I’m pretty easy to please, as long as procgen fits within the overall vibe of the game.
My only hang-up is when there aren’t enough unique/modular enough nodes and I can recognize walking through the same room several times in one dungeon. If that happens, I’m not playing your game for more than 20 hours no matter how much fun it is.
Procgen should increase novelty. If you’re just rearranging the order of parts A, B, and C, that’s bad.
When done well it greatly expands the game’s replayability.
When done poorly it feels bland and boring.
In my opinion it lacks the core essentials of game design.
But one ought to get used to it. With the A.I. boom, procedurally generated is no longer secluded to the dungeons and “rogue like” games, as the future in the mind of a lot of game devs these days is how it augments the possibilities of any given game. And while in theory it is true, in practice it translates into very bland gaming. Because it lacks the intention and precision in hitting whatever makes the contextual gameplay interesting and engaging in the first place.
But… to each their own, I’d say.
The proc gen maps in Diablo 1 worked pretty well IMO.
It’s really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.
I think they get a bad wrap due to how frequently they are used as a crutch to scale up content quantity without quality. Which isn’t an unfair opinion to have given the fact that this is the case more often than not.
But at the end of the day ProcGen is a design tool like any other that, when in the hands of a passionate team using it with intent and creativity, can be an effective way to bring elements of surprise/randomness/chaos and/or remove tedious work from development to allow for more time to handcraft content where it can best be utilized.
Some games that show off how it can be an effective tool (not all specifically ProcGen Dungeons), Dwarf Fortress, Noita, Caves of Qud, Minecraft, Elite Dangerous, Deep Rock Galactic, a lot of 4x games (Civ, HoMM3, etc), also a lot of indie rougelike/lites (Rougle Legacy, Splunky, FTL, etc)
The important part, imho, is that the developers are investing the time to make it “good”. Either by treating it like a core design mechanic with it’s own unique/engaging qualities, or by treating it like a “quick rough draft” and going back to curate and hand craft quality content on top of it.
I’m sure they can be done right, but I’ve never seen them done right, so I’m not for them. Everything starts to feel the same very quickly.
Not even Diablo II? I think that’s done pretty well.
Amazing when done right like Diablo II or Minecraft !
