STO: Genesis System

We've all had an inkling that STO would be using some kind of procedurally created content would be used to fill out the galaxy and now its been confirmed by Daniel Stahl via his blog on mmorpg.com

The Genesis System.


To quote Daniel Stahl

“Give me an M class planet with a Federation complex set up in the mountains where some scientists are milling about ...”
“… Now add a bunch of Klingon's attacking the complex …”
“... Oh, and make sure the Klingon's brought some Targs!”
“… Now make sure one of the Klingon's is a badass Dahar master”
“… And how about a really funny looking Ferengi running around screaming!”

Until we start seeing some pictures of video gameplay of this content I can't really make any judgements, if I was to just go by the blog I'd feel excited that it will fill the game out and give us a lot more content but at the same time it makes me worry that content might end up lacking in detail and quality.

Quality is always better than quantity and I hope Cryptic can get a good balance with it.

This kind of created content is good for planets we have never heard of inside the Star Trek lore but I wouldn't like to see it being used for somewhere we might have heard of but not seen for instance, these programs are great for creating content very quickly but some places needed to designed and tweaked by hand.

Another potential problem with procedurally created content is that eventually everything can start looking the same which could be a major downfall for an MMO. What we don't want to see is a 30 different M class planets with a Federation complex in the mountains where the only difference is the color of the sky or maybe the grass is a different shade of green.