I think you are describing something different. What you are describing is procedural creation.... like instead of having a human artist, you have a computer artist. Neither of these methods are the same as procedural generation you know of from a game like No Man's Sky. Horizon and the Unity methods are both definite level structures. where as one is just generated based on some algorithm. At least, this is the way I understand it.

All of those things are different flavors of procedural generation. NMS is almost fully procedurally generated, but HZD and Unity's tools use procedural generation to complement the level artists' work (instead of replacing it completely)

The same enemies respawn in the same spots all the time!

They don't actually Mogwaii. Usually what happens is you'll go to a shellwalker site, and they'll be flanked by Watchers. Then, if you go back again, they'll be flanked by Longlegs. And if you go back again it may be Sawtooths and Longlegs. Or, on one occasion, a ravager, 3 shellwalkers, 2 longlegs, and some watchers. All at the same site.

It is pretty cool. The weather disguising loading areas is excellent as well. Very smart.

That is definitely one of its few down falls. That and the water animations and lack of physics.

They are both really special games. I like Witcher 3 a bit more. The variety in the world, characters, enemies, quests, etc. was really amazing in Witcher 3.

Thanks for the comment. I guess I already sort of got that part of it -- more just wondering how using math to decide where a tree (or series of trees) goes, is any more efficient than an artist dictating that beforehand.

It doesn't really free up power on the console, it frees up manpower during development. None of this is really happening at run-time. It's part of Guerrilla's terrain decoration pipeline when authoring the game, they input some hand painted maps that define which areas should have biome characteristics. And because the placement of the world geometry (plants, trees, rocks, etc) is applied to the world based on some defined parameters, a few artists can create huge areas of the world.

Most studios that do open world games have something like this already for adding density to the world, the key difference here is that Guerrilla opted to use GPU resources to speed up some of the processing at author-time.

@Pandamobile Thanks for the explanation!

No, and I'm totally with you on this, but the media would never dream of calling a man from Pakistan and Paki, because that IS deemed racist. I've never been able to work it out either. Turkish turks, Swedish Swedes, British Bits, yet abbreviation certain nationalities is 'racist', smdh.

I guess this guy is pointing out you should either do it for all or do it for none. This is why racism is a pain in the arse - people get carried away with it and start hunting for something to be offended by.

Btw, can I call you 'mog' for short? ;^P