Looks interesting.
this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Hope they learned and aren't announcing more than they can deliver again.
A truly open world, with no boundaries at a scale never attempted before. A massively varied and dense planet filled with immersive biomes, unique enemies and valuable resources to discover.
uhhhhhhhhhhhh about that
What I'm curious about is how is it a big open world MMO but also procedural? Isn't that by nature not easy to accomplish? For example, if there is a big city that exists (2, even). Is what's in between them what's procedural? So is there no consistency, landmark wise?
On top of the sheer size, where there's a lot of empty space between these cities. There's a lot of ways to travel which is always good, they even flashed 3 or 4 methods as they showed the sprawling landscape.
That aside, the game just kind of looks like Rust and RuneScape but with a "worldwide open world".
Procedural doesn't mean random, just generated from a set of rules. These rules can have inputs that lead to different results and you get randomness by randomising those inputs.
What's Intresting is this this exactly how most random number generators work because computers can't be random. They take a "seed" value and will always produce the same list of "random" numbers for a given seed. This means you can randomise all kinds of numbers in your procedural generation code but always get the same output if you give the random number generator the same seed.
So in No Man's Sky, for example, each planet basically has a set seed so the game will generate the same planet, on the fly, for everyone one who visits it in game. Which is why them tooting their own horn about having a whole galaxy to explore was a bit of red flag. All it meant was they generated a massive list of seeds which would have results limited by the tooling next to none of which they'd have been able to review etc.
Which is a long winded way of saying they'll basically create the world using procedural tools and save the inputs used so the game can generate the same fixed map for everyone that plays with out having to store/load a world's worth of data.
Great low-down, thank you.
I can't shake that it just looks like No Man's Sky with a fantasy skin on it. I hope it's better than that and is something new.