One of the promises of procedural generation in gaming is that each experience will be unique, because it was randomly generated. The irony is that the opposite is almost always the case, as designers seem to lack the courage to commit. Or perhaps they recognize that true randomness makes for bad gameplay experiences and thus put in guardrails that render the “procedural” bits moot.

Both Starfield and No Man’s Sky feature procedurally generated planets with randomized terrain, resources, flora, and fauna. Both games allow you to land anywhere on a given planet. But neither¹ game allows there to be nothing on it. There are desolate moons with no atmosphere, yes, but in both games there will be some Point of Interest (PoI) within 2 km of your landing location in any direction. Sometimes several. And the real kicker is that there are always more PoIs everywhere you look.

There is not one inch of the universe in these games that doesn’t already have monuments or outposts on it, and the ludonarrative dissonance of that fact is never resolved.

The dilemma is that true procedural generation probably leads to even worse outcomes.

Imagine that the next eight planets you land on have zero PoIs. No quest markers, no resources of note, no outposts, no nothing. How interested are you in landing on a ninth planet? Okay, but imagine you can use a scanner from orbit to determine there are no PoIs or whatever. So… the first eight planet scans come up with nothing, are you scanning the ninth planet? At some point players are going to want some indication of where the gameplay is located, so they know where to point their ship. Fine, scanners indicate one planet in this system has two “anomalies.” Great, let’s go check it out.

But hold up… what was the point of procedural generation in that scenario? There isn’t much of a practical difference between hand-crafted planets and procedurally-generated-as-interesting planets surrounded of hundreds of lifeless ones. Well, other than the fact that those random PoIs in the latter case better be damn interesting lest players get bored and bounce off your game due to bad RNG.

Minecraft comes up as an example of procedural generation done right, and I largely agree. However, it is “one world” and you are not expected to hop from one map to the next. The closest space game to resolve the dilemma for me has been Starbound + Frackin’ Universe mod – some planets had “dungeon” PoIs and/or NPCs and many did not. Each star system has at least one space station though, so it’s not completely random, but it’s very possible to, for example, land on a bunch of Eden planets or whatever and not find an exact configuration that you want for a base.

As I mentioned more than ten years ago (!!), procedural generation is the solution to exactly one problem: metagaming. If you don’t want a Youtube video detailing how to “get OP within the first 10 minutes of playing” your game, you need to randomize stuff. But a decade later, I think game designers have yet to fully complete the horseshoe of leaning all the way into procedural generation until you come right back around to hopping from a few hand-crafted planets and ignoring the vast reaches of uninteresting space.

1. NMS may have actually introduced truly lifeless planets with no POIs in one of its updates. They are not especially common, however, as one would otherwise expect in a galaxy. ↩︎