Procedural generated maps!

Not sure why no one has suggested randomized maps before now… But personally the whole reason i left Conan exiles and haven’t come back yet is because we only have the one map to play on and i know it like the back of my hand. So why not give us randomized maps?

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Because randomized maps still cannot come close to the handcrafted ones in terms of look and more importantly feel, I suppose. Procedural maps do have other qualities, replayability chiefly.

Procedurally generated maps would be awesome, and I’ve even suggested it before… for a mod.

I say a mod because given all the undermesh and other stability issues with even a fixed map, I don’t see this being within Funcom’s ability to implement at the level of quality they’d need to guarantee to customers. Because once something is in the game, the expectation is that it will work properly.

Given that they are still wrestling with making Unreal Engine do even what CE does now without exploit or error, I’d say they’ve still got more ‘core’ work ahead before they could even thing of tackling something so ambitious.

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Because you’d have to scrap pretty much the entire gameworld in order to do something like this?

It’s a better idea for a game in the early stages, not so much when the game has been out for a while.

Procedural stuff only works in certain things. No Man’s Sky makes it work because you can go to a crapton of different planets. Invisible Inc makes it work because you are going to different locations and it’s a confined area.

Conan Exiles, it simply wouldn’t work. We are trapped in a defined location. It’s not a single player game. (By which I mean, most of the design is geared to the online community, not the single player one.)

So for official online stuff, you’d have to work out how exactly the entire map is going to change randomly, every time the server resets or reboots itself, so basically every day the map would become totally different. Then you have to take into account any owned land by players or clans, and how that has to be ignored by the procedural generation, so they aren’t deleted.

It would piss players off, who build based on defensive capabilities, or for aesthetic appearance. This would change from day to day, essentially making your preference meaningless.

Then you have to consider the procedural generation deciding that today a giant boss is going to spawn near your base, so it wrecks you whenever it chooses, if you aren’t capable of beating it.

If/when purges work, and you get shafted out of your defensive location, your base gets wrecked by the purge thralls, if you aren’t capable of fending them off.

You spend all your time online hunting for resources, because every day they are in different locations. So you have less time for actually playing the game, and more time on meaningless grinding, made more annoying by the fact that first you have to actually LOCATE the resources you need. Which could take ten times longer than necessary.

So, really, there is just zero chance something like this could be received positively. At least regarding the main part of the Exiled Lands itself.

Now, dungeons are another matter. If we had instanced dungeons that ported us out of the map, and a procedurally generated one, with different pathways and monster spawns scattered. That in itself actually would be fun. Because then you have the fear and anticipation, but over a smaller area, where it’s all more about survival in the short term.

But it doesn’t have as much of a chance to become super annoying the way an entirely randomized Exiled Lands would be.

Because dungeons, no no-build areas, the risk of very bad resource distribution, the purge zones / spawns, npcs spawns (faction, t4 distribution, city generators etc.) meteors spawns and another tons of issues a randomized map has.

All the things I mentioned are not automatic-related to map zones in a way a map generator could arrange easy, they are man work.

That’s why to develop an intelligent map generator would be a huge work, than it could be easier to produce a map editor and sell it instead.

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