Published October 28, 2023
What Did we Gain from Algorithmic Loot Generation? More than we Lost.
We would have been better off algorithmically generating the stories.
The year is 2004
You're playing an RPG at your computer on a rainy Friday evening. You enter the Cave of Despair with your ragtag group to rescue a child kidnapped from the village nearby. After failing to convince the bandit chieftan inside to let the child go you're forced to kill him and his entire clan. You spend the next hour struggling and trying different different strategies until finally his head falls. Upon opening his treasure chest you find the Bow of Silent Ends, a magical artifact that the chieftan had stolen but could not appreciate the power of. You drag it into the weapon slot of one of your party members and right click the nearest enemy. Your brain floods with happy chemicals as you discover that your archer now does four times as much damage as he used to and you can take on the Lizard King at the top of Mythical Mountain, who you failed to beat after hours of trying last night. You're filled with determination and excitement as you head back up the mountain, glad for this hard-won turn of the tide in your favor and your mind buzzes with possibilities at what loot The Lizard King will drop next.
The year is 2023
You load into your game. Corporate decided that games receive better reviews if they can keep you playing them longer so developers had to come up with enough content to keep you staring at your screen for at least 600 hours. Better reviews means more sales but making content is hard so you load into Procedurally Generated Cave Template 23. This one has pirate bandits. Damn, third time in a row. You prefer the blood cultist caves because they have fewer enemies. You kill the first enemy in 1 seconds and spend 2 seconds pressing E to loot it, vacantly moving your mouse around to grab the 23 gold off the body (adding to your stockpile of 293,523), and Minor Healing Potion which you like because they have a pretty decent value/weight ratio. You kill the boss at the end with two button presses and find a Leather Helmet of the Ox which is a 8% increase in stamina but a 2% decrease in damage. You take it to sell for later. You can't wear leather.
We've failed to procedurally generate meaning
Making meaningful loot drops is difficult work, sure, but loot is at the core of our experience of playing games. The possibility of an amazing find adds a sense of anticipation and uncertainty to every encounter with an enemy. We form relationships with loot -- we remember the moment we found it, how we took a second to appreciate how cool it looked on our character, how it let us overcome a challenge we previously thought impossible. They are part of the story of our save file and the story of our life. Loot helped us learn that when one problem seems insurmountable we can lean firmly into a different but related problem and still make progress. Why did we think this, of all parts of game development, needed to be automated away?