Game Videos

[Grimmie]

More Watchdogs?

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECC38TkgRDg[/media]

Bloody hell.

[Dog Pants]

Creepy? I think so.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLVOif6CHgE[/media]

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eytOzwyfiCA[/media]

[Grimmie]

Those look very interesting. Creepy interesting.

The Vivarium reminds me of a SCP sort of thing, they're fascinating.

Edit:
From the makers of Amnesia (aka: nope nope nope nope nope).

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHVkMIP1b8[/media]

Interesting, atmospheric. I hope they put more of a unsettling, human fear aspect in to it like the live action trailers, rather than relying on creepy scenery and monsters for the game's scares. Tension you can identify with, another person slowly getting more and more agitated, that's what I want to see.

[Dog Pants]

Those were my thoughts when I saw the gameplay trailer. The live action ones were sinister and subtle, hinting at something really bad on the horizon. The gameplay one was about gore, jumps, and monsters. I'm hoping that's just because they want to keep the creepy bits for the game.

I made a comparison to SCP in the PCGamesN comments when they showed the Mockingbird trailer. I like the concept of SCP, but a lot of the actual writing seems clumsy and awkward (and the writing guide makes me think the community is somewhat elitist).

[Dog Pants]

Lonely robot

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g063gr1SPWU[/media]

[Grimmie]

Oh, cool. I think I saw a very early concept art video of that, I'm glad they're actually turning it into a game.

[Grimmie]

Stick with it..

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=419bRJmp3Zw[/media]

[Dog Pants]

I'm really looking forward to this. I just hope there's a lot of variety to the disasters.

[FatherJack]

DRAGON AGE: INQUISITION so unexpected!

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpEsgxlZqro[/media]

I just played DA2 again and it's quite striking seeing Varric as portrayed in this vid, pity it's still so blimming long away, but rather that than the foreshortened paste-an-interior one-story-only felt-rushed disappointment DA2 was.

[Dog Pants]

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eTxRNlaZyY[/media]

[fabyak]

Excellent video from The Stanley Raphael Parable

Played this when it was a mod, was very tempted to buy it when it came out proper and even more so now (and it's on sale but I'd quite like to make it through just one Steam Sale without buying anything!)

[deject]

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNVgVl6v6YU[/media]

[Dog Pants]

Interesting stuff. The trailer doesn't really hint at what the game involves, and I suspect they've overhyped how procedural it is - there's no way that huge sand snake was generated entirely at random to be like a sandworm - but an entire galaxy to explore would be some pretty impressive tech.

[fabyak]

duuuuuuuuuuuuuuurp

Now with actual video
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ-IcS7mRSk[/media]

[spoodie]

No Man's Sky video

Looks very interesting and could be very cool, but I'll reserve my excitement for something more finished. Every atom created procedurally, hmm.

It's quite a difference from their previous game, Joe Danger:

[FatherJack]

Every atom created procedurally, hmm.

Sounds like hyperbole.

Procedural generation was used quite a lot in early games for computers with little memory, such that the original Elite was designed to house approximately 72,057,594,037,927,936 solar systems but was cut down to around 2,000 so that players weren't too overwhelmed - not bad for 32k. Also the psuedo-randomly generated Daggerfall had a game world 100 times larger than the artist-designed Morrowind, with three-quarters of a million NPCs as opposed to around 1,000.

In modern games procedural generation succeeds and fails in equal measure. While things like trees look glaringly stupid when the exact same one is just copy-pasted forever, no one actually notices if each and every tree is uniquely different. Paths through dungeons or rooms using random arrangements of set props can look different each time, but players eventually tire of seeing the same damn pile of crates everywhere they go.

Games need artists to either design unique props or make sure "randomly generated" stuff doesn't look like arse and the workload for them increases exponentially with graphical fidelity. Even in lo-fi with artists making hundreds of versions of crates or barrels as gamers we soon begin to see the same props reappear. With hi-fi ones where we can see rust-spots, dints and lettering on them it becomes even more obvious where they are being reused.

So I certainly call BS on atom-level generation, as that implies that their algorithms are somehow so advanced that they can bypass having artists and let the engine generate its own matter (ie: textures/models) by itself - even ignoring the tacit claim that their "world" is built from atoms in any case.

I've tried random, random-with-rules and psuedo-random (defined by a formula that always comes out the same for everyone) generators in a number of areas, from game map design, creating music and even picking fantasy football teams. None were ever any substitute for creative genius however much I wished they would be. Very, very, very occasionally you will stumble upon something that is okay, but it's like searching for any given text from the output of an infinite number of monkeys at keyboards - most of the time you'll just find the keyboards covered in shit and wank.

[Dog Pants]

RPS have more info on how it will play: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12 ... ore-179362

[Joose]

They have an interview too

[buzzmong]

It's quite ambitious, I just hope it does not go the way of Subversion. Awesome procedural generating software, no actual game.

[FatherJack]

It makes more sense now they explain it - they've gotten around the frustrations of the simulation spitting out rainbow-coloured rocks that would make Alum Bay look drab by thinkng about the possible elements which are actually present in real rocks. I do really like the notion that upon release people will discover things that even the devs won't have seen, and found their pragmatic approach to the red ground red sky problem most refreshing.

I do still share one of the commenter's views about it setting off my Molyneux alarms, though.