Xenoblade Chronicles 3 Dev Used Procedural Generation To Manage 100,000 Different Assets

Xenoblade Chronicles 3 developer Monolith Soft has revealed that it used significant procedural generation to cope with the vast increase in assets required to build the world of the critically-acclaimed Switch RPG.

As detailed by CG World (thanks, VGC), Monolith Soft’s map model designer Yoichi Akizuki, support engineer Mitsuhiro Hirose, and programmer Takashi Shibahara all discussed how the studio started incorporating software such as Houdini to aid in procedural generation.

Off the bat, it’s important to remember that procedural generation is not the same as generative AI. The former utilises an algorithm based solely on assets created by the developer, whereas the latter pulls data from an indeterminate number of sources, often without explicit approval.

As Akizuki notes, the Xenoblade entries increased in complexity with each entry, and so creating everything by hand would have taken up far too much time. As such, automating the procedural generation allowed the team to focus more on “actual game creation”.

“The main reason for the introduction was to cope with the increasing volume of assets required for games. This has had a particularly significant impact on our game titles, which feature the exploration of vast and diverse fields.

“In the past we managed to produce 1,000 to 2,000 assets manually, but now that number has increased to 100,000, which is impossible to keep up with manually.

“The conventional method had limitations in terms of cost and schedule. So we replaced the placement process with a procedural one and automated it, allowing us to focus our development resources on the actual game creation. We had been conducting basic research on Houdini for some time, but it was with Xenoblade Chronicles 3 that we were able to put it into practice for the first time as part of our asset placement system.”

Interestingly, Akizuki also states that the use of Houdini also allows technical artists and designers to make direct adjustments where needed, without the requirement of a programmer. He says that this “frees up programmers to work on improving the environment, which is a win-win situation”.

What do you make of Monolith Soft’s use of procedural generation? Do you think there are potential Switch 2 games that might benefit from such technology? Let us know with a comment.