Galactic Arms Race (2010)
A game that is also a research project into better procedural generation, Galactic Arms Race is based on the research of the Evolutionary Complexity (EPlex) Research Group at the University of Central Florida.
The game is a space shooter with particle weapons. Each weapon is generated by an evolving system that tracks the player’s use of the weapons and uses that as part of its fitness function for the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies algorithm that creates the weapons.
The advantage of evolving weapons this way is that, since they take into account how useful the player found their ancestors, the newly spawned weapons are much more likely to be usable. Moreover, they’re likely to fit the style of play that you prefer. This is a way of narrowing down the infinite possibilities into something more meaningful and manageable.
Where this really gets interesting is that the game has a PvP mode. Rather than having the designers handle multiplayer balance, the players evolve their own weapons, searching out the niches that will give them the advantage. Techniques like this can potentially go a long way to keeping a long-running multiplayer game viable. New strategies can evolve in multiplayer to match the new weapons, keeping the balance of power dynamic and always fresh. Since the new content is the weapons plus the ways that the players use them, this keeps things much more interesting than either aspect would be on its own.