The Xenoblade Chronicles 3 devs cut production costs through procedural generation

In an interview with CG World, Monolith Soft developers explain how the use of procedural generation tools, such as Houdini, dramatically reduced production time for Xenoblade Chronicles 3.

With over 100,000 assets to create, compared with 1,000 to 2,000 in the first opuses, the studio automated up to 70% of object placement, while retaining 30% of manual settings for collisions and fine-tuning. This has allowed more resources to be dedicated to gameplay and visuals.

Procedural generation has also made designers more autonomous, allowing them to directly modify elements without programmer intervention. Monolith is now exploring this technology to automatically generate buildings and cities, starting from simple building blocks.