Last year’s Remnant II is a loot-based, Dark Souls-ish third person action game that does something with its level designs that I desperately wanted from Diablo IV: it crafts a uniquely randomized world for every individual player.
Random level layouts are nothing new in the world of action RPGs, or even video games at large. The original Diablo proudly sold itself on its ever-shuffling dungeon, itself carrying on the tradition of early ASCII-art classics like the original Rogue. But Diablo paired the idea with at-the-time lavish production values, and game worlds assembled at runtime from artist-generated tile sets have been pushing the boundaries of replayability ever since. Sometimes, entire games are now built around this concept, with No Man’s Sky featuring a whole galaxy of millions of planets made using procedural seeds.
This approach has many potential downsides. It’s easy for random worlds to look chaotic if the artists and designers don’t have enough input or control over the system. Without some human-driven logic, the results might look visually interesting, but they won’t have the careful balance of spaces that make a game fun to actually play. But too much input can be bad as well, making every space feel like every other space…
