Originally Posted by
Kent
Actually, that was only true for the Forest. Forest 1 and 2 had the same physical topography every time they were loaded up, however the presence of switches and locked doors would alter the path you had to take between the areas' various rooms. In these areas, it was these elements that had several different layouts.
The combination of the same topography, but variable elements that changed your path of progression worked for this area, since they were always essentially the same "place" in the in-game world: The approach to the Central Dome.
However, starting with the first area of the Caves (and all throughout Episode I, save for boss arenas), this was no longer the case. These areas employed a technique similar to "chunking" in other disciplines, where individual rooms were made, and the base area was constructed by assmbling these rooms together, instead of using a static topography. After this, progression elements (doors, switches, teleporters, etc.) are added in order to give a specific progression path unique to each version of a map layout.
The areas still only have a very specific number of variations each, so this isn't employed to randomly-assemble areas in the game (though it certainly could be, just this particular game was not designed to do so), but this is still a method used to sort of "fool" the players into thinking they're going into familiar territory, since individual rooms look the same, while still providing varying experiences between layouts. Though not randomly-generated (just randomly-chosen layouts), this means that the game isn't purely some being of chaos - because of this, it allows the level designers to design much higher-quality gameplay experiences than a random-generation system would actually allow. Though, that's not to say that a future random-generation system couldn't have some very interesting advances in this category, just that the randomly-chosen layouts of the time led to a much higher-quality experience, overall.
In Phantasy Star Universe though, a slightly different variation of this technique is used. On the whole, areas are pretty much static, and generally a lot smaller, though there are a lot more actual areas in the game. However, it still very much discouraged much exploration, simply by not providing much in the way of opportunities to do so, which is probably the biggest detrimental factor in the game's level design.
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