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?
Noita is a great one. Making a randomly generated world this consistent while simulating a million particles and not having it collapse on itself is really cool.
Despite the fact that I don’t like No Man’s Sky very much, its procedural generation is also pretty impressive. Planets have a lot of variety to them. It’s a very pretty game.
not having it collapse
I’ve dead ass had levels in this game where as soon as I load the safe zone shake my screen for minutes at a time. Like what y’all doing down there blowing all them boxes up?
Yeah I’ll agree with No Man’s Sky here as well. While sandbox type games aren’t my favorite (I do find the expeditions fun though) the amount of procedural generation is really cool.
Same, though the base building is also one of the things that ties the procgen there together imo. Theres something just cool about being able to discover random player’s bases organically by exploring, even if it is rare to actually find em in the quintillions of planets
Dead cells
I think you mean doesn’t hurt, but YES. Still releasing regular updates, patches, fixes, expansions, they rule.
I like Shattered Pixel Dungeon.
Age of Empires 2 skirmish maps are procedurally generated, in contrast to other competitive RTS games of that style. It’s done quite well and makes scouting meaningful for reasons other than rock-paper-scissoring your opponent.
Minecraft/Terraria are obvious answers.
When Minecraft was still fresh, there were times when the landscape was absolutely jaw dropping.
Did this change? I saw videos of Minecraft with ray tracing enabled and it looked honestly stunning.
