Quote Originally Posted by Nektulos-Tuor View Post
Its been done on games that were in the 1990s. Like Daggerfall, it IS complicated, but once you have it down...
With respect to those games from the 90's, tile based randomized dungeon crawlers are not even remotely in the same league as FFXIV....

You could get away with tile based maps when having 3D environments you could free roam in was new, but you can't really get away with that now. Hell, the faces on our characters have more textures and polygons than the entire image above.

I agree with the broad idea of more randomized elements to create variety, and even a semi-random dungeon that never quite looks or runs the same each time compared to the last. But I can't accept 90's dungeon crawling as an exponent of procedural generation of content.

Rogue was great in the day, as was Mines of Moria, both games (and 100s of Rogue-like games since) consisted of entirely 'random' maps generated procedurally. Of course neither had a particular story, and neither game engine suited story driven content. The 90's games that use this technique similarly used it for non-story driven content and produced labyrinths of uniform stone walled corridors and square rooms.

I think the technique could be used to generate variation in the content that we face in dungeons, and alter paths, puzzles, etc. But other than doing a dungeon as a tribute to dungeon crawlers of the past, I don't see a completely random, procedurally generated dungeon happening.