Randomly generated islands- can it work in an MMO?

I found myself thinking about the possibility of having some random generation of a small temporary island (or a few) beyond the pre-made world map, non-instanced of course. This could be cyclical and a new seed could generate island(s) every few months while removing the old ones during patches or maintenance (similar to how seasons will change). I personally envisioned this as an end-game system where you compete on a ladder for prestige instead of spending your time getting better gear, creating an alternative end-game system you and your guild can focus on.

I was thinking this randomly generated island would first need to be found, encouraging exploration (naval) since it would not be on the map. Early on, players can then choose to keep its location secret or share it before it gets discovered by more people. The island itself would only have a few nodes and cannot have nodes lvl up beyond a town (to prevent players from staying there forever with services such as re-speccing etc missing to this end). Content-wise, it would play like a season in other games where ladders, achievements etc would be wiped for each iteration of the island and guilds/players would compete each time. The island could have a handful of world bosses, a single PvP objective without a timer (unlike node or castle sieges), maybe some scarce amount of good quality gathering resources (for consumable items, not gear) and 1-3 dragon eggs (temporary flying mount) which could serve as the ultimate goal. Not to mention, outside of the in-island PvP, piracy would become a very exciting experience around the waters of the island(s). To prevent invalidation of main-land content, the resources/loot should not be able to be used to create better or even equal quality gear than what can be found in the main-land... the dragon eggs are the prize, not shiny purples. The geography, climate, mob types, world bosses, location of PvP objective etc will be the randomly generated part. Lots of things can be done to spice this up, like the gods could have special influence over these islands and each iteration could have special rules in place like "no corruption" or something (similar to leagues in PoE).

I was thinking such a system would be a constant source of 'new' content that reinvigorates the player-base without invalidating the rest of the world, or at least that would be the goal. Due to the lack of fast travel and the lvl cap of the island nodes, players would need to really prepare for the journey, and commit time and resources that could not be be put towards mainland content, gear and objectives (e.g. castles, node mayoral races etc). The mainland nodes of the world closest to the island would also become more populated and tense as players would want to use the waters for the shortest travel distance to the island. The island would be a hub that concentrates end-game level and geared players and guilds as an alternative to all the end-game content on the mainland. I've always liked games that have alternate end-game systems that players could specialize in or engage with like the ARPG genre (e.g. mapping vs delving in PoE or the arena vs the monolith in last epoch).

On the flip side, in an MMO, having too many end-game systems can spread the population out too much, especially of end-game players. Ashes might already suffer from this with no fast travel where high level players would flock around the 6 possible metros (instead of a singular end-game hub in other MMOs) and only deviate from these locations for castle sieges, world bosses etc. It also runs the risk of invalidating one form of content by indirectly competing with it. If a server's population decides to focus on the island, the island might be an epic experience while the mainland content suffers or vice versa (kind of like how a theme-park MMO expansion makes the old content suffer). It all made me think, is there any room in a healthy MMO, or AoC in particular with its current design decisions, for randomly generated content such as this?

I like the idea of random generation because I've seen how games can do it so incredibly well like the maps in Deep Rock Galactic and the early exploration part of games like Civ6 have always been the funnest part of those games for me when I'm exploring the land, looking for resources and thinking about optimal locations. This would definitely evolve the MMO genre by borrowing systems from other game genres. Or does this simply have no place in an MMO... thoughts?

Final note: I understand AoC is not an end-game focused game. When I say 'endgame' I just mean high lvl content for players that would not have leveling as a big motivation.

Edit: after some fun discussion below I am lead to believe that this does not need to be 'randomly generated' at all, and could be quite low effort with an artist since it is small, temporary, and does not need to accommodate things like freeholds etc. It simply does not need to be too complex as it should not compete with mainland content and should instead provide a fun temporary battleground instead.

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neuroguy

Azherae wrote: »

I feel like one of the two of us is much less informed about this than they think, so I'll assume it's me and go ask someone about it. I'll therefore 'Baton Pass' on this thread and stay out of it, and if anyone from my group oosts again, it'll be the person who knows exactly what they're talking about. And of course, if there's no post, it'll be because she corrected my misconceptions.

Hahaha, how humble of you. I don't have any game design experience. I have a decent bit of coding experience but am mostly extrapolating from that. The main reason I'm pushing for randomization is that
A: I liked Vhaeyne's idea of one boss and was fresh off the divine node catacomb reveal so I was imagining a sprawling underground dungeon to crawl through. I think there is a lot to be said for being able to randomize a maze-like sprawling dungeon.
B: I think when you design a recurring system, it is almost always worth investing time to automate as much of it as possible. For example, if this design idea is scrapped or was super successful and wanted to be expanded upon, having an automated pipeline would be best. If it is scrapped, you might as well have developed a nifty algorithm that can generate geography, it may be useful elsewhere. If it's a huge hit and they want to make 3 islands, each twice the size originally planned, the workload would increase dramatically for every part that is not automated.
C: I think algorithms can generate very interesting stuff, intentionally or not. I also, with little practical knowledge, assumed that manually designing the island, even if the assets are all recycled, would be fairly resource intensive if it were recurring.

Dygz

Bacon can explain why everything will be handcrafted better than I can.
But any island in Ashes would be created similar to Nodes.
Check out the latest Dev Livestream for some insight.

Merek

Due to the huge RNG factor that would come with it, no. The chance that someone gets the one in a million island with the best mob cycle, loot and everything, making him a millionaire would be too damaging to the economy. I wouldn't mind there being a large amount of islands off the coast, but they shouldn't be randomly generated.

neuroguy

Merek wrote: »

Due to the huge RNG factor that would come with it, no. The chance that someone gets the one in a million island with the best mob cycle, loot and everything, making him a millionaire would be too damaging to the economy. I wouldn't mind there being a large amount of islands off the coast, but they shouldn't be randomly generated.

Not sure what you mean. There would never be a terrible or super amazing island, even with all the RNG, since they would all go through QA. If it would be too enriching, it would not make it to live servers. The space in which the island can spawn in is an important factor on the rate at which people will find the island. If players are looking for it, it will not stay monopolized by a single guild or player for long. In a previous comment I said at most I would want it not found for 24h. A high number of islands would spread out the population a lot and damage the mainland content too much. For this to work it needs to concentrate players, be dependent on mainland for resources, not out-reward mainland content and be only temporary content (available for some window of time and removed afterwards). I go over all of that above though.

GrandSerpent

Hi all, to follow up on what @Azherae said, while procedural generation of content in the context of an MMO is within the realm of technical feasibility, there are a lot of non-obvious challenges which make it difficult in practice.

1. How procedural terrain generation works

In order for this to make sense, I need to give a brief explanation of how terrain is normally generated in procedurally-driven games.

The most common technique for dynamic generation of terrain in video games utilizes computational tools call noise functions, most commonly Simplex noise. These generate continuously-changing 2D or 3D fields of numbers, which can be used as inputs to terrain heightmaps, or voxel-based terrain generation functions.

Through applying mathematical operations and multiple layers of noise functions with different parameters, game developers can refine their outputs, resulting in something more tailored to the sort of game environment they're interested in creating. With sufficiently complex algorithms, this can result in some interesting, varied landscapes, which are utilized to good effect in games like Minecraft or No Man's Sky.

However, it's important to emphasize that this sort of procedural generation is, at its core, unpredictable and random. While programmers can influence how terrain is generated, it's not fundamentally possible to get results which will consistently conform to any given set of requirements for gameplay.

2. Non-obvious pitfalls in the context of MMOs

An MMO like AoC has a specific set of requirements for its gameplay areas. Players need wide, relatively open areas to fight mobs, they need the capacity to easily traverse between areas of the world, and they need a certain, logical distribution of resource gathering points for things like fishing and harvesting. In the context of a large, procedurally-generated island, there are some significant technical challenges to achieving these goals. In no particular order:

1. Does the island have enough wide, open areas for players to fight in?
2. Are there areas of the map which players can get stuck in (e.g., a drop into a canyon with no way out)?
3. Are there large areas which are inaccessible (e.g. a plateau with sheer cliffs surrounding it)?
4. Do randomly-placed props (trees, rocks, plants) on the island clip through geometry, or display in other janky ways?
5. Do any NPC spawn points or resource gathering nodes intersect with props or with terrain features?
6. Is there a clear route onto the island from the ocean?
7. Will player-operated ships get stuck in shallow areas of water?
8. Can the generation system create the required gameplay systems (AI pathfinding nodegraphs, collision geometry) in a reliable way?
9. Is this collision geometry generation reliable enough to prevent any spots where the player will fall through the world?

With sufficiently complex algorithms and enough development time, I believe most of these problems could be overcome in the majority of the cases, and manual QA of generated areas would help screen out many islands with obvious technical flaws. However, there's still an irreducible level of inconsistency in this approach, and getting sufficiently good results requires a lot of investment in the procedural generation systems. It's also very easy for more subtle flaws in the generation of any given island to be missed by QA and make their way into production.

Even games with a heavy emphasis on procedural content generation sometimes misstep on these points, either by removing enough of the randomness from the proceed that everything feels kind of generic and "samey" (e.g. No Man's Sky at launch), or by creating areas of content which are sometimes unplayable (too many examples to list here).

Since AoC's main focus is on hand-authored content, I'm therefore not sure if it would make sense for Intrepid to dedicate the technical resources necessary to implement this type of system in a sufficiently reliable way, at least at launch.

3. What game developers can do

While full procedural generation is probably outside of AoC's scope, there are still ways to utilize procedural tools and algorithms to help expedite the level creation process, and blend hand-authored and procedural terrain.

One approach sometimes used in games is to start from a piece of terrain created by a noise function, and refine it into a usable gameplay space via conventional terrain sculpting tools. This can be a good way to quickly iterate on content, and ensure that no areas of the world have significant technical flaws. This kind of workflow has been used in many open-world RPGs in the past (Morrowind, Oblivion, etc).

Another approach is for a level designer to define the broad shapes of a landscape, then allow algorithms to refine the terrain, applying processes like erosion, or applying textures and props to areas of the landscape based on slope angle or a noise-driven biome system.

From what I've seen in the alpha so far, I believe AoC's devs are already utilizing techniques of these types of techniques. UE4 has fairly sophisticated tools for terrain generation natively, which make intermixing algorithmically-driven and hand-edited terrain feasible (e.g. simulated erosion, foliage painting).

4. Conclusion

This is a case where, although dynamically-generated islands would make for an interesting system, the technical complexity most likely outweighs the benefit unless Intrepid plans to focus heavily on this type of content.

Areas like islands can be generated by hand relatively quickly by level designers, often with a greater degree of quality and visual interest (hand-placed props, environmental storytelling, etc). Based on my experience, putting together a small island without any unique assets or gameplay scripting is something that a designer could finish within a day, meaning that even a relatively extensive archipelago could be put together in a reasonable span of time.

neuroguy

@GrandSerpent Thanks for the educational post. Your links don't take me anywhere =/ I would love to learn more. Short response: I definitely don't have enough knowledge about manually creating this stuff to try to compare their relative effort and I trust your expertise so I concede and will edit my original post (which btw I'd love to hear your thoughts on as a game system). I think that personally, I would find it easier to be creative if provided a clay mould of an island than an empty canvas so that probably biased my thoughts haha. Setting up a random generation algorithm sounds like fun to me and I might just make it a pet project so I will also post my thoughts on how I would approach that here and you can maybe give me some feedback/point me to the right tools to try to code it up myself.
Edit: on second thought let me read more on the manual creation before I sink time into this haha so if you have any good resources to point me to, I'd appreciate it (otherwise I'll just google it).

Azherae

@neuroguy - Yeah she and I have both had odd issues getting the BBCode for video links and such to work, but it's probably just overlooking something.

Here's another try.

neuroguy

Azherae wrote: »

@neuroguy - Yeah she and I have both had odd issues getting the BBCode for video links and such to work, but it's probably just overlooking something.

Here's another try.

Yeah so as mentioned by @GrandSerpent it definitely seems doable with a simple "multiple layers of noise functions with different parameters". To clarify, I understand all of the problems mentioned in her post but she also immediately provides the intuitive solutions to all of them. These are just a number of tractable problems that can be solved with iterative random generation and parameter setting, plus you can just brute force a lot of it if needed and do manual rejection (and train up a machine learning algorithm if you really want to get fancy). But ultimately if it is really as quick as you say to hand-craft these environments then more power to that.

Noaani

neuroguy wrote: »

But ultimately if it is really as quick as you say to hand-craft these environments then more power to that.

If I were to implement something like this general suggestion in to a game, I would start with procedurally generated terrain, and would add in props and spawn points manually.

This isnt as much about saving time as it is about variation - if you had a small team making new islands every so often, they would eventually end up being similar in some fashion. If you randomize the foundation of it and leave the details to those same people, you are more likely to get more variation.

Also, issues with terrain generation (pathing, ensuring space etc) are very easy to solve in comparison to prop placing issues, and spawn points - especially since generation speed isnt exactly a factor (such as a game generating a random map when players start a game, or enter a new area).

neuroguy

Noaani wrote: »

This isnt as much about saving time as it is about variation - if you had a small team making new islands every so often, they would eventually end up being similar in some fashion. If you randomize the foundation of it and leave the details to those same people, you are more likely to get more variation.

I tend to agree, and I've seen procedural map generation in DRG blow me away so that's why I initially proposed it as such... But I mean taking only a day to whip up an island is fast. I feel like a team of 3-4 people should indeed be able to set up some procedural generation pipeline in <4 months easy, and I feel like that's a conservative estimate.Again, keeping in mind that is just needs to be geography that designers/artists will pick up and make sing. But a day per island? At that speed you could just swap artists in charge of the island and produce content for a few years that way without seeing any individual artist's biases.

GrandSerpent

Looks like the forum software added some extra characters in front of my links, sorry about that. I've edited the original post, and it looks like the links in it are working now.

@neuroguy Yes, to elaborate a bit on the points you brought up, I don't mean to imply that Intrepid's level designers couldn't use procedural generation as a base to start from - I think modifying an algorithmically-generated terrain would make for a fairly good workflow, with some advantages over a more manual workflow. Rather, the point I want to get at is that quite a few passes are still needed either way (prop placement, AI spawnpoint and navmesh definition, QA, etc), so it's less of a time savings than it might initially seem, and comes down moreso to personal preference on the part of the level design team.

This is off-topic, but if you're interested in learning more about the level design tools commonly used for this sort of thing, Unreal Engine 4 is free for personal use, and as I mentioned, has some good tools for terrain editing (you can find a short tutorial about manual terrain editing here, and about importing an externally-generated heightmap here). Bear in mind that UE4 has a bit of a learning curve, and if you're interested in importing the outputs of a noise function, you'll need to write some code for handling images. There are good noise function libraries in Python, Node.js, and Java. There's a great tutorial on some specific concepts in procedural generation here.

neuroguy

GrandSerpent wrote: »

Looks like the forum software added some extra characters in front of my links, sorry about that. I've edited the original post, and it looks like the links in it are working now.

@neuroguy Yes, to elaborate a bit on the points you brought up, I don't mean to imply that Intrepid's level designers couldn't use procedural generation as a base to start from - I think modifying an algorithmically-generated terrain would make for a fairly good workflow, with some advantages over a more manual workflow. Rather, the point I want to get at is that quite a few passes are still needed either way (prop placement, AI spawnpoint and navmesh definition, QA, etc), so it's less of a time savings than it might initially seem, and comes down moreso to personal preference on the part of the level design team.

This is off-topic, but if you're interested in learning more about the level design tools commonly used for this sort of thing, Unreal Engine 4 is free for personal use, and as I mentioned, has some good tools for terrain editing (you can find a short tutorial about manual terrain editing here, and about importing an externally-generated heightmap here). Bear in mind that UE4 has a bit of a learning curve, and if you're interested in importing the outputs of a noise function, you'll need to write some code for handling images. There are good noise function libraries in Python, Node.js, and Java. There's a great tutorial on some specific concepts in procedural generation here.

Thanks, yeah I'm comfortable with python so I'll start there once I have a bit more free time and see if I can gauge the effort required a bit better.

akabear

Not quite the same as the OP suggestion, but thought that perhaps some of the islands, should they have nodes, could have varying degrees of accessibility and/or sufficiency. So that they may become a little more unique or outliners.

neuroguy

@akabear I don't think I follow what you mean by 'accessibility and/or sufficiency', could you elaborate?

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