> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them. You can't do environmental storytelling because that requires a human hand.
I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.
In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.
But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.
Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.
Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).
They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.
I would say, rather, that no one wants to invest the development effort to make them interesting enough to explore.
In my view, you can either use procgen to make development cheaper or to make it more interesting to explore, but not both at the same time. The roguelike genre was invented because the developers of rogue wanted to be surprised by their own game. And it worked to an astonishing degree.
But you've got to design in the systems that are interesting to explore, rather than relying on the amount of content.
Everyone hopes that you'll have multiplicative results so that content X times content Y goes exponential. But with procgen the multiplicative effects are more from different systems interacting; having a sword with different stats feels same-y, having a sword that combines two gameplay effects starts feeling more interesting, having a sword that integrates with a procedurally generated narrative and a system of tracking per-weapon kills that dictates your reputation among monsters starts feeling like there's a lot more to explore.
Nethack is famous for having a zillion different hidden reactions that let different parts of the content work together in surprising ways, as anyone who has tripped down the stairs while wielding the corpse of a cockatrice has discovered. Dwarf Fortress has a zillion different moving parts, so that the giant shambling golem built out of salt can be defeated by shoving it into a lake. Caves of Qud lets you bring a chair to life and then use your psychic powers to swap minds with it and then go on to play the rest of the game as the chair (with rocket launchers).
They've all got a lot of interesting environmental storytelling, but in absence of the human scripting have to work a lot harder for it. A lot of games, unfortunately, stop at the X+Y generation, without building in the synergies to make the different values of Y unique and expressive enough for the players to care.