Because it's the new fad and people are getting tired of the fad, plus like every other fad games that might have been very well better off without it crammed it in to be hip and trendy.

Out of interest are we talking totally procedural generation? Am thinking there are those games, say Saints Row/GTA where the city is fixed, but the area around the player is constantly procedurally generated. And does randomised tiles like Rogue Legacy count?

"It's good for you!"

Depending on the game it can be a powerful addition. Whenever the game has aspects of exploration & vastness of its surroundings procedural generated contend, if done right, adds not just to the atmosphere but also to the amount of time one can have fun with the game.

The more story driven a game is the more useless it will be to have such a feature; like the before mentioned point & click adventure games.

I'm not sure, actually. I only took notice of people's response in the release threads and that had me wondering about it.

Maybe someone with good insight could explain the, I dunno, 'levels' of PG. As mentioned above, some use it at quest level while others use it to create the entire gameworld a la the Civilization games. And I suppose there is a ton of variation in-between.

And where does randomization fit in? Also as mentioned above, true randomization likely wouldn't work with many games as it would create unwinnable dead ends, a world filled with one-hex islands, etc.

There are all sorts of things that can be procedurally generated; the crowds of bystanders in games like Assassins Creed or GTA, whole worlds and levels (or universes) in RTS and 4X games or quests or enemy placement (or a combination of all of the above)

As for randomization, procedural content will hardly ever be truly random (one, because true randomness is quite difficult to achieve and two, because true randomness would more often than not lead to broken levels) but will instead be governed by a set of rules that can lead to very random content (the levels in most roguelikes or the maps in an RTS) or just small randomised elements in an otherwise designed world (like randomly placing vegetation or trees).
It doesn't even need to be random at all as the algorithms used can be made to recreate the same world each time (which is basically just a fixed input as opposed to a seed generated fresh each time) and in that case it is a way of creating very large and detailed worlds without taking up a huge amount of disk space.
Nope, I'm fairly sure Oblivion and Skyrim are. They're just not random. They generate the terrain based on algorithms, it's not saved and loaded from disk, it's loaded each time from a seed.

I really don't understand all the hate for games that use randomization, or "roguelites." I think it greatly increases the lifespan of a game when each round is different from the last. It's the same reason why one wouldn't want to play the same game of solitaire over and over.

Take Ziggurat for example: it's a fun FPS game made up of 5 large levels--each one randomized with different items and weapons. Again, no two gaming sessions are the same, and about 10 different characters can be unlocked as well. This easily provides dozens of hours of gameplay. It's a must for any fan of Heretic.

Or how about Spelunky? This is a 2D exploration game that also uses procedural generation. The player explores about 4 main levels divided into 4 stages--all brutally difficult. For those that grew up in the '80s, this game is very reminiscent of Dig-Dug mixed with platforming.

There are many other great randomized games on GOG, such as Tower of Guns and Rogue Legacy. Games like Not the Robots and Our Darker Purpose belong on GOG too!

Hmmm it really depends on what's procedurally generated. Honestly a good number of games would be dead without it. Diablo, Rogue-likes, etc.

I can almost imagine going through Dark Cloud games with no random levels and it would be 'alright go left, pick up the box there, go to the enemy there fight him, go here etc etc' and quickly getting bored and not bothering because there's no exploring and no uniqueness to the levels at all.

I know for Diablo 2 with Zy-El, not having newly random levels is a good thing over and over again when leveling and trying to just survive long enough to get posters. But deleting all your maps and starting over is a lot more fun when you don't die immediately.

Bad generation is uncreative, but good algorithms make for worlds that can be incredibly unique. Not to mention games that have new elements added, trying to hand-craft a huge map can not only be time consuming but annoying, while giving rules to the generation often can make it feel as good or better than hand crafted work. Terraria is one of the best examples of that probably.

That's hardly what people refer to when they talk about procedurally generated content, though. The algorithms improve performance / reduce the amount of custom data and reduce the amount of work required from the level designers / artists but they ultimately work entirely based on content manually defined by people. It's not the kind of procedural generation that you can advertise a game with.

It is still procedurally generated (and the OP did ask about whether it always meant random) even if it's not what is typically meant when the term is used.

Hmm, I've never heard that. Perhaps it is a small number of people saying it that aren't really representative of the entire marketplace? No idea either way either. Personally I don't see anything wrong with using procedural generation as it can make some things possible to do in a game that would literally be impossible otherwise. Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing in an individual game really depends on the game itself I believe. It's not something that would automatically make me buy or avoid a game personally though. I'd be more interested in the trailers, gameplay videos, the rating the game gets on Steam and Metacritic as well as reading enough reviews on Steam and elsewhere for a given game than whether or not it was procedurally generated. But that's just me... :)

Usually hand-crafted levels are much more interesting than procedurally created ones - at least for now.

Also procedurally only works well with a lot of repetition (similar or equal building blocks) - and who likes repetition.

Procedurally created means only less costs - but often quite artificial and not very interesting structures, which means less fun.

The only advantage is when playing the game a second time - but who has time for that anyway.

So in most cases when people want to play it only through once they see "procedurally created" as a negative label and it probably is.

That's one thing I hate about GTA and it's clones, is the cars/people etc. around the player are not only procedurally generated, but to a flaw at times, with cars magically transporting themselves right into your damn way at the most inopportune moments. Look one way, no cars, turn your head and try to steer into the lane you just looked at - suddenly a car teleported in from nowhere. Look behind him and there are 20 cars in a row that there's no way could have been there from the time it took for you to turn your head and back. Worse, is that they magically teleport cars in right when you are trying to navigate corners, intersections and other tricky spots so it is way harder to play than in real life situations. This is particularly true during scripted high speed chases that you have to complete in a fixed amount of time, usually with the scripted in-the-way vehicles appearing when you hit trigger points. I hate that shit totally. For an "open world" game to force you to go down a specific series of streets, avoiding scripted timed cars and pedestrians etc. it is very non-open. It feels like a rail shooter at that point. So you have to reload from the last checkpoint 50 times until you magically do exactly what they force you to do. But you now have Ground Hog Day memories of what is going to happen, so you want to try to use that information to avoid the problems from the previous runs. Sometimes it helps, but other times you'd rather veer way off course knowing where the scripted sequences is going to end up and taking short cuts to get ahead. Then the game fails your mission for "going off course". How about not _having_ a forced course in an open-world game! There's an idea! :)

So those kind of games are flawed both with their procedural aspects and their forced-to-play-as-developer-demands aspects.

So after reading some reviews and game descriptions on steam, it seems that F4LLOUT is right when he says that the term is being used (or one could say misused) to mean something different now. Heck, I even suspect that in some games the content described as "procedurally generated" isn't really so. It's just random.