Procedural Generation Ruins Starfield

Starfield is a game filled with over a th000 planets and a near endless amount of content so why is it that the game isn't resonating with players in the same way that previous games by Bethesda game studios have in the past I've played every Bethesda game since marind and I think Starfield is the first one that I don't feel the need to revisit anytime soon that's not to say that there isn't redeeming or good qualities in Starfield I'm happy that many people are finding lots of enjoyment out of the experience in fact there are quests and gameplay mechanics and lots about the lore that I find interesting or enjoyable but it's all drowned out due to starfields Reliance on procedurally generated content it makes the game feel like an ocean of repetitive content with little islands of Polish and effort now as a whole there might be more handcrafted content in it than any other Bethesda game but it feels lost amidst the endless generated content cont so let's dive in and talk about why the use of AI and procedurally generated content ended up hurting a game like Starfield and also how it can and has been used to enhance other games now first things first what do I mean by procedurally generated content in Starfield procedurally generated content is the use of AI and computer tools to craft unique and endless pieces of gameplay with minimal input from the game designer it's been around for years and it takes many forms in bethesda's games we're mostly referring to things like radiant quests you know when you go to the yl of white run and he tells you to go kill some Bandits at a cave nearby or the often memed another settlement needs your help Loop of quests in Fallout 4 each time you get one of these quests it pulls from a list of objectives and locations to send the player to and it creates a quest within that set of parameters these rules were set by a designer but the game is allowed to take those rules and generate quests based on the procedures that the designer assigned another common way we see procedurally generated content in Bethesda as well as many other games is the use of programs to create Maps levels and Landscapes to assist designers in creating the game World in Bethesda games this goes back a long way in places you might not even realize procedural generation is not a New Concept it's been around for a long time Oblivion for example use dungeon generation tools to map out the various Forts and locations in the game that's why that game in particular seemed to have a lot of locations that feel very similar to each other the general layout would be created and then the level designer can go in and fine-tune the dungeon to fit a specific feel or aesthetic adding in enemies and items Furniture whatever they need to make the location feel more alive so the concept of procedural generation in games isn't new even for Bethesda it's been a staple of game design for decades with some games hinging on it as a core feature and part of the experience experience the most obvious example of this is Minecraft a game that creates entire unique worlds based on procedural generation but when you boil that down it's a list of rules and parameters that the designer specified which the world creation tool then uses to create an environment the result is an infinite amount of Worlds but none that feel truly unique but that works really well for a game like Minecraft because the core of the experience is interacting with the world being creative and quite literally making your own fun procedural generation is great at making a Sandbox for players to run a muuk in doing whatever they want but it isn't good at making a story-driven realistic RPG with extensive lore and World building that's where a game like Starfield falters an over Reliance on procedural generation in place of handcrafted and curated content so where is Starfield using procedurally generated content and how does it negatively affect the overall game Bethesda uses procedurally generated content as part of the core Loop in Starfield the exploration and discovery of a vast Galaxy its planets locations and inhabitants and that is the single biggest mistake that Bethesda made when designing Starfield they replaced curated content by a human being with generation tools governed by a set of parameters that it must stick to at all times this design philosophy allows Starfield to have a near endless amount of content but results in none of it feeling unique or different when the player interacts with it every planet that you visit uses these generation systems in a variety of ways when you land on a planet the game generates the Topography of the map that the player is allowed to explore in it follows the rules given to it by the designer and the traits of the planet if you land in a mountainous region it generates more large Hills on the map if the planet has Flora it'll choose from a list of trees and bushes and plants then color them to match the color scheme of the planet the game then looks at the planet's traits again does it have alien life if yes it consults a database of alien life forms and traits that it can mix together and apply to the planet then it looks at the location requirements of the planet because the player needs something to do while they're exploring it consults the planet traits again does it have the glacier trait if yes it places a natural Glacier formation nearby so the player can scan it there also needs to be enemies and man-made structures on the planet so it adds a mining cave a cryo facility and an agricultural Farm nearby these can't all simply be filled with hostile enemies though so it again consults the list the cryo facility now has spacers inside it and the cave now has turrets and the agricultural Farm is abandoned the game will do this every time you land at a new location on a planet which isn't one of the predefined settlements or quest locations in the game so you explore that planet and then you land on a new one this one is hot there is a desert with with a flatter map some palm trees and small plants but this planet has traits as well so it consults the list of traits again and comes up with three but one of them is the glacier trait again so it generates the same location the player already found on the other planet along with an agricultural Farm a settlement Outpost and a mining cave so what you have now is a new location that is by definition different from the one you've seen before but it contains content so similar to the previous one that the player doesn't feel like they found anything new or interesting but the procedural generation is doing what it's told to do by the designer so in that sense it's working as intended what it lacks is the reason why it's doing all of these things now asking yourself why is one of the most important questions in game design particularly in level and narrative design where that fundamental question is how you tie an entire world together as opposed to it feeling like a soulless lands Escape dotted with map locations for the player to walk to I think one of the biggest strengths of Bethesda in the past has been their level and narrative designer's ability to create a world that feels like it's lived in where every location has a history and a reason to exist they first ask what is in this location and then why is it in this location as an example let's look at one of the most well-known locations in Fallout 4 corvega assembly plant it's one of the early locations the player will find and likely explore when they're first leaving sanctuary and exploring the map it's pretty hard to miss no matter what you're doing in the game if you follow the main story you need to go to Diamond city which means you'll have to walk right past it on your way and maybe get shot at by some of the Sharpshooters on the roof if you're doing the Minutemen quest line it's the most likely location you'll be sent to from ten pinees Bluff so that you can clear out the Raiders and have that settlement Ally with the Minutemen but it's also just a giant Landmark on the map so when you're exploring you'll see this huge Factory accented in red markings in the distance and most players are likely going to go there to go check out what it is Corva assembly plant serves as the first large dungeon for the player to explore when they're experiencing the game so that's why it's there but why is it there that might sound like a silly question we just answered it after all but this is the big difference between design philosophies between Fallout 4's world and starfields because Fallout 4 and previous Bethesda games all exist on the same map each individual location needs to have environmental storytelling and reasoning as to why it exists in the world corvega serves as a large dungeon for the player to explore but it has its own story in the greater world of Fallout 4 that the player can discover and play an active role in corvega is the base of operations for a group of Raiders the same ones that were following Preston Garvey and his companions when they got trapped in conquered but that's not all the Raiders set up their main base in corvega for a multitude of reasons corvega is right beside nearby Lexington which the Raiders have identified as a territory they want to expand to but Lexington isn't exactly the safest place it's infested with ghouls that can easily overwhelm Raiders through their sheer numbers a lot of the locations in and around Lexington have ghouls everywhere you can even encounter Raiders actively fighting them trying to clear out the area so they can claim it as their own territory but because there are so many many ghouls in Lexington they're currently limited to rooftops and high Vantage points for safety while they attempt to clear them out that's why that Infamous Raider with the fat man that one hits players exists he's a shock trooper trying to pacify the region so naturally they took over corvega assembly plant first because it's large reinforced indoors and it's easily defendable from the ghouls because the only entrances are the front doors or the doors on The High Ground so the Raiders reinforced the front entrance and place sentries on the roof to keep them safe or so they thought even though the Raiders reinforced the entrances they found that ghouls were still getting in somehow they eventually figured out that there was an additional entrance at a broken pipe near the borders of Lexington so they set up turrets and traps there to try and stop more ghouls from getting in and that entrance is actually one of the best ways to get into corvega if the player is lowlevel and finds that fighting the Raiders outside is too difficult you can sneak in with a lot less resistance and going even further the entire reason that Lexington as a larger location exists with a supermarket apartments and a neighborhood is because corvega is a car assembly plant that employed hundreds of people before the war and they needed a close by place to live so buildings were built around it so corvega assembly plant is a dungeon location that the player can find and explore for Loot and experience that's why it exists but in the lore of the world there are tons of reasons why the location is populated with Raiders Ghouls and turrets and the mere existence of it informs the player of why the world is shaped the way it is a human designed this with intention they told a story without sending the player on a quest or making them follow another character while they rambled on Exposition about the world around them the player gets the agency to discover the history of the world themselves this is what immerses people in Bethesda games the idea that the location in them have a history be it simple or complex it makes the world feel just that little bit more alive and it's why procedural generation as a core gameplay mechanic in Starfield doesn't work it can create an extremely detailed map with dozens of locations and enemies to interact with but it's not so good at creating environmental stories that offer the extra immersion which makes every location memorable why is the cryo facility over that Hill why did someone make a settlement here the answer is just that the generation tool needed to populate the map with locations so it pulled them from that list this permeates so many of the systems in Starfield even the enemies and the main storyline of the game like we talked about before the game needs to populate many of the planets with different life forms because the game is attempting to simulate a degree of realism there can't just be one or two kinds of life it needs to at least attempt to create some semblance of an ecosystem within the environment but because the generation tools can't discern which animals are best suited for specific environments or roles the ecosystems it creates don't make sense and feel incredibly artificial you end up with a planet where the alpha predator is a level 60 caterpillar that crawls slowly towards you while the combat music goes insane of course technically speaking there could be a planet somewhere that has predacious caterpillars crawling about but it's far more likely that the animals they prey on would be smaller and slower than they are not gigantic fast-moving herbivores and because they're so high level you end up unloading multiple magazines of ammo into tiny worms which feels incredibly bullet spongy compare that to say a death claw in Fallout which is a comparatively highlevel enemy that looks the part your brain is much more forgiving about unloading a MAG of ammo into a Godzilla Hells spawn lizard than it is into a baby butterfly and that's because Fallout 4's enemy list was designed by a person with intentions for the role of every enemy now look I'm not even the biggest fan of how Fallout 4 handles its world and enemies but it's kind of insane how much better even a weaker Fallout title handles basic World building and game design than Starfield does I could make all of these comparisons with Fallout New Vegas but that would be like comparing Sydney Crosby to a cow on skates I'm Canadian if you didn't know all right all right so let's leave Fallout 4 alone for a bit and use Skyrim as an example instead the enemy level list in Skyrim generally goes as follows skver wolf SaberCat bear these are all very basic animals that fill the same role for being an enemy for the player to defeat but just by looking at them the player can gauge how challenging they're likely going to be a wolf is bigger than a skver so it likely poses a bigger threat and position on the food chain therefore it's likely a higher level the player doesn't need an arbitrary level number to determine threat and difficulty they can just use their basic intuition to figure all that out now here are the aliens from that planet with the predatory caterpillars if a player landed here for the first time how would they mentally rank the difficulty and role of every alien I bet nobody would assume without the arbitrary level numbers that the tiny caterpillar fills the role of apex predator since all of these life forms were assigned with without intent Beyond needing something to fill a role exploring and experiencing the worlds of Starfield doesn't feel satisfying because nothing feels natural but I hear some people say an alien world may not be similar at all to our own how do we know where animals are on the food chain well we don't but we can use our own world as a guideline for the different bioms and life that may exist out in the universe even in the most extreme alien environments on Earth life still follows some general rules life in the Arctic for example sees far more mammals with high amounts of fat and fur in order to keep warm in that environment you don't generally see small insects because they would freeze so logically if we were to go to an alien planet with similar extreme temperatures our assumption would be that the animals there would be at least somewhat similar to the ones in Earth's Arctic regions they might have lots of fur or blubber or or they might not it is an alien world after all who's to say how life evolved there maybe they have some other methods of staying alive in an extreme temperature but if that's the case someone designing the game would have to ask the question why why don't they have fur what else could they do to stay alive in this climate maybe they burrow underground for most of the year so you see hives dotted about the map where they take refuge thinking about how the animals in your environment stay alive make it feel more believable and immersive for the player it's why the trolls in Skyrim have fur they need to survive in harsh climates it's why Bandits wear lots of fur armor if they didn't wear a shirt they would freeze actually that's a problem in Skyrim 2 because there are multiple armored sets that look incredibly cold and you probably noticed this or thought it was funny during your playthrough because your brain does notice these things and it can take you out of the experience it's frustrating to me because Bethesda has made an alien environment filled with Smart World building and design choices that make it feel real while still otherworldly it's called maroin here are the various enemies you can encounter in marowan they all look incredibly alien in comparison to what we're used to seeing in the real world but your brain can still categorize them into different Potential Threat levels they follow a pattern that fits the world that they reside in this is the type of design that procedural generation cannot do it doesn't understand why a caterpillar might not be the best option for a predator in a snowy Forest it just needs to fill the holes like it was programmed to so that's what ends up happening in a game like Starfield the massive amount and Reliance on procedural generation to create infinite content makes it much harder to find and experience the higher quality hand created content by the design team you end up with a few locations in a massive world that have something unique or interesting but you need to to sift through the generated slop to find them the decision to make a vast Galaxy filled with generated content takes away one of the biggest strengths that Bethesda games have had in the past making the locations in the world feel like they each have a reason to be there even the main storyline in the game has multiple points where it sends you to find artifacts in these generated environments there's not much room for grander storytelling here and if the locations have a story at all it actually gets recycled then used again the next time the game generates that location for you somewhere else it really sucks for the designers because there are a few quests in Starfield that are memorable in comparison to the rest of the game like when you go to the ruins of Earth and you see how Humanity progressed to space travel and technological innovation or the quest where you hop between realities in a science facility and one is filled with robots and the other is filled with a creepy Alien Hive but all of these moments are so disjointed and disconnected when compared to the larger World in Starfield it's so easy for it to get lost Ai and procedural generation are not inherently bad things for game design in fact they can be a Cornerstone of game development and a fantastic tool when they're used properly the key is for it to be used as just that a tool I use AI generation tools nearly every day at work because it helps me create a baseline for narrative content and my drafts heck it even helps me get over writer's block when it strikes for example I might need to create a new set of content for a game and I want it to be space themed with a race of alien seals now that sounds pretty rad to me at least and I have an idea for it in my head but searching online for reference images to give to the artists that make the content is probably going to be a little bit difficult there just aren't many seal themed spaceships that match what's in my head so instead I might use mid journey and ask it to make me a spaceship Command Deck populated by Seals it might take a few tries but eventually it'll spit out something that more closely fits what I was envisioning I can then take that image and add some additional instructions to change specific parts of it to better match the theme that I'm going for the end result is a product that took less time to visualize and create and gave the artist a clearer vision for what we want the assets in the game to resemble otherwise might have ended up photoshopping a seal into a SPAC suit or another quick example maybe I'm writing dialogue for a pirate game and I want the captain to spot land in the distance so I'll write my first draft of what the dialogue should be all right so admittedly that's a terrible first draft for dialogue but it'll serve its purpose as an example so maybe I'm not happy with it or I have some sort of pirate lingo related brain block today so I run it through chat GPT and tell it to make the dialogue sound more pirate and it spits out the result which uses more pirate lingo and changes up the grammar a bit it's not perfect but I can take a bit from there and apply it to my original text to improve it so I've gotten over brain block and used AI generation as a tool to help me make better handcrafted content as opposed to relying on the AI to make large amounts of it for me if you want to see how bad AI actually is at making stories or interesting content then go on Amazon and look at the plethora of AI generated kids Books and Comics grifters are using AI to generate something that at first glance looks like a story but is really just what the AI thinks makes up a story with no reason or meaning as to why any of it fits together and that's what the generated content in Starfield feels like artificial and separate from the higher quality created content by real people I really feel bad for the designers on the game because I guarantee you they know all this already ready the regular people making games like Starfield aren't stupid they play games just like us you've probably played with more of them on multiplayer games than you even realize but they work for companies and Executives that are more concerned with marketing and buzzwords than actual content because that's what sells and appeases shareholders an executive at Bethesda hears procedurally generated content and understands it as creating thousands of hours of content with less human development time which means less people to employ and bigger numbers to parade to shareholders and media any developer or executive that plays games themselves understands the shortcomings of systems like these and in some cases know how to use them to their advantage that's why for every Starfield you have a game like Minecraft or Rim World these are games that use generated content to enhance the player experience instead of replacing the developers input procedural content is a tool for developers to utilize to create better handcrafted content it cannot make compelling stories and experiences on its own because it lacks the Artistry and human Spirit which is needed to create great games I hope you enjoyed the video if you did consider subscribing so you're notified of more content in the future and that's really all I have to say [Music] bye [Music]

Channel: IAmPattyJack

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Keywords: iampattyjack, steam, games, gaming, worst, game, ever, indie, reddit, reviews, first, impressions, news, starfield, procedural generation, ai generation, video essay, jemison, coralbug, one small step, one giant leap, crimson fleet, cryo lab, pirate, starborn, bethesda, oblivion, skyrim, morrowind, fallout, new vegas, fallout 4, unearthed, unity, exploration, good, bad, sucks, game design, corvega assembly plant, space, gameplay, opinion, andreja, barrett, sam coe, rook meets king, deep cover, akila, volii, neon, city

Id: vnEHoZOlZrA

Length: 23min 38sec (1418 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023