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OkayPhysicisttoday at 5:05 PM2 repliesview on HN

IMO, Dwarf Fortress benefits greatly from the player seeing relatively few samples of the world gen, and the geography actually mattering to gameplay.

The actual geography doesn't vary that wildly most of the time ( if you've seen one lightly forested river valley, you've seen them all), but players generate a relatively low number of worlds, and in each world probably only see a handful of sites, where dwarf-scale world gen actually matters. Unlike NMS, though, the details of world gen matter to gameplay a lot. Trade caravans and invading armies can't traverse mountain ranges and ocean, so a mountainous peninsula can be extremely isolated. At the site level, you'll probably want to design your fortress to take advantage of local geography to help fortify your fortress and provide resources, so terrain and features like rivers, volcanoes, etc. placement matters a lot.

In contrast, No Man's Sky world gen feels pretty tangent to the actual gameplay. The game does a good enough job incentivizing you to explore lots of planets, but in terms of the survival/base-building aspects, there's a pretty short list of resources that matter to deciding where to setup, and geography hardly matters in terms of how you build.


Replies

WhatIsDukkhatoday at 5:15 PM

If your proceduralism doesn't generate easy to hard solvable problems (ie from geometry constraints etc), its not really adding to the gameplay, only the visual experience.

nemomarxtoday at 5:59 PM

I'm thinking of the generated history and legends too - NMS only seems to gesture at this with wrecks of ships but I don't think it actually gives each planet a history.