(Now, I am assuming that this is not possible, or may be but only with vast amounts of work. Truth be told, I have no clue what makes this work…)
One really cool feature that No Man’s Sky has is the random creatures you find on each planet. I recently began to find hunting quite repetitive and was wondering if this could be implemented. I appreciate however, that this would most likely require a whole new algorithm and a ton of assets for random generation, (but as I said above I don’t really know), and therefore would never happen.
Regardless, I thought I would put this out there just in case.
More creatures are coming, including the Hunter (I prefer to refer to it as the Haunter) which is, as I understand it, completely modeled and animated. Other creatures we have seen teased are the ground basher / stone thrower (status unknown) and block parasite / giant worm (status unknown) each with 5 tiers. That’s a potential 25 additional models to encounter.
Additionally, constructs known as Guardians and Drones have been mentioned in the past, and concept art was teased. These are expected to accompany Titans, so we don’t actually know what or when to expect that.
Delicious info @Havok40k! Can’t wait for the Hunter!! Titans will, of course, be absolutely epic…but considering the assumed difficulty in implementing those, for me patience is easier to find for them. The Hunter will add many more degrees of threat and excitement to venturing around their spawn areas. Fret not folks, I have every confidence there is tons more to come in Boundless!
I thought the hunter was just in caves, so not really found exploring, only mining. Also, would the block parasites spawn in the wild? Anyway, I forgot about the basher and stone thrower. Thanks @Havok40k
TBH, not sure where the Hunters are intended to spawn. Either way, much of my ‘exploring’ is synonymous with ‘caving/mining’, hehe. I’m a sucker for the gems and dark places, although a little lonely creature-wise atm…in good time.
I think I kind of prefer that they stay away from procedurally generated creatures and stick with the procedural tinting that they’re working on implementing. With specific creatures in the game, it’s easier to say “Oh we need to go hunt X Creature for X Materials.” and it also adds the ability to learn what mobs have what abilities. If the creatures became completely random it’s kind of like they all become the same since their drops and abilities would be random as well.
That would be semi solved with flying creatures always dropping X, bipeds always dropping Y, etc. But yeah, procedurally generated mobs can be a bit of a choppy thing really.
Btw this questions isn’t easy to answer briefly because it’s a quite involved area, but I’ll try …
We did consider procedurally composited creatures early in development. We actually consider this for all aspects of the game. Which parts are hand crafted versus which parts are procedurally generated? The Worlds are procedural. But the Creatures aren’t. Ideally we would generate more content and hand craft less. Ultimately which aspects of the game are enhanced by being generated? (For example I originally wanted to generate the player characters - but no one else was interested in exploring this idea.)
Here’s the thinking for creatures - the aim was to create a collection of sandbox aware creatures. (Not easy btw!!) We wanted the creatures to be fun to interact with, with each creature interacting with the players and the sandbox uniquely.
If we generate creatures then they’ll all look different, but their interactions will often be the same. You’ll still be playing against a known set of mechanics. Some fly. Some shoot. Some charge. They’ll look different but the play will be the same.
In Boundless we decided to focus on the sandbox and interaction for the creatures, instead of going for the path of variation where the fun is more about collecting the generated variations.
Thoughtfully handcrafted stuff is imo always favorable over procedural one, but hunting does feel repetitive atm.
Maybe creatures could draw their stats from a range rather than a set value? Like:
Dmg = Base ± (0…10)%
Health = Base ± (0…10)%
Speed = Base ± (0…10)%
…
This might be a cheap way to add some variety to hunting.
To put icing on the cake you could tie the rolls on the stats to the loottable RNGs or even indicate high stat rolls with a specially tinted body(part). E.g. a golden tinted “eye” for a Cuttletrunk that got a 10/10 on his dmg roll.
Oooh, that would be amazing! Have certain parts of all creatures that are universally colored based on their rolls, golden eyes, red leg markings, backened armor plates… etc. These could pair with the procedurally tinted colors and elemental effects to make a kaleidoscopic range of colors and appearances!
