Unreal engine is perfectly compatible with procedural terrain generation and possesses a feature called level streaming which allows to load and unload different zones of the same map not dissimilar in effects with how minecraft loads and unloads chunks so that had me thinking if they both could be employed in ember's devenlopement.
While adopting procedural terrain generation does sacrifice art quality and artist control over the map it allows for massively increased map size, seamless world and the possibility to allow for infinite exploration and pairs extremely well with the resource sistem that will be part of ember as there's no more the need to compete for a limited amount of "resource nodes" which generated endless toxicity in firefall with unwanted biomats leechers, node ninjas and etc and most importantly it saves money and time on world builder artists which if i understood things right are both at a premium here.
Another alternative supposing an instanced environment would be to generate a map would be to generate a map of moderately large size the first time the instance is open and leave it at that until it's abandoned, this would NOT require huge map downloads as the generation ideally should happen simultaneously on client and server using a map seed, this is already working fine for Rust and ARK devs plan to adopt a similiar approach in the close future
Ultimately the main reasons i would suggest this approach for ember is that first, it saves money and time both in the short and long run and has been succesfully employed by indie studios already (i wouldn't exactly point at no man's sky already but giving their outragious price of 60€ i'd say that they're feeling pretty confident) but also it has a separated kind of hype factor that standard mmo have long lost (maybe never had? We're talking the dawn of time here) so i'd imagine that ember could ride the wave effectively.
While adopting procedural terrain generation does sacrifice art quality and artist control over the map it allows for massively increased map size, seamless world and the possibility to allow for infinite exploration and pairs extremely well with the resource sistem that will be part of ember as there's no more the need to compete for a limited amount of "resource nodes" which generated endless toxicity in firefall with unwanted biomats leechers, node ninjas and etc and most importantly it saves money and time on world builder artists which if i understood things right are both at a premium here.
Another alternative supposing an instanced environment would be to generate a map would be to generate a map of moderately large size the first time the instance is open and leave it at that until it's abandoned, this would NOT require huge map downloads as the generation ideally should happen simultaneously on client and server using a map seed, this is already working fine for Rust and ARK devs plan to adopt a similiar approach in the close future
Ultimately the main reasons i would suggest this approach for ember is that first, it saves money and time both in the short and long run and has been succesfully employed by indie studios already (i wouldn't exactly point at no man's sky already but giving their outragious price of 60€ i'd say that they're feeling pretty confident) but also it has a separated kind of hype factor that standard mmo have long lost (maybe never had? We're talking the dawn of time here) so i'd imagine that ember could ride the wave effectively.
