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Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#1
Kill Screen has an interesting article up on this subject.

It follows grumblings about the UK government potentially targeting Hello Games because some players complained that what they've seen doesn't look like what was advertised.

But as the article asks: how do you accurately depict the content of a game in which a lot of the content is uniquely generated for each player dynamically?

Please note that this question is not meant as another opportunity to bash Hello Games or No Man's Sky. I've posted it in this section because it's an interesting general question as well as a question that may be specifically applicable to Limit Theory.

Assume Limit Theory is ready for release. (Yeah, yeah, just assume it.) What does a legally accurate ad for LT look like? Should it show any cool in-game content if some player might never see that particular content?

How do you showcase what a highly procedural game is capable of delivering if someone might sue you for not delivering exactly what was generated and shown in an ad?

Does the idea of using replicatable universe seeds help?
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#2
Hi Flat,

Is this the only place you've posited this question? :D :lol:
Show us your blog :shock:

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?

fM

P.S. The flybys would be a similar fare to what we've seen in the devlogs:
- Watching miners going by and swatting the pirates trying to score some loot
- Flying the ship across the varying ice fields, and the wonderful muted light that comes through
- .. can't think of any more at this time..
YAY PYTHON \o/

In Josh We Trust
-=326.3827=-
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#4
Flatfingers wrote:Please note that this question is not meant as another opportunity to bash Hello Games or No Man's Sky.
Sorry if I use it this way for a short period, but I do have to say that the article misrepresents it as though Hello Games are victims here, and they're not.
Flatfingers wrote:It follows grumblings about the UK government potentially targeting Hello Games because some players complained that what they've seen doesn't look like what was advertised.

But as the article asks: how do you accurately depict the content of a game in which a lot of the content is uniquely generated for each player dynamically?
1. Don't advertise features that point blank aren't in the game.
2. Show screenshots of content that actually exists somewhere in-game and isn't hand-made especially to be used as promotion material.

The content advertised on the Steam page and various other places was not procedurally generated in-game content - it was manually created content. 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. And that's only scratching the surface.

Bashing over, let's get back to the real meat:
Flatfingers wrote:Should it show any cool in-game content if some player might never see that particular content? How do you showcase what a highly procedural game is capable of delivering if someone might sue you for not delivering exactly what was generated and shown in an ad? Does the idea of using replicatable universe seeds help?
Yes, showing (some) cool in-game content is required to advertise the features of the game. Someone suing you because they don't see it is never going to hold up if your content is in there. And to prove it's in there, replicatable seeds would definitely help. If you can give step-by-step instructions that lead someone to content in your game, then you can obviously prove its existence.

But then if your game procedurally generates content, you'd expect to see content similar to that advertised at some point. There is rarely so much variance in the generated content that none of what's encountered looks like what was advertised, and when there is you don't reach a point where everything that's encountered looks like everything else that's been encountered, especially among hundreds of thousands of players.

Essentially, it's a non-problem.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#5
I would only show UI graphics which should remain the same from game to game. I would talk about game play in the same manner it was shared to us in the Kickstarter. I would not include images of ships or stations without stating that ships are subject to change depending on the seeds used.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#6
The problem with NMS isnt so much the randomly generated content, although it all looks like it was generated from a small number of varaiables.

You know, everything looked samey...

No, the problem with NMS is that they [LIED] or didnt include features that they said they would.
I aint listing em all. go google it.

Hello Games could have stemmed the hype BEORE the game released by simply disclosing what features made it to release but they didnt, they let the hype train ride and ride.

Players arnt so much angry at the prodceural content, but of missing features that they said were in the game.

So from a procedural generation standpoint NMS is ok, I say ok, but the wildlife looks it was all made from the same very small number of parts.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#7
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 recall this has always been the plan. According to the Kickstarter page, the default universe is "Universe 3827" (ref'd in $200 pledge), but there are "a handful" of preset universes that will be partly mapped out, guides compiled for etc. before release.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#8
ColdSpiral wrote:
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 recall this has always been the plan. According to the Kickstarter page, the default universe is "Universe 3827" (ref'd in $200 pledge), but there are "a handful" of preset universes that will be partly mapped out, guides compiled for etc. before release.

Heehee, i reckon you never saw my sig ;)
YAY PYTHON \o/

In Josh We Trust
-=326.3827=-
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#9
While I believe that the consumer bears a great deal of responsibility in researching the products they buy, I think an advertiser does have a basic moral obligation to not lie. The problem with procedural games is that you can keep reloading the universe until you get one that is most appealing to show off, even though such a universe may only happen a fraction of a percent of the time, so you can show off things that might happen 1 in a million universes and not technically be lying. For advertising, I think it would be good if we were given figures on how often particular phenomena have been found in playtesting. As a developer, I wouldn't feel comfortable advertising something that would happen in less than 25% of the universes. I think it's clear that Hello Games used many different seeds to create universes and then went from planet to planet, cherry-picking the most unlikely and best results of each seed, even though it is possible that some of those results were mutually exclusive of each other. I think what we've learned from NMS is to be particularly wary of procedural games and probably to not buy them at launch, let alone pre-order them.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#10
masseffect7 wrote:I think it's clear that Hello Games used many different seeds to create universes and then went from planet to planet, cherry-picking the most unlikely and best results of each seed, even though it is possible that some of those results were mutually exclusive of each other.
They didn't. They manually created the content they advertised, it doesn't appear in-game at all.
Games I like, in order of how much I like them. (Now permanent and updated regularly!)
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#11
Well, that we can't know for sure. Any kind of statistical results that may bring light into the issue are far away to occur. With such a number of systems in the game, "you can never know". Maybe in a couple of years, if people still plays the game.

What we can confirm is that the part of the algorythms that play a big role in generating interesting stuff isn't all that well implemented (if at all). They could save some face if they show the real probabilities in the actual game. IF they're even worth showing, that is.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#12
You can know. It's not just content, it's stuff behaving in ways and doing things that are not possible in the game. Gameplay features that are easy to confirm not to exist. That kind of thing.
Also, if tens of thousands of players don't find content in many weeks of playing, then for all intents and purposes I consider it not in the game. (Such as the sandworms etc :roll: )
Warning: do not ask about physics unless you really want to know about physics.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#14
Dinosawer wrote:You can know. It's not just content, it's stuff behaving in ways and doing things that are not possible in the game. Gameplay features that are easy to confirm not to exist. That kind of thing.
Also, if tens of thousands of players don't find content in many weeks of playing, then for all intents and purposes I consider it not in the game. (Such as the sandworms etc :roll: )

Indeed, there were 200,000 players in the first week, by the first month it had dropped to 1000 and has been hovering at just around 1000 per day since, a lot of times dipping into just three figures.

Monumental fall from grace imo, no need to read reviews when the player numbers litterly drop through the floor like that.
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Re: Honest Advertising of Procedural Games

#15
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.
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