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It's all Progress Quest under the covers
James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games will make you think very differently about video games ... to the point that you may stop playing them.
This also sort of touches on the memes about "Open-World" vs. "Linear" games.
The joke is that open world games still ultimately railroad you to the same place, it just lets you wander around whatever winding path you like to end up there. The 'choice' of open world games is just when to move on to the next chapter in the story, but the story will still unfold in the same order.
And while I do think there's a distinction between a very cinematic linear game like Uncharted and, say Fallout: New Vegas or Baldur's Gate 3, there's something to the argument that a game can never do anything that wasn't programmed in, and whether it directly railroads the player to its end or it merely places boundaries on player actions and patiently waits for them to get there, the 'choices' presented by the game aren't actually producing new, surprising outcomes.
Wasn't the idea behind No Man's Sky that it was open-beyond-open in that it was procedurally generated. The game would actually shift and expand its world in a pseudo-random way based off of player actions?
IIRC, it was too successful at this and players never go to do ... anything. There was a lot of wandering around planets and zipping around space without much contact. In order to generate meaningful action, you have to have some sort of fixed and directing game mechanic. Help me out of I'm remembering this wrong.
P.S. something something we accidentally proved the existence of God through experimental video game design.
No Man's Sky got a TON of flack at launch because its procedural generation was actually far too limited and there was no interaction between players, despite implications or promises made by the publisher.
But then it improved in fits and starts over the next couple years to actually deliver on or exceed most of those promises, and now its a shining example of reputation rehabilitation. So the procedural generation is indeed impressive by any fair standard, now.
And they've released a lot of new content and upgrades to the game over the years.
Yet I think it is still running into the limits of what you can actually do with procedural generation. Only some subset of those generations will seem 'unique' and even fewer will be 'interesting' so the thrill of discovery is going to run out eventually, even if planet X-9-1-3-C-7-J is technically very different from planet X-9-1-3-C-7-Q, you won't feel like there's much difference if you can see how the lego pieces were rearranged to make each one.
I think the disappointment arises because any sort of full deterministic universe probably won't be like the Star Trek Universe, where you can run into nonstandard, unexplainable phenomena all over the place and the galaxy is just teeming with intelligent life that has abnormal powers, strange morality, and biology that defies understanding so the effort of exploring is rewarded, and there's nigh infinite novelty to be found because the rules of what is possible simply can't be pinned down.
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