Today, we’re introducing WorldGen: a state-of-the-art end-to-end system for generating interactive and navigable 3D worlds from a single text prompt.
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By schmichael 2025-11-2221:504 reply It’s a fun demo but they never go into buildings, the buildings all have similar size, the towns have similar layouts, there’s numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns don’t really make sense. It generates stylistically similar boxes, puts them on a grid, and lets you wander the spaces between?
I know progress happens in incremental steps, but this seems like quite the baby step from other world gen demos unless I’m missing something.
> they never go into buildings, the buildings all have similar size, the towns have similar layouts, there’s numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns don’t really make sense
These AI generated towns sure do seem to have strict building and civic codes. Everything on a grid, height limits, equal spacing between all buildings. The local historical society really has a tight grip on neighborhood character.
From the article:
> It would also be sound, with different areas connected in such a way to allow characters to roam freely without getting stuck.
Very unrealistic.
One of the interesting things about mostly-open world game environments, like GTA or Cyberpunk, is the "designed" messiness and the limits that result in dead ends. You poke at someplace and end up at a locked door (a texture that looks like a door but you can't interact with) that says there's absolutely nothing interesting beyond where you're at. No chance to get stuck in a dead end is boring; when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration".
The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring. Second Life has that in some well-built areas. If you visit New Babbage, the steampunk city, there's almost a square kilometer of city. Almost every building has a functional interior. There are hundreds of shops, and dozens of bars. You can buy things in the shops, and maybe have a simulated beer in a pub. If anyone was around, you could talk to them. You can open doors and walk up stairs. You might find a furnished apartment, an office, or just empty rooms.
Other parts of Second Life have roadside motels. Each room has a bed, TV, bathroom, and maybe a coffee maker, all of which do something. One, with a 1950s theme, has a vibrating bed, which will make a buzzing sound if you pay it a tiny fee. Nobody uses those much.
No plot goes with all this. Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Amusingly, Linden Lab has found a way to capitalize on this. They built a suburban housing subdivision, and people who buy a paid membership get an unfurnished house. This was so successful that there are now over 60,000 houses. There are themed areas and about a dozen house designs in each area. It's kind of banal, but seems to appeal to people for whom American suburbia is an unreachable aspiration. The American Dream, for about $10 a month.
People furnish their houses, have BBQs, and even mow their lawn. (You can buy simulated grass that needs regular mowing.)
So we have a good idea of the appeal of this.
By kqr 2025-11-239:26 > The other extreme, where you can go inside everywhere, turns out to be boring
But that's the point! Daggerfall is like this too: huge areas (both cities and landscapes) with nothing interesting in them. That's what makes them feel so lived in. They're not worlds designed for the player to conquer, they're worlds that exist independent of the player, and the player is just one of a million characters in it.
The fact that I pass by 150 boring buildings in a city before I get to the one I care about both mirrors reality and makes the reward for finding the correct building all the greater!
>Unlike a game, the density of interesting events is low, closer to real life. This is the fundamental problem of virtual worlds. Realistic ones are boring.
Reminded me of this clip of Gabe Newell talking about fun, realism and reinforcement (behaviorism):
By MarkusQ 2025-11-2317:16 > Realistic ones are boring.
You must live in a different reality. The one I live in has fractal complexity and pretty much anywhere I look is filled with interesting ({cute..beautiful},{mildly surprising..WTF?!},{ah, that's an example of X..conundrum}) details. In fact, so far as I can tell, it's interesting details all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in any direction I probe.
No, the fundamental problem isn’t the recreation of real life. Rather it’s that real life isn’t mirrored in ways that are important like having agency to pull of systemic changes something I’m having a hard time articulating. What I can say is that Eve online pulls off certain aspects of this pretty well.
By stackghost 2025-11-236:202 reply >What I can say is that Eve online pulls off certain aspects of this pretty well.
Eve is a game about interstellar corporate fuckery where gigantic starships fling missiles and lasers at each other.
That... is not a recreation of real life.
By fragmede 2025-11-236:45 Corporations pouring millions into flashy, pointless projects using a bunch of Excel seems pretty realistic to me, the lasers and starships aren't, sure.
By dyauspitr 2025-11-2319:45 It’s not but there is an aspect of complete freedom to do things outside the bounds of prescribed interactions is what I’m getting at.
For instance second life might be a lot more interesting if you could kill someone, assume their identity and pull off other such shenanigans. At the same time there should be real user “law enforcement” continually tracking down criminals of this nature. Being arrested should mean real jail time/account suspension for a fixed amount of time etc. Criminals should get a real user driven trial where they can argue their case, real user lawyers you can hire etc.
By bc569a80a344f9c 2025-11-2223:431 reply This comment kind of reminded me of a YouTube channel I completely adore. AnyAustin (https://www.youtube.com/@any_austin) has quite a few videos exploring and celebrating open world video games.
By QuantumNomad_ 2025-11-230:44 Also related, YouTube channel Shesez https://youtube.com/@boundarybreak
Explores what’s outside the bounds in video games.
For example:
Off Camera Secrets | Goldeneye (N64) - Boundary Break https://youtu.be/Reaz4aKYci8
Hidden Secrets in GTA 3 https://youtu.be/xBpNWVDQ5QM
By ArekDymalski 2025-11-2223:55 > when every path leads to something interesting, there's no "exploration"
While this sentence makes sense from current game design perspective, I have to say it strikes me as very unrealistic. Facing dead ends has always ruined the immersion for me.
By trollbridge 2025-11-2222:38 Sounds like the AI accidentally implemented NIMBY style zoning.
This is potentially a lot more useful in creation pipelines than other demos (e.g. World Labs) if it uses explicit assets rather than a more implicit representation (gaussians are pretty explicit but not in the way we are used to working with in games etc...).
I do think Meta has the tech to easily match other radiance field based generation methods, they publish many foundational papers in this space and have Hyperscape.
So I'd view this as an interesting orthogonal direction to explore!
By schmichael 2025-11-2222:00 Thanks! That’s some nuance I absolutely missed
By ProofHouse 2025-11-2223:53 is there a working 'demo' I don't see one?
>It’s a fun demo but they never go into buildings, the buildings all have similar size, the towns have similar layouts, there’s numerous visual inconsistencies, and the towns don’t really make sense.
that's 95% of existing video games. How many doors actually work in a game like Cyberpunk?
on a different note , when do us mere mortals get to play with a worldgen engine? Google/meta/tencent have shown them off for awhile but without any real feasible way for a nobody to partake; are they that far away from actually being good?
By brnaftr361 2025-11-2222:38 I would think the argument for this is that it would enable and facilitate more advanced environments.
There's also plenty of games with fully explorable environments, I think it's more of a scale and utility consideration. I can't think of what use I'd have for exploring an office complex in GTA other than to hear Rockstar's parodical office banter. But Morrowind had reason for it to exist in most contexts.
Other games have intrinsically explorable interiors like NMS, and Enshrouded. Elden Ring was pretty open in this regard as well. And Zelda. I'm sure there are many others. TES doesn't fall into this due to the way interiors are structured which is a door teleports you to an interior level, ostensibly to save on poly budget, which again, concerning scale is an important consideration in both terms of meaning and effort in-context.
This doesn't seem to be doing much to build upon that, I think we could procedurally scatter empty shell buildings with low-mid assets already with a pretty decent degree of efficiency?
By jaccola 2025-11-2222:01 There are a bunch of different approaches. Many are very expensive to run. You can play with the World Labs one, their approach is cheap to explore once generated (vs an approach that generates frame by frame).
The quality is currently not great and they are very hard to steer / work with in any meaningful way. You will see companies using the same demo scenes repeatedly because that's the one that looked cool and worked well.
This just seems like an engineered pipeline of existing GenAI to get a 3d procedurally generated world that doesn't even look SOTA. I'm really sorry to dunk on this for those that worked on it, but this doesn't look like progress to me. The current approach looks like a dead end.
An end-to-end _trained_ model that spits out a textured mesh of the same result would have been an innovation. The fact that they didn't do that suggests they're missing something fundamental for world model training.
The best thing I can say is that maybe they can use this to bootstrap a dataset for a future model.
By kubb 2025-11-239:05 The people who worked on it did what they could to satisfy the demands of their higher-up’s, who frequently are out of touch with the technical landscape.
Being kind to them and understanding the environment they work in won’t improve their lives, but it will expand our understanding of the capability of particular large companies to innovate.
By theptip 2025-11-2317:22 What’s SOTA in this area right now?
I'd call this 3DAssetGen. It's not a world model and doesn't generate a world at all. Standard sweat-and-blood powered world building puts this to shame, even low-effort world building with canned assets (see rpg maker games).
It's not really a world no. It generates only a small square by the looks of it. And a world built out of squares will be annoying.
Still, it's a first effort. I do think AI can really help with world creation, which I think is one of the biggest barriers to the metaverse. When you see how much time and money it costs to create a small island world called GTA..
Last time I checked, the metaverse was all about people collaborating in the making of a shared world, and we already have this. Examples include minecraft and vrchat, both of which are very popular metaverses. I don't see how not having bot content generation is a barrier?
Then, let's say people are allowed to participate in a metaverse in which they have the ability to generate content with prompts. Does this mean they're only able to build things the model allows or supports? That seems very limiting for a metaverse.
By wkat4242 2025-11-2311:06 I don't mean for content creation to only be AI! I mean it could be a tool especially for people who don't understand 3D design so well.
Minecraft makes it easy by using big blocks but you can't have detail like that and it's very Lego like. VRChat requires very detailed Unity knowledge. You really need to be a developer for that.
Horizons has its own builder in world but it's kinda boring because it's limited. I think this is where AI can come in, to realise people's vision where they lack the skills to develop it themselves. As a helper tool, not the only means of generation.
I guess that doesn't matter in games where the world ultimately doesn't matter, it will be better procedural generation, but personally I adore games where the developers actually put effort into designing a world that is interesting to explore, where things are deliberately placed for story or gameplay mechanics reasons.
But I suppose AI could in theory reach the point where it understand the story/theme and gameplay of a game while designing a world.
But when anyone can generate a huge open world, who really cares, is the same as it is now, gotta make something that sticks out from the crowd, something notable.
By wkat4242 2025-11-2311:08 It's the human guidance that makes it special. Low effort single sentence prompt creation like meta does here is super boring of course.
But it can be a tool for people with great imagination but not the technical skills to make it real.
Every time we talk about AI people think it will be used only as an easy mode A-Z creator. That's possible but creates boring output. I view it more as a tool to assist in the difficult and tedious parts of content creation. So the designer can focus on the experience and not tweaking the little things.
It's called world gen.
I know nothing about games and game development, but comments INSTA-sticking up for bigCo is increasingly hilarious to me.
World generation is different than world modeling. It's like java versus javascript. I'm not sure why I bother with technical discussion on hacker news anymore.
By apsurd 2025-11-234:06 My comment was too snarky. I take your point. Based on the discussion this capability is closer to a really cool automated asset pack than "building 3D worlds". My understanding of world modeling is towards AGI, and you're saying nobody implied this is world modeling.
You're right. But the criticism is that it's closer to 2D asset packs than it is to 3D worlds and you're being overly charitable to Meta and underly charitable to the community response.
edit: this is just my over sharing of why i downvoted you. I didn't intent for you to feel dismissed.
