Star Wars Outlaws won't use procedural generation; all planets are being handcrafted
The game's creative director recently discussed the scale of the game and how the team is crafting the areas of the galaxy players will get to explore.
Ubisoft floored us when during the summer showcases, it showed off Star Wars Outlaws and a grand galactic campaign in which we’ll play between the boundaries of the Empire and Rebel Alliance. More than that, we were amazed to see such well-crafted worlds and the means to move between them. It’s all being painstakingly crafted by the devs at Ubisoft too, no random procedural generation here, as revealed by creative director Julian Gerighty in a recent interview.
Gerighty shared details about the environmental scale and design of worlds in Star Wars Outlaws in an interview with Edge Magazine, as reported by GamesRadar. According to Gerighty, the team has not been using any form of procedural generation for the environments players will explore, it’s all being painstakingly crafted by the crew. He also goes on to share just how big some of these areas are.
“It's a crude analogy, but the size of one planet might be about [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin's Creed Odyssey,” Gerighty shared.
Source: Ubisoft
As for how Ubisoft Massive is taking on stuffing such large areas with interesting activities and stories to explore, he claims that creating it in a way that’s as sensible for the team as it is for the player is a priority.
"It could be two to three zones. But it's not, you know, this sort of epic 'the whole of England recreated' approach," Gerighty clarified. “[It will be] manageable in size for both the player and developer at Ubisoft Massive.”
Star Wars Outlaws caught millions of eyes and hearts when it was surprisingly revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase 2023 presentation in June. It’s shaping up to be a solid open-world action adventure in the Star Wars universe, but we’ll see for ourselves when it arrives sometime in 2024. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to move towards that release window.
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replyTJ Denzer posted a new article, Star Wars Outlaws won't use procedural generation; all planets are being handcrafted
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I think that’s my favorite implementation of it. Some of the levels are nuts and really fun/challenging to explore
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XCOM 1 was mostly pregenerated maps but they could turn objective objects on and off, change your spawn location and stuff like that iirc
XCOM 2 was almost entirely procedurally generated
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Not even FTL?
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PUCKER UP BIG BOY
I have well over a hundred successful runs in FTL. But yeah if you can't manage to find a couple decent weapons by the midgame life gets really hard really fast. Unless you have a Mantis boarding party that is. -
I think i've literally only beat it with one strategy. 4-person boarding party.
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Not even Soldier of Fortune 2?
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Yup. I played the demo so many times. Somehow I remember the demo more then the full game.
Sof2 wasn’t as good, but still fun.
I even didn’t hate SoF3-
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Soldier of fortune payback. Wasn’t made by raven and got bad reviews, but was still fun at the time.
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SOF2 MP was timeless.
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yes you have and you didn’t even know it
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As demonstrated by the above comments it seems very situational.
If the game is a story focused game it's probably pretty hard to have meaningful procedural content in it that doesn't feel like it's just filler.
If the core gameplay loop is based on repetition with different situations for variety, then procedural seems like it's probably a pretty good fit.-
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As I understand it, none of the planets are entirely hand-created. There's too much terrain to cover. Most of the surface of any given planet is procedurally generated. Certain planets have some quest-related locations that are hand created with predefined positions. Flora and fauna are hand-created, but distributed mostly by the algorithm. On top of that, planets are generated with locations where hand-created content can be placed when the player discovers them.
Something else worth noting is that, based on the Direct, the planetary generation system is significantly more sophisticated than anything we've seen before, incorporating things like distance from the star and atmospheric density to determine the biome that is generated in an area.
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I'm gonna propose a radical idea that might blow your mind:
At the end of the day, in a way all content in computer games is "procedurally generated" because while the models and meshes and sprites and backgrounds may be defined by hand, it all requires a computer to render and run them. The "handcrafted/procedural" dichotomy is somewhat artificial, or more like a gradient/continuum where certain stuff is explicitly specified by the creator while other stuff is handled by algorithms. Almost certainly you've played a ton of games with stuff you might consider to be "procedurally generated" and you just didn't know because nobody told you or because the environment didn't rearrange itself on subsequent playthroughs.
If you're determining quality by how much explicit thought goes into each aspect of a game, you're almost definitely looking at the wrong things. That isn't to say there isn't some satisfaction in knowing something was hand crafted or it isn't impressive, but the thing you're actually looking for when you're trying to map human labor to a digital product (or any entertainment product, really) is "spectacle." And that's actually not an indication of quality at all, it's just a measure of how many resources/effort were poured into it. -
Not even Pac Man?
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Holy shit that is amazing news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-BkrwO_Dck , very cool!!!!!!!!!!! I think whats is also amazing is "the size of one planet might be about [equivalent to] two of the zones in Assassin's Creed Odyssey" , that is pretty cool.
I really hope the game owns it has the potential to be something special. -
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