> I don't know how one can spins this as a bad thing.

People spin all kinds of things if they believe (accurately or not) that their livelihood is on the line. The knee-jerk "AI universally bad" movement seems just as absurd to me as the "AGI is already here" one.

> Spore is well acclaimed. Minecraft is literally the most sold game ever.

Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

As I see it, it's all a matter of how well it's executed. In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work (in the same way that e.g. renaissance artists didn't make every single brushstroke of their masterpieces themselves).

In the worst (or maybe even average? time will tell) case, there are only minimal human-made artistic decisions flowing into a work and the output is a mediocre average of everything that's already been done before, which is then rightfully perceived as slop.

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mikkupikku 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Counterpoint: Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation, seemed very soulless to me at the time.

Is that even a counter point? Nobody in their right mind would ever claim that procedural generation is impossible to fuck up. The reason Minecraft/etc are good examples is because they prove procedural generation can work, not that it always works.

	▲	lxgr 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		True, I should have said "counterexample". Procedural generation is just another tool, in the end, and it can be used for great or mediocre results like any other.

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zimpenfish 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation

I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means...

> "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work"

...is what Bethesda did, no?

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lxgr 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of the art of game terrain design is reconciling the inherently unrealistic scales.)

	▲	bombcar 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		WoW had this but you never really thought about it - even the massive capital cities were a few blocks at most. The problem with procedural generation is it's hard to make it as action-packed and desirable as WoW zones, and even those quickly become fly-over territory.