Procedural generation is an interesting topic to me, as it forgoes traditional level design in favor of a bunch of formulas, rules, and random elements to make varied replayable gameplay.
One of my favorite procgen games is Dwarf Fortress, and how it creates a fully realized world with lore and history, and then places both fortress and adventures as relatively small stories in said world.
Also Deep rock galactic is great in varying its caves, from normal tunnels to massive caverns that you can only traverse using ziplines and platforms
Any other interesting procgen games?
You’re not wrong about that. I’ve only played about 15 hours of the game so far, but finding it to really feel samey most of the time
It really is. I like no man’s sky, but most of it starts looking very familiar fast.
Only exception, I still get good surprises with random creatures. Sure, they’re all based on the same few structures, but once in awhile I get some perfect combination of funny, dorky and/or cool that I just can’t refuse as my new pet.
The ironic thing is that if the game just looked more samey, it’d actually be less of an issue. If all these cool stuff wasn’t everywhere, it would feel fresh for much longer.
Like you can tell what parts of the creatures are reused cause you’ve seen like a hundred species within a few hours.
This is one thing I think Starbound did pretty well. Procgen creatures were mixed with premade creatures, and you’d only get a few species of procgen creatures per planet, so it took you a good while to start seeing different creatures with similar parts.
The planet generation, on the other hand…
Didn’t Starbound get rid of their procgen creatures? Actually, I just looked it up, I guess they’re still there but the not-procgen creatures are just everywhere and they were heavily reduced compared to the original versions of procedurally generated creatures.