The words procedurally generated spark the idea of endlessly interchangeable combinations of parts linked together in hundreds of different ways, creating something unique that may never be seen again. At its heart, that’s not terribly far off the mark, but as Firaxis Games discovered during the production of its 2012 reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, there’s a gulf between random and procedural. And traveling from Enemy Unknown to
XCOM 2 has meant discovering how to bridge that long divide.
(…)
The first rule, according to XCOM 2 Art Director Greg Foertsch, is striking a balance. “Random’s not fun,” Foertsch declared. “That’s the lesson we learned. The procedurally generated levels in Enemy Unknown, they were more random.”
(…)
However, with the addition of mod support in XCOM 2 — which we’ll be diving into next week — and the modular nature of building design and creation, there’s no telling how many different variations and original buildings you’ll soon be blowing holes through. But in the meantime, Firaxis is planning plenty of variety in each map layout.
“You might get a gas station next to a park, next to a parking lot in one playthrough, and that's your experience,” DeAngelis said. “Even though the ‘quilt’ is the same, all of these elements are procedural, mini set piece bases.”
The plot portion of that system comes into play in the space between our buildings. At the risk of mixing our metaphors, think of the plots as the connective tissue that links one parcel to the next. The plots could be a street, or a park area, or train tracks, or a river bed, or an empty tract of land, et cetera. When you begin a mission, the map reaches into a bank of options and fills it up.
(…)
But the procedurally generated approach of XCOM 2 doesn’t stop with the patchwork environments and battlefield locales. For the first time, your squad will not only be tasked with exterminating the aliens in the area, but secondary mission objectives which will cater to the procedurally generated settings. “It might be blowing up one of these buildings to spark the resistance,” Foertsch said. “It might be hacking a workstation, or protecting a device. All these different things you can do that can show up and in dozens of different buildings and areas. And you don't know what you're going to get.
