> No one wants to explore procedural spaces. There's never anything interesting in them.
I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.
I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.
Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.
Starfield (and I speak as someone who put in a couple of hundred hours to the game) has a wealth of problems, but one of them is that they messed up the distribution of even the small-ish number of points of interest that they have.
They put some sort of cooldown timer on them, set way too short, so players see the same half dozen over and over again.
A modder discovered the timer and set it longer, and suddenly found a load more content that very few people had come across before.
I wasn't making a comparison, I was just commenting on procedural generation in general. It clearly can be fun and interesting if done well since some games have managed to achieve that.
Whether it's possible to do well in the kind of game Starfield is I don't know, I never claimed it was. I even said as much in the last line of my comment, that perhaps the kind of game Starfield is makes this approach not work.
I think practice shows this isn't true, Minecraft is pure procedural generation and people love wandering through Minecraft worlds.
I haven't played Starfield, but based on what you said the difference is in the complexity and amount of stuff, in Minecraft you don't have to go far to find more new things. Even if you're very familiar with the game you can still come across very unique areas, it's rare that I feel like I wasted my time by just wandering around a map.
Additionally Minecraft solves the story problem by simply not having one, which works fine for the kind of game Minecraft is, probably not so much for Starfield.