Just because you can produce an infinite number of content doesn’t mean that you can show all of them to the player. Instead, the player will fail to see any difference between your generated content and will get bored fairly easily. Craig Perko calls this issue the Content Swamp and states that No Man’s Sky suffers from it, especially with its random planet generation.

In this video, Craig Perko discusses possible solutions to the Content Swamp: reduce the occurrence of the content to make it seem more rare and special, reuse the content by allowing people to carry on a long-term relationship (allow people to take possession of the “content” or to revisit the “content” regularly), and recycle the content by allowing the player to change the generated content to thereby produce their own human-generated content.

Procedural generation is just a tool. It’s important to know its limitations and be able to work around them…

A reader submission by Igor Horst, talking about a Craig Perko video. Both people come highly recommended by me. (Check out Craig’s huge list of videos and blog posts!) And I can definitely get on board with procedural generation just being a tool and a starting point.

The Content Swamp is clearly related to Kate Compton’s Bowls of Oatmeal Problem, something a lot of people are working on finding ways to address.