Supposedly No Man’s Sky was the vanguard of procgen but I wasn’t impressed. I get the impression that Starfield uses it very similarly.
For characters and ships, all NMS seems to do is combine permutations of prebuilt parts, not create any actual unique parts. Spore was way more impressive a decade and a half earlier because it tried to animate whatever wacky creature the player designed.
For terrain, NMS doesn’t even create biomes. You won’t find a river, glacier, waterfall, or oasis anywhere. They didn’t even apply the system to space stations, those are identical everywhere in the universe. Valheim and even Minecraft did better.
Starfield’s biome and planet generation is extremely barebones, but placing that in a single player RPG with the radiant quest systems is fairly innovative. Imagine STALKER Anomaly style tasks, but with proc-gen landscapes.
This combo allows any character to have more content available to suit that character style far more than Skyrim or Fallout 4 style faction radiant quests.
Still needs far more work though, it’s half-baked.
Supposedly No Man’s Sky was the vanguard of procgen but I wasn’t impressed. I get the impression that Starfield uses it very similarly.
For characters and ships, all NMS seems to do is combine permutations of prebuilt parts, not create any actual unique parts. Spore was way more impressive a decade and a half earlier because it tried to animate whatever wacky creature the player designed.
For terrain, NMS doesn’t even create biomes. You won’t find a river, glacier, waterfall, or oasis anywhere. They didn’t even apply the system to space stations, those are identical everywhere in the universe. Valheim and even Minecraft did better.
Is that an accurate comparison?
Starfield’s biome and planet generation is extremely barebones, but placing that in a single player RPG with the radiant quest systems is fairly innovative. Imagine STALKER Anomaly style tasks, but with proc-gen landscapes.
This combo allows any character to have more content available to suit that character style far more than Skyrim or Fallout 4 style faction radiant quests.
Still needs far more work though, it’s half-baked.