Comment by schnevets
1 day ago
I vaguely recall an episode of the Triple Click podcast around 2023 where they had a serious AI fanboy who was rah rah-ing about future procedural generation in games. It might have been Casey Anthony, but I'm unable to re-listen while at work.
The fanboy started saying how they could have endless different levels in Destiny 2... which is absurdly off-base since the entire game is just running through the same 9 sandboxes and 12 raids over and over and over again
He then went on to talk about AI creating an album as perfect as OK Computer on-demand, which was gently putdown by Kirk (who is an exceptional musician but also chill enough to suffer fools)
By the end of it's lifetime Bungie had created quite a bit of variety in the Destiny 2 content library (although there's always a bit of orb dunking, plate standing, and symbol reading). And if they hadn't rebuilt the engine from scratch it would've been even bigger.
There's like 30+ strikes, ~8 pinnacle ops/exotic missions, 11 dungeons, 10 raids, and many campaigns. But more to the point of the original comment: it's quite engaging to spend an hour or two a week mastering one of those missions at the hardest difficulty. The modern difficulty knobs are really neat and complement the immensely fun gameplay loop very well. NMS, unfortunately, has no real enjoyable gameplay loop.
We are still years off of an LLM creating a gameplay system even 1/4 as good as Destiny IMHO.
I'm listening to OK Computer right now. Came upon this reply half way through "Let Down". Hmm.
In my own procedural explorations, the solution to the 10,000 bowls of oatmeal problem is to manually curate them and give the user only the exceptionally good ones. It's a tedious lot of work.