The issues raised in the article highlight a persistent challenge with procedural generation. As players spend more time in the game, the copy-paste nature of assets and locations becomes increasingly apparent. Eventually, the illusion breaks and what should feel like a vast, handcrafted universe instead reveals itself as a series of templated environments filling empty space.
To truly elevate the experience, future development needs to shift toward making each planet feel like a bespoke, curated destination complete with unique set pieces and intentional design. But realistically, no single developer has the time or resources to build the tools, assets, and scalable systems required to achieve that level of detail across a universe the size of Starfield.
We can look to other studios for how they're approaching this problem. I applaud the ambition of companies like Cloud Imperium Games (developer of Star Citizen), which are actively investing in procedural generation tools and asset pipelines designed to avoid this pitfall. That said, it's a long road and it may take another decade of feeding the system with enough modular content and intelligent tooling before content creation becomes truly turnkey.
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