In October of this year (2023), I started a started a PhD in video games, as part of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Intelligent Games and Game Intelligence (iGGi). Specifically, I have dedicated the next (at minimum) four years to researching ‘impossible physics’ and how it could add a new layer of creativity to video games.

What is ‘impossible physics’, exactly? And how can it make better video games? To answer those questions, I want to ask you a question: have you played Starfield? Bethesda’s latest game, their brand new IP, set in space, with over one thousand unique planets to explore? I haven’t, PhD salaries don’t exactly afford the luxuries of brand new AAA titles. I have heard a lot about the game though, and how people may or may not be enjoying exploring those thousand plus planets.

Before getting into how impossible physics would or wouldn’t make Starfield the Greatest Game of All Time (citation needed), I’d like to spare some words towards how Bethesda managed to achieve what is, technically, a very impressive feat.

One thousand planets are difficult to hand craft, a thousand individually designed landscapes with multiple biomes, potentially hundreds of different flora and fauna, and maybe even some living species. It’s a lot of work to do once, never mind over a thousand times. As such, Bethesda rightfully employs heaps of procedural generation to populate their universe. Jean-Francis Levesque, the lead technical producer of Bethesda explains briefly in the direct above how they use procedural generation for the planets. To paraphrase, they do it in stages. First, they generate the landscape, then they populate this landscape with points-of-interest (cool locations for the player to check out), plants, animals, and other such goodies.

There’s a lot going on there, and I want to zoom in on the first bit: the landscape. Unlike No Man’s Sky, Bethesda aren’t generating entire planets on the fly, they actually baked all one thousand plus terrains into the game data. So, every player will land on the same planet, with the same landscape. Those landscapes were generated based on a handful of properties the planet has. Unsurprisingly, Bethesda haven’t released their exact method for generating a piece (a Tile, as they call it) of terrain, but we are aware of some of the properties they use that being: the planet’s size; position in its solar system; its composition; and its atmosphere, if it even has one.

The results are genuinely impressive, I think. Like I say, I haven’t played the game myself but I’ve seen screenshots and videos of the landscapes and they do look cool… for a while. There’s a threshold to the number of times I can look at a picture of a procedurally generated mountain and be impressed (and for me, that threshold is quite high). As one comment on a Reddit post put it,

It’s both impressive and dull at the same time

ImaginaryGur6803

There are many reasons why people have expressed that they’ve gotten bored with Starfield, and I can’t pretend all of them are because of the terrain, but samey procedural generation plays into that feeling of repetitiveness in many games. 10,000 bowls of oatmeal would make a boring buffet.

In Starfield’s case, at least in the specific case of the boring ground on which the players were standing while being bored by the rest of Starfield, the fault can’t be placed entirely at the feet of Bethesda. When generating these Tiles that would make up their planets, they were beholden to a higher power: the laws of physics. When generating a piece of terrain for a planet, Bethesda used the physical properties of the planet to decide what it should look like. If it’s far away from its host star, it’d probably be cold. If it’s small, it’s going to struggle to hang on to an atmosphere, so on and so forth. Right from the word go, Bethesda were limited to what they could create, in order to keep things realistic.

What if the rules were different? What if gravity wasn’t some static, fixed force that pulled all things towards the middle? What if the conditions were such that even the tiniest of planets could have thick, dense atmospheres or tectonics? Maybe we could have seen worlds in Starfield that look less like our own, but with some weird plants and colours, and more like the worlds generated in Minecraft. If the tools were available for developers to tweak not just the conditions in which their games interact with physics, but the very rules of physics themselves, what could they make?

I’ll get back to you in about 4 years with that one.