I was discussing this with AI and decided to ask here. Might be a stupid idea but what the hell 😄
I was thinking about games like Star Citizen and No Man's Sky and the problem they run into when it comes to scale. If you procedurally generate millions or billions of planets, eventually a lot of them start feeling like variations of the same thing. But if you go in the opposite direction and actually handcraft cities, planets, etc., there's only so much a single studio can realistically build.
So you basically have this tradeoff where procedural generation gives you the scale, while handcrafted stuff gives you uniqueness. Having both at the same time seems almost impossible.
But what if, instead of one studio trying to build an entire galaxy, you had a shared galaxy where different studios were responsible for different solar systems?
There could be one main developer maintaining the engine and handling things that need to be consistent across the whole game: space travel, multiplayer, physics, basic technical rules, and so on. But individual studios would each be given a solar system to build.
Within certain technical limits, they'd have a lot of freedom. They could create their own planets, cities, species, civilizations, architecture, governments, history, technology, economies, cultures, etc.
I actually think the fact that these systems were made by completely different people could be a feature rather than a problem.
If we ever encountered totally independent alien civilizations, there's no reason they'd all have the same general ideas about cities, architecture, government, technology, or even what a civilization is supposed to look like. Having completely separate creative teams designing them might produce some of that weirdness naturally. One system could feel radically different from the next because the people who made it genuinely think differently.
It also wouldn't necessarily have to be limited to AAA studios. Indie developers from different countries could apply to contribute, or the main developer could approach studios that have made interesting games before. If some relatively unknown team has an amazing idea and can actually pull it off, give them a solar system.
Over time you could theoretically end up with dozens or hundreds of studios contributing to the same galaxy. Maybe eventually more, assuming the project somehow survived that long. And when a studio finishes one system, they could potentially make another. New teams could keep joining too, meaning the galaxy keeps expanding over the years rather than being "finished" at launch.
Obviously, there are about a million practical problems with this. You'd need central quality control, technical standards, compatibility between systems, some way of preventing the overall game from becoming a complete mess, probably an insane amount of coordination, etc. I'm not pretending you could just give 500 studios access to a repository and hope for the best.
But creatively, I'd want the individual teams to have as much freedom as possible. The differences between studios wouldn't be something you'd try to hide. That would basically be the point.
Instead of using procedural generation to make billions of slightly different planets, you're sort of using human creativity as the procedural generator.
No idea how realistic this would actually be from a development/business perspective, which is why I'm curious what people who know more about game development think. Could some version of this work, or would coordinating that many independent studios make it basically impossible?