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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#16
While it does really suck to get burned by false game advertising, it is a bad long term strategy for your company. Hello Games' reputation is beyond tarnished, it's pretty much destroyed to the point where I believe that they may not be able to make another game. They may have profited from their lie now, but going forward consumers will not trust them and other studios may not want people who worked there either.

I worry about the health of the procedural "genre" (if you can really call it that) because of the actions of Hello Games. Any other game with the word procedural tied to it will likely be lumped in with NMS unfortunately, but hopefully this will also have the positive effect of more thorough investigation of procedural games by gaming journalists before release to get a more accurate depiction of the game prior to release.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#17
Well the "first big seller" that used procedural generation was Minecraft. If you want to talk about biomes, entire environments, along with cliffs and content being generated in specific areas for specific reasons then I think Minecraft should be the game everyone goes back to. There have been lots of failures or little heard of games that use procedural generation. Getting it right isn't easy, and when you are talking about something as complex as Limit Theory there is going to naturally be some fear about how the end user will react to the content.

If the gameplay is solid the user will be more forgiving of the graphical content. So while Josh may feel like he needs awesome star-ships at launch the real challenge should be getting the non-procedural content working. These being the systems which drive the game mechanics.

In summary, I'm not concerned about 'procedural generation' receiving a bad reputation based off of recent failures. A look at Star Citizen and Minecraft can show players what is possible. The problem is that most of the games which use this technology have failed game mechanics. Game mechanics make or break the game.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#18
FormalMoss wrote: Is it possible to have a seed, that generates the "as advertised" universe of LT?
The one where all the fly-bys have been performed for the ads that appear online for LT.. that way, you merely dial into that seed and see everything that you heard/knew about from reviewers/ ads.

Then, safe in the knowledge it's there, I could generate a new seed, and play the game whatever way I want to..
Maybe this should be the default setting for the runtime of LT?
As far as I know, yes, that is possible. I don't have much experience with random number generators, but the same seed always giving the same sequence of numbers is a well known property.

So offering LT with a standard seed as default setting is a good idea, and anything that comes up with that seed would be OK to use in marketing. Just add a small hint that says "from default game seed" :) .
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#19
DigitalDuck wrote:
Lum wrote:Well, that we can't know for sure.
DigitalDuck wrote:The files for the E3 demo (which was used for promoting and advertising the final game) were discovered in the game files as being separate and not procedurally generated, and yet during the demo he said he's jumping into a level nobody's seen before and that he has no idea what's in it.
Yes, we can.
Didn't know about that, but I guess that's one more of their lies.

Maybe they intended to deliver what was promised but performance constraints killed the idea and instead of coming out clean and say it, they took the f**k-y'all-way and said nothing.

Seeing how the game performes with creatures no larger than 5-ish units and how it would perform using giant dinosaurs or sandworms... *shrugs*
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#20
BFett wrote:In summary, I'm not concerned about 'procedural generation' receiving a bad reputation based off of recent failures. A look at Star Citizen and Minecraft can show players what is possible. The problem is that most of the games which use this technology have failed game mechanics. Game mechanics make or break the game.
Focusing on "how to accurately advertise games that rely on procedural content generation," *cough*, this may be one of the better suggestions.

It's very tempting to want to promote PCG as the key selling point. It's somewhat new, which helps to distinguish a game from others that rely on human artists to handcraft a limited amount of content. PCG is also arguably a critical technology for extremely open-world games that emphasize exploration as a primary playstyle.

But maybe BFett is right, and selling a game based on its dynamics is just too abstract for most people. Maybe that makes exploration too hard to sell, and developers should just stick to talking about rules and mechanics -- specific, concrete actions that players can perform, which are either in the game or not and are thus less subject to interpretation.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#21
So why haven't NMS players seen the diplodocus from the E3 trailer?

Greg at 3dgamedevblog thinks he knows... because he's opened up the graphics files and figured out how they work.

He's put together a fantastic blog post describing his findings in the areas of Geometry, Texture, and Animation, what they imply for what players can reasonably expect to see from the procgen of NMS, and what might be done.

Great nuts-and-bolts stuff!

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