary location to location, but on Steam it's at 55%. That's unfathomably bad for a Bethesda open-world RPG title.

A lot of people bought Starfield because it was a Bethesda game. A lot of those people will re-consider the next time such a game comes out.

Even years later, people are willing to put up with all of Skyrim's jank, bugs, performance problems, terrible animations and visuals, bad story and the rest because the core gameplay loop of exploration is so strong. It carries the entire game.

Starfield is missing that core that holds it together.

> Just because you enjoy it doesn't mean the game doesn't have problems, or it didn't have a negative affect on BGS's image

All of their games have a negative effect on BGS’s image. There’s no company that has more people complaining about their games. It’s going to take a whole lot more than a single terrible game to get people to stop buying them.

I disagree. None have been as negative, except FO76.

Plus - competition is way fiercer recently, and standards have risen.

I’ve played fewer hours but gone through the whole story and about eight trips through the unity.

I don’t think it’s a failed game so much as one that’s not lived up to what it could be. The story is occasionally great but not always so. Most of the procedurally generated planets are entirely pointless and dull. You can see where they abandoned and downscaled ideas because there are still rough edges - the ‘fuel’ system that never was, for instance.

Overall I enjoyed the game, but it definitely falls into the same “banality of the infinite” trap that No Man’s Sky does

> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them.

I mostly agree, though at least for me Minecraft was a game I loved exploring in despite it all being generated