Loe Svane

@thomasmahler This is coming from the guy who, if it werent for Microsoft, wouldn't even be in the gaming business anymore, thats what I call to spit on the plate where you eat

Since quite a lot of people have asked about how we crafted our 'open world', here we go!💡😀 I generally see a lot of 'open world fatigue' in gamers at the moment. The problem here is this: Procedural Generation Tech of today is just still not good enough to actually create good level design. Most developers who make open worlds do it because it's fairly easy to just create a large terrain and then use some perlin noise heightmap to create valleys and hills and et voila, here's your game world. Cheap and easy, but you also kinda get what you paid for: The problem with this approach is that you get vast stretches of emptiness that just aren't fun to traverse through. And you can see that in almost all open world games out there. Vast stretches of nothingness that were never touched by a designer to create really interesting moments. So what do most companies do on top? They go in and level design on top of this randomly generated terrain. That works, but you need an army of level designers to fill up these huge worlds with actual design, which is why you see most of these games having good design in this spot, but then not in all these other spots. Sometimes less actually is more! 👍🤣 By now I'm so trained to this that I can very clearly tell which spots in an open world game were touched by a designer and which ones weren't. And because of this, our approach to creating a huge world was different. We just spent a decade meticulously hand-crafting entire seamless worlds on Ori, so we aimed to apply the same quality and care to @wickedgame: Instead of just procedurally generating a huge world that then suffers from vast swaths of emptiness, we instead hand craft everything inch by inch and then we stitch everything together, create intersections and constantly iterate on the moment to moment gameplay. The goal in our level design department was that there would never be moments where in order to go from point A to point B, you'd simply hold the analog stick forward for 2 minutes. We don't think that's fun, that's just turning your game into a walking simulator at times. So, whenever you play your next open world game, keep your eyes open for this stuff, you'll quickly be able to discern what I'm saying here! Maybe in the future AI will be able to actually create interesting level designs, but with the Tech of today, we still need extremely talented designers that know how to build amazing levels by heart, that get the time to build a huge world with love and care. Based on what I'm reading online, I think most gamers appreciate good level design! Most gamers can't directly explain why they're so turned off by your typical 'open world' levels at this point and this here is the reason. I think most gamers agree that we don't need 10.000 planets or a quintillion areas in our games: We just need one big, intricately designed space that actual designers put their blood, sweat and tears into creating! It's just more fun to play in an area that a designer spent weeks and months on instead of just traversing endlessly through a randomly generated world that's large, but completely lacking of actual design.

The odds of this happening were 1 in 160,000. Can anyone recommend an exorcist?! #BaldursGate3