More Randomness, More Replayability For Games?

Thanks to GamerDad for its 'Long Shot' editorial discussing whether randomly generated gameplay and maps make for more interesting videogames. The author argues: "As time has advanced and games have become less like the arcade games of old, plotting and story have removed the randomness from many of our games... That's to say nothing of the gameworlds themselves... The places you'll visit are always going to be the same with each play through." However, he points out: "Ensemble Studios has done an absolutely superb job of making online play in Age of Mythology exciting through the use of random maps. These maps are generated using excellent seed criteria that give the player the feeling of playing a pre-designed map but with completely unique designs every time", concluding: "I'd like to see the same kind of thing applied to first person action and more."

Comments

Paranoia

[RidiculousPie]

This is about as close as I've gotten to what many old arcade games did as a matter of course, drop players into a world and let them fend for themselves in a situation with pre-determined rules but random everything else.

I personally prefer the paranoia solution. You aren't allowed to know the rules ;-). Endless crazy fun

Randomness would be good

[bigman2003]

Randomness would be good, and one genre that would really benefit, would be the First Person Shooter/Sneakers.

I'm in the middle of playing through the Rainbow Six 3 campaign mode, and what I've been dealing with is the same thing that I have seen on every other FPS:

I walk into a new room, and start getting shot at. Instead of running out, I continue to move forward to draw fire from as many enemies as I can. Yes I die, but now I know where everyone is.

Reload my last save, and this time I enter the room knowing where everyone is. I 'sneak' in, kill them, and move on.

I would say that this is 'smart gameplay'. It works, but it is also 'cheating'.

But that is the only way to do it, when they hide the enemies behind boxes, tables, etc, and they are set to ambush you as you walk by.

While I do LIKE this type of gameplay (problem solving really) it would be nice to have some randomness built in, to keep me honest.

F-Zero X

[wick3t]

If anyone wants to check out a great example of randomness, I highly recommend F-Zero X on the N64. The X Cup (which needs to be unlocked) generates random tracks providing a whole new experience every time you play. There are the occasional tracks with tight corners and no walls where everyone just flies of the edge and dies, but I see it all as part of the fun.

Ikaruga

[Doctor Ian]

I don't think that it follows that more randomness means more replayability. It can just highlight the meaninglessness of playing games. Ikaruga is almost totally deterministic with just a few enemies that swap around to keep you paying attention. The whole game is about 25 minutes from start to finish, yet the serious players have spent hundreds of hours on the game. That is some serious replayability, and it gains it through being not random.

Then again, on the other side, there's stuff like Diablo, Phantasy Star Online or Minesweeper where the random spin is pretty much the saviour of the game.

Another issue with random whatever (evel, monster placement, etc...) generation is that, most of the time, it sucks. No care or human ingenuity is used. For example, F-Zero X's random track generator creates tracks that aren't half as good as the 24 built in ones. All the randomly generated Doom level I've played from various programs can't even compare to maps which are made by anyone who knows roughly what they are doing. Again there are counter examples, like the levels in Worms which were randomly generated.

I think it all boils down with how the game needs the player to deal with possibilities. If there's something which needs to be unknown, or some unknown factor, what better way to set it up than have it picked out randomly?

I'm only trying to point out that it's a double edged sword, as the article seemed very pro-random. The dungeons in Daggerfall were just completely uninteresting, yet the author suggests this is down to a poor random generation algorithm? I don't think so, the dungeons were generally well constructed from a technical point of view. They were boring because it is just boring to wander randomly around a dungeon full of random, meaningless corridors and templated rooms, looking for a random item placed randomly somewhere in the dungeon, so you can get the item back to the random villager who gave you the random quest to do this. It just sort of hits home that maybe you're really wasting your time?

The Unexpected

[ThePyro]

The thing that hurts replayability the most for me is that, after the 1st time through a game, I usually know where most, if not all, the enemies/items/etc... are going to appear. There are no surprises any more!

I don't think random level generation is needed. Just look at how popular multiplayer is - those people are playing on the same levels over and over again. It's the unexpected that keeps bringing them back. With human opponents, you never know when or where you're going to run into somebody, OR what they're going to do. You must constantly use your head to do well.

Random enemy placement (especially right behind the player :) ) may extend the life of a game by a bit. Also, it might be helpful to give more variety to the tactics that enemies use. Thus, the players won't know for sure that "okay, that brown guy is going to run at me for 3 seconds and then break left, so it's safe for me to take careful aim now."

All you really need is a little bit of a surprise here and there to keep the adrenaline flowing...

Gauntlet wasn't random

[johannesg]

Every level in Gauntlet was hand-designed, and the same each time you played the game. What changed was the positions of the enemies, as they tended to spawn extremely rapidly. As a result, minor changes to your own route could radically change the opposition you encountered.

Anyway, I agree with one of the other posters: purely random levels just make the game meaningless. It is the same with soaps on TV (which I consider to be randomly generated for the purpose of this argument): I'd rather see a good, one-off story, then see the same elements repeated in different combinations again and again and again.

Disgaea

[dancingmad]

In Nippon Ichi's tactical RPG Disgaea, there's an item world; you "enter" an item and do battle on randomly generated maps. For every 10 levels you beat the item becomes stronger. It adds a lot of replay vale to the game and certain stages (Cave of Trials) require you level up your weapon.

Sometimes you do get a doofy level where you can't beat all the enemies or the exit panel is right next to the base panel (you can exit in one move), but overall it's always give you some way to get out of the level (defeating all the enemies or the exit panel).

Its really one of the big elements that make the game last as long as it does (80+ hours - I'm at 70 something and nowhere near unlocking all the stuff).

How about doing it right?

[Gothic_Walrus]

Lest we forget, randomness needs to be done correctly to work.

The Xbox version of "Toejam and Earl" boasted completely randomly generated worlds. According to my friends that have played it, though, the levels aren't really all that different from the ones that were generated the time before. Heck, I've even heard someone say that the random levels took away variety from the game.

On the other hand, we can't have random levels that don't work. Putting a snowy mountain in the middle of a rainforest just won't work, and it's not fair to have random levels that are impossibly difficult (as mentioned in another post, F-Zero X has generated race tracks with incredibly sharp turns and no walls).

Still, randomness is appealing. I love puzzle games like Tetris, mainly because the experience is different every time. The basics are the same, but the actual challenge is never the same.

It's been said, but this would be great for some genres. There are too many shooters and strategy games for the PC. Find a way to develop random maps that are logical, challenging but not overwhelming, and fun and you've got a goldmine on your hands.

As far as I can tell, finding a good randomization system is the biggest hurdle. If we clear that, then we've just found a way to put level designers out of business. :)

Random maps have always been the best

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

Civilization, Railroad Tycoon, Master of Magic etc, they *became* classics because they had random maps.

Sadly, many of the sequels dropped the random maps, and were lousy. They just never seemed to figure out the correlation.