The Daily Grind: Procedurally-generated MMOs

by Krystalle Voecks on Jul 13th 2009 8:00AM

Culture, Game mechanics, Opinion, The Daily Grind

With the way MMOs keep changing and growing, there's some very exciting things on the horizon for players wanting something more than what's currently out there. For example, Eskil Steenberg is working on a unique procedurally-generated MMO - you could call it an art-house MMO - named Love. What we've seen of it has been utterly fascinating so far, and the fact that he's developing it solo ensures it will hopefully come out precisely as he wants it. Outside of that, a friend of mine named Jason tossed out a post this morning about another procedurally-generated engine - the CityEngine - that can generate enormous cities completely on the fly. As he mentioned, can you imagine using it to create a horror MMO where you can essentially wander for huge distances, in and out of buildings before you find another player? Completely open and playable building interiors? Zombies? In a sandbox? We'd be happy to just play there as a seriously spooky fragfest.

But before we get ahead of ourselves, we wanted to ask you - what do you think of the idea of procedurally-generated content? Do you think this is really the only logical choice in terms of building enormous open-ended sandbox MMO worlds for the future, or do you think the tightly designed and scripted worlds we have now are the only way to go? Can you see procedurally-generated games becoming a part of the mainstream, or is the tech too open ended for us? Are we ready to break free and tell our own stories?

Tags: cityengine, eskil-steenberg, horror, love, mmo, mmorpg, procedurally-generated, zombie

Reader Comments (19)

It would certainly take a lot of the grunt-work from developers, who could then focus on other, traditionally neglected areas (like anything non-combat related).

The idea of wandering a large city looking for another player doesn't really appeal to me, personally. That's usually the kind of scenario you dread in a modern MMO, because it means you're on a low pop server :D But generating something very large just because it can be done is not the proper way to go. I think that if it can be done to free up development resources, then it's worth the effort.

By using procedurally generated content, developers should be able to spend more time fleshing out the game lore, or working on other aspects of the game.

Also, because the volume of content that can be generated procedurally is cheaper than the same volume hand-crafted, there'll be more net profit to keep a good MMOG afloat for longer ^_^

In just taking a brief glance at the articles you linked to my question would be, in the case of something like the dreamed of zombie apocalypse, would a proecedurally-generated MMO be persistent? In the case of something like that you'd want to be able find a safe house. I suppose you could take care of that with specific persistent areas, but wouldn't the point be that you could settle down anywhere?

Maybe you could flag an area as your home base and it would then save?

Hrm....

I think sometimes people assume that procedurally generated means only that it makes it up as you need it. While that is certainly possible, it can also be used to quickly generate persistent elements that can be gone over in more detail later. So rather than hand crafting every town, or (worst case scenario) crafting one town and then copy/pasting and editing, you can have the engine follow rules to procedurally generate dozens of towns (the rules being which theme textures to use, height and other "zoning" guidelines for the towns), all of which will be different and then you can go through and touch up each one with some hand crafting for the final touches.

Procedural content generation doesn't have to replace hand crafted design, but instead can be used to augment it.

And yeah, in my zombie example (because that's my post Krystalle linked), I envision a persistent world, but one which could really only happen through some level of procedurally generated beginning in order to get the amount of "world" needed to pull the game off without having to have hundreds/thousands of servers to keep the populations low enough to set the proper mood.

I just want to mention that procedural generation is nothing more than a tool, one that is already implemented on various scales in games already. Procedural generation is just a fancy way of saying "instead of building it by hand, give the computer some rules to build it for you". And in that broad respect, MMOs most certainly need to start incorporating this technology sooner than later, if they want to build those vast sprawling worlds (or galaxies) that people will want once the invisible fences in our current games get stale.

I personally know of a procedurally based MMO that failed to make it to market, simply because investors didn't know what the heck they were putting their money into. Too ahead of its time.

Procedural generation is a tool that must be taken in context. The creator of the MMO "Love" uses it to replace the need to hire artist, level designers etc with his own programming and math abilities. For current development studios, procedural generation is much more useful for generating content using current assets. Massive areas of a game can be best created using automatic generation as a prelude to manual authoring rather than a replacement. Areas are automatically created and then manually checked for aberrations to be corrected and then main game content like NPCs, buildings etc are added afterward.

Procedural generation is a great tool for automating repetitive and time-consuming design processes but it's tricky to harness as the absolute creator of all content. Traditional content producers will still be required to make good content.

I like the idea of generated content for organic things, but when it comes to structures I wish for them to be crafted by hand. I like it when an artist creates a place and as a user walks through his world he sees the artists vision in action. For instance, the first time I walked up to and near Stormwind with the in-game music on and the sun high in the sky... it was a great image, something procedurally generated content doesn't get without an artist actually stepping in and governing it.

I think using procedural content could be used to give inspiration to artists. Such as giving them an image to work around and with. Terra-gen is a good example for getting ideas for landscapes.

So anything not man made, I'm all go for procedurally generated content that is persistent and not forever changing.

I agree to a certain amount builds etc should be hand crafted but when you are making something the size of a small city to hand craft everything is just silly. why because if your city has 1000 buildings are you going to hand craft all of them? to what end?

i would handcraft about 10% and on there main website it seems you can do that in program as well (although i have not read, watched everything). If your doing a RPG then those 10% will be certain builds that the player will/Need to be in that way you can give it your personal touch.

now will it go as far as me getting a house in what every game and then paying someone to fix it i dont know

An interesting game in development that I came across recently using procedural generation in a truly amazing way is Infinity: the Quest for Earth. This developer is procedurally generating a realistically sized galaxy, complete with billions of stars, planets, asteroids, nebulas, etc.... all with no loading screens.....

http://www.infinity-universe.com/Infinity

Some of the concept videos are amazing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fp8WOCuR_pQ

I think there is an argument here for hand-crafted level design that's going unspoken. PCG is all fine and good for games where levels are effectively going to be visited over and over and over again, but require some level of randomness in order to be replayable (i.e. dungeon crawlers), but for an MMO, I don't think PCG really has a place.

With a proper level designer considering all aspects of a certain area, more lively and immersive landscapes can be created, albiet at the cost of the time it takes to generate that content. Thankfully, engines like the Unreal engine can be used to hand-craft huge landscapes in very little time, with all of the creativity of a professional level designer's touch.

Leave PCG to what its good at. Randomized, instanced content for dungeon crawlers.

"Zombies? In a sandbox?"

That reminds me. Where the hell is my zombie apocalypse horror MMO?

I'm not entirely sure, but I think Hellgate might of been one. Never played it, only basing that observation on what I've seen and heard.

Ok sorry, no. Not a sandbox. But a zombie MMO perhaps.

There were several tech vids on LOVE on youtube (not sure if they are still there) but i was not impressed on the overall theme. That a single person is doing this is laudatory, however the real world will destroy any hope of this person releasing or maintaining this title by themselves or with a skeletal team in hope of making some nice cash.

Nice premise, the best intentions, ok tech and weird ideas that, if you see the videos, will need to be worked out. Good luck on it.

I think procedurally generated content is one of the only ways to bring back a sense of surprise to the MMO genre -- that sense of wonder the first time we saw a mob many levels over our wee toon, or the first time we marched our toon into the big city.

Nowadays, with every secret a game holds available with a simple alt-tab to Allakhazam (or Massively!), one of the only ways to delight players is going to be through non-authored content.

I think procedurally generated content is the way to go. All of the possibilities is making my head spin. While hand made maps have a place for things like main cities, procedurally generated content can be the main source of adventuring maps. How cool would it be to sail around on a ship and discover some random island that no one has ever been to, and fight in dungeons that no one has ever seen.

Why not also have generated weapons, armor and monsters? Sure maybe the models will need to be hand crafted, but the names, stats and abilities can all be procedurally generated with very little work.

I think that procedurally-generated content has a place in the future of MMOs, but not in terms of world creation beyond smaller, niche projects with an extreme focus on sandbox elements (ala Love). I can see procedurally-generated dungeon, and perhaps quest, content becoming a popular trend as developers are pressured to produce content more quickly and in larger quantities.

MMO worlds themselves, however, I don't think will get to this point. Even if they are created with the assistance of some sort of generator, developers will still need to comb over and tweak every square inch in order for it live up to the standards of the majority of MMO gamers, and truly hand-crafted worlds, I think, will always be the most engaging and successful.

For one, it will allow to create scalable worlds that shrink or expand to keep the player density constant no matter the population numbers. The game can be run on a single server that adjusts it's size on the fly.

Random map generation has been successfully used for years in strategy games (world maps) and roguelikes (dungeons). There are quite some research papers for generation of narrative as well, it's still far behind in practical application, but seems to be achievable.

Even more traditional aspects can benefit from procedural approach. For example, quest can use some randomization. Instead of "kill 10 ogres, save a princess", every player will see a slightly different princess guarded by different set of mobs (maintaining the difficulty level) and, perhaps, the instance of evil tower will also be random, so you have to actually look for traps, rather then relying on a quest wiki. Or "find out who of NPC is the thief" in a capital city can have randomly generated suspect faces and names for every player taking the quest.

A single game does not have to implement all of these features. Procedural generation can be freely mixed with manually created content. Special unique places or quests will always remain hand made.

The generated content should be primary used to extend the traditionally created one, not to replace it.

Although random maps do keep things fresh, I don't think it fits with the RPG aspect of MMORPGs. Maybe MMO-Adventures.

RPGs (although most people nowadays do not seem to care) ultimately depends on roleplay. That means there must be monuments, static places so to say, that you can anchor the RP around. And randomly generated maps will never be as thoughtfully designed as a static map. I mean, think about the random doodads in WoW--a lot of them are lovingly created and placed in the most thoughtful places. This simply won't happen in truly randomly generated maps--unless there is a way to program in "cultures" of the setting.

Ultimately randomly generated maps simply won't have that director's touch.

I guess there are always the middle of the road method like D3. There are static places among randomly generated maps. Of course it's much harder to successfully pulled off in 3D, open world games.

The Daily Grind: Procedurally-generated MMOs

Reader Comments (19)

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