Which of your games has the best/worst procedurally generated world?

The best I've seen are Remnant: From the Ashes and Valheim. Remnant seemed like a great, handcrafted world. In fact, I didn't realize it has been procedurally generated until about half-way through the game. Valheim is great, as well, but sometimes (rarely) I end up seed shopping.

For the worst, at one time it was 7 Days to Die, but they've continued to work on theirs. Even if they hadn't, though, they would have been easily bumped out of last place by Empyreon Galactic Survival. Just endless, mostly flat worlds with the occasional bush.
 
Minecraft for me, especially the cave biomes. It is amazing to glide into one of them and then experience how they expand for several levels with tons of lava lakes and lava falls. Sometimes the caves can be hidden underwater and you'll have to swim a little and squeeze yourself between the rocks until you get to the biome. It goes from cramp to insanely large in seconds. Another cool thing about the cave biomes is that if you venture really deep, you might find (not sure if it spawns in every cave) the Warden. Warden is a mini-boss type and very scary the first couple of times you experience him. He is basically a thing you do not want to have after you, a Balrog of Moria and that can even make it black around you, something that is a really bad combination when you have lava and several holes in the ground leading to a certain death.
 
Minecraft for me, especially the cave biomes. It is amazing to glide into one of them and then experience how they expand for several levels with tons of lava lakes and lava falls. Sometimes the caves can be hidden underwater and you'll have to swim a little and squeeze yourself between the rocks until you get to the biome. It goes from cramp to insanely large in seconds. Another cool thing about the cave biomes is that if you venture really deep, you might find (not sure if it spawns in every cave) the Warden. Warden is a mini-boss type and very scary the first couple of times you experience him. He is basically a thing you do not want to have after you, a Balrog of Moria and that can even make it black around you, something that is a really bad combination when you have lava and several holes in the ground leading to a certain death.
Haven't been in Minecraft in ages, but I hear that cave update is great.
 
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So how does it actually work then? I don't think I've played one.

I did find the procedurally generated world of PC's(rather than NPC's, because all 9 million are playable) in WD's Legion interesting. If you scan any character in the game it shows you their itinerary for the day. They are generated within a certain distance of your character.

John goes to pub at 2.30pm, then for a walk along river until 4pm, etc. And you can watch each character, (play stalker) and follow them and see them do that. You can also interupt that itinerary.

I think some gamers had a problem because they were so used to identifying with one main character that they couldn't get their head around switching to the best character for the mission.

I have been wondering with reference to AI generated art, characters, etc. How long before an AI system can generate a whole game. Next week!
 
I have been wondering with reference to AI generated art, characters, etc. How long before an AI system can generate a whole game. Next week!
AI can't consistently put 5 fingers on a human or spell a word you just typed in, so we may have to wait till week after next.

The city in Legion was wonderful. Looking for the collectibles was fun. I played for maybe 5 hours and decided the missions weren't fun, but I'm not a fan of stealth. I thought the second Watch Dogs was more fun when you called in police raids and gang hits. Then you just sat back and watched the world go up in flames. When all the commotion was over, you just walked up to the mission objective and did whatever you needed to do because everyone was dead.
 
AI can't consistently put 5 fingers on a human or spell a word you just typed in, so we may have to wait till week after next.

The city in Legion was wonderful. Looking for the collectibles was fun. I played for maybe 5 hours and decided the missions weren't fun, but I'm not a fan of stealth. I thought the second Watch Dogs was more fun when you called in police raids and gang hits. Then you just sat back and watched the world go up in flames. When all the commotion was over, you just walked up to the mission objective and did whatever you needed to do because everyone was dead.
I got the impression they were so chuffed with the procedurally generated charcter system, they forgot to up their game when it came to missions. So the missions and enemy weren't a step up from WD2.

It's the sort of open world game where I create my own fun and chaos. I like riding motorcycles along the embankment and finding place to do jumps, even a stairs.

I think many got bored quick. I did play a lot of WD2, just enjoyed that whole world. But again post missions it a great place to have fun and chaos.

So what we really need is procedurally generated characters, in a procedurally generated world with proceedurally generated enemies with a Nemesis system:).
 
Looking through my game libraries, I think the only 2 games that used procedurally generated content that I've actually played were Diablo 1 & 2. Maps and dungeon levels had different layouts for every new game you started. Enemy types (outside of bosses) and loot in drops and containers also changed, though that part might be considered "randomness" instead of procedurally generated content. Diablo 1 may have been one of the first games to use that method of map/level design (?), at least it was my first experience with it, and probably still my favorite even over Diablo 2.

I checked the Wiki, but their list seems incomplete to me, as it also doesn't mention Remnant From the Ashes:
List of games using procedural generation - Wikipedia
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Well, Dwarf Fortress is supposed to be the king of procedurally generated worlds, but I've never played it. The best I've played is No Man's Sky.

The worst I've seen was in Persona 3, which not only makes ultra-bland randomized dungeons, but it also can't remember them. If you go up the stairs, then come back down, you find yourself in a newly generated level. Ugh!

Procedural get used a lot! 4X games use them for everything but pre-made scenarios. RPGs will sometimes use them for smaller dungeons (or more in the case of Daggerfall). No Man's Sky is all procedural. X4 puts a few pre-placed big stations out in the universe, but then it drops in MANY random ones. XCOM makes random battlegrounds, as does Mechwarrior 5.

The randomness of procedural content is a curse and a blessing, IMHO. The curse is that, despite the best procedural coding, you can end up with stuff that just doesn't make sense. The blessing is that it's unpredictable nonsense.

For instance, hand-made areas/levels like to warp them into corridors. If you see two ways to go, you can be fairly certain that one way will be blocked off within 30 seconds (and will likely have a bit of treasure at the end). With procedural, you could be presented with 5 different ways to go, all of which lead to something of interest! I find that inability to predict a lot less immersion breaking than the "oh wow, the damage done to this city just so happened to result in there being exactly one path through it" system.
 
4X games use them for everything
Yeah, that would be my only exposure to procedural worlds. The huge thing I love about Civ games is that it's a new world to eXplore and eXploit every game, never gets old. In Civ4 I play with a map mod "Full of Resources" which allows loads of customization. It all works very well, 4 out of 5 maps are ones I want to play—but that may be because by now I know well how I want to set it up.

I checked the Wiki, but their list seems incomplete
Yeah, Civ is the only 4X there. As @Zloth said, they all use procedural for maps as far as I know—eg Endless series, Humankind, Old World etc.

Far Cry 5 and later have procedural generation of NPCs and wildlife, which is nice variation.
 
I haven't played a ton of games with procedural worlds, other than No Man's Sky and a little Minecraft. But the very first procedurally generated game I remember was the Dungeons and Dragons Cloudy Mountain game on the Intellivision. I thought it was really awesome that the game was set up differently every time you played it.
 
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Well, Dwarf Fortress is supposed to be the king of procedurally generated worlds, but I've never played it.

Dwarf Fortress definitely is the king of procedurally generated worlds, because it doesn't just generate the geography, it also procedurally generates individual creatures, each with their own physical description, personality and relationships, and then generates an entire history before you even start playing.

Minecraft's procedural generation is quite impressive, but it's also still easy to spot faults. The NPC villages still fairly frequently get intersected with other terrain features for example. And it's not unusual to see a snow biome next to a desert.

The worst procedural generation I've seen was probably for Heroes of Might and Magic III. It's fairly common that armies that guard resources don't cover every angle, so you can just walk around them, possibly giving you very overpowered resources for free. It's also possible that your starting castle is completely surrounded by impassible terrain, trapping you unless you can fly or teleport out. The terrain also just doesn't look nearly as good as the handcrafted maps.
 
It's also possible that your starting castle is completely surrounded by impassible terrain, trapping you unless you can fly or teleport out.
Reminds me of the infamous one-tile island starts in vanilla Civ4 :)

There you are, stuck in the ocean until you research Sailing and build a boat to transport your guys to shore and start eXploring—about 30 turns behind everyone else!
Yeah, no… I rerolled those after experiencing the first one.
 
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Apr 26, 2021
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Plenty of good and bad procedural generators i've seen, but if i had to pick one. I would pick the one that i got a Love/Hate relationship with. Which is the one of Deep Rock Galactic.

It knows how to make some very nice looking caves, but sometimes it derps and puts mission objectives in absurdly hard to reach places, like up a shaft and if the map happens to take place in a sturdy environment where everything takes longer to pickaxe your way through... oh it is going to be LONG match.
 

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