So it's rather not preloaded vs. generated content, but more the question about the influence of the randomness.

If everything is predetermined one could as well say it's manually chosen (one way or the other). But if it relies on randomness then the outcome is somewhat different each time.

Basically by randomness you can redistribute the landscape / enemies / treasuries / minor quests in Skyrim but you cannot that easily convert Skyrim into a Witcher game for example. It's more like they vary a bit the overall theme.

Actually Spore is maybe really the best example for what procedurally content can also stand for in a positive way. It stands for complexity then, so that the game allows you to make more complex actions. That's something that is really good. I wish there were more games like Spore.

Heh... I'm suddenly reminded. Back a long time ago there was this little game that came out, i think it was Elite. They talked about it and how it ran and the worlds you could go to, and after a while other gamers and programmers stopped and said there was NO WAY he could have packed so much information into a 64k of data (probably half that for the actual floppy or cassette). Instead worlds were generated and modified based on their location and things you did for them. This meant there were millions of worlds which in reality you could only put a couple dozen in if you didn't use procedural generation.

At the time it was the best thing ever made to show off the potential of the game. Maybe watch about it a bit

Exactly. Originally procedurally generated meant in essence "generating data dynamically rather than simply loading static data into memory... " plus all the rest of the stuff Wishbone wrote about. It did not mean that the content wasn't manually designed, nor random, and was usually done due to storage constraints. The player needn't even know if the content was procedurally generated or not simply by playing.

But what it means now (i.e. what game designers mean by it when they put "procedurally generated" in game description) and what the OP meant, is essentially "influenced by randomness".
I just thought now, that technically it would be possible to create a game with non-(procedurally generated) player score, but one where all possible player score values would be saved into memory and read before the game starts. Extremely bad design, but technically possible.

Assuming the game has 10 goblins and 20 orcs and you get 100 points for killing a goblin and 200 for killing an orc...

Procedurally generated:

score = goblins_killed*100 + orcs_killed*200

Non-(procedurally generated):

// before starting the game
possible_score[0]=0
possible_score[1]=100
possible_score[2]=200
possible_score[3]=300
// ...etc
possible_score[50]=5000 // maximum possible

// during game
score = possible_score[goblins_killed + orcs_killed*2]

I don't always avoid procedural generation of the game world but I do agree it is sometimes used unnecessarily in RPGs, or worse: used as a cheap alternative to thought-out and detailed design.

Well, Wishbone went and said it far better than I could. Procedural generation is generally a plus point, and anyone intelligent enough to make use of it is usually intelligent enough to know its limitations, or at least their own limitations in utilising it.

Because generating something (when procedural generation is advertised, I've found that it's usually levels) is typically less solid of an experience than if that part of the game had been designed by hand. Take a game like Wayward Souls, which has procedurally generated levels; its difficulty comes down to luck because you can get an easy level with a couple enemies and an exit just as easily as a sprawling maze with tons of annoying dead ends full of enemies you then have to deal with. The levels aren't designed around the gameplay or for any real purpose. Contrast that with something in the Fire Emblem series, where the levels are fixed and designed to create specific difficulties and advantages. I remember playing Radiant Dawn and having trouble keeping a character alive in a certain level because of a long-range attacker who could kill them in one hit. It was frustrating until I unlocked a door that let me keep them a single square out of said attacker's range, with this being just one of many levels that almost became puzzles on harder difficulties. That's the kind of intentional design stuff procedural generation has yet to find a way to match, so it's become a huge dealbreaker for me when it comes to certain genres.

It's not unlike the difference between talking to one of those old AOL chatbots and a real human being. You can have entertaining conversations with both, but only one of them can anticipate your reactions and use that to subvert your expectations to make things more interesting.

Sounds like how they were generated was poor; Too maze-like is probably bad design (unless you wanted mazes). Often the level generation in rogue-likes (Castle of the winds, Adom, ToME) are less mazes and more connected rooms or pathways. Deadends are possible, but they usually are very short and going one path usually loops around to access the other paths.

If i were to make a map generated this way, it would probably select a room from premade sizes/types or rectangle, then attach 2-3 doors that lead to other rooms, and then using that with a little RNG figure out how to connect them, even having paths intersect. Then occasionally declaring a door as 'hidden'. Often they are most obvious if you enter a level where there are no doors, and searching the walls until a door becomes obvious. Sprinkle the floor with monsters and spawn some regularly based on level/difficulty, add traps, lighting in some rooms, and then random treasures or trinkets, chests, etc.

This really does depend on the game. Games where you die often and fast due to rising difficulty, having identical maps and layouts and enemy spawn points can quickly become a min/max approach to gameplay.

The largest reason for level generation, is so you don't feel too much deja-vu, or that when you enter a cave/level that you've already done this before and you're wasting your time.

Yeah, I've always had the impression that procedural level generation is used as a means of adding infinite replayability and unexpected twists for those who have already completed the game.

But I have hundreds upon hundreds of unplayed games in my backlog and rarely play games more than once, and for someone in that position, all it accomplishes is making that one playthrough unmemorable. Depending on the genre, at least; Terraria is fantastic and the procedural generation works in that game's favor. If replayability is the goal, though, level generation falls flat on its face when it comes to my tastes because the rare games I return to never have procedural levels. If avoiding deja vu is important, there are always harder difficulty modes that can force you to approach similar situations in an entirely different way, though sometimes I just like playing through something familiar that's been designed well because of an appreciation for said good design.

And then there's the downside for Terraria too. I remember watching TB and Jesse Cox playing together and when new features are added to Terraria, they only really take effect when generating a new map, so they had to abandon all their work (more than once) to get the new features in their game. This would include traps, new NPCS, new weapons, etc.

Still watching them play together is a riot :)

Daggerfall was procedurally generated (except a few main quest locations) and then the details were baked in. Some of the dungeons are completely non navigable with areas broken and completely inaccessible (by normal means). The world is huge and empty. Morrowind's world by contrast is beautifully crafted, if smaller.

Ok, so I think it's random seed generators that give you consistent results, and system clock (or something) generators that are more genuinely random. Interestingly, XCOM has both. It defaults to a random seed, but has the option of being turned off.

Still, I don't think random seeds are plotted out before hand, as if the designers wrote down 50 numbers in a certain order. It just happens to come out the same with the same seed. Am I close here? From a play perspective, I don't notice the difference.

You tend to die quickly in roguelikes, forcing a restart. I'd say 20 mins to an hour, with the occasional "pay dirt" character who lives a lot longer. Still, their lifespan is relatively short, usually not "full game length" of 60+ hours.

I like hand-crafted levels, but they are too carefully designed around being "fair". With that, you feel like you're just going through the prescribed motions. Generated levels add some chaos, and circumvent the ho-hum lather, rinse, repeat cycle of crafted levels.

Randomly generated reply:

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Not sure if it is generally a plus point. First, the definition is quite fuzzy and almost all games have this feature at least to some extent. And on the other hand I would like to have a few more examples of where and how it can be a plus point and where it is a minus point before saying that on average it is positive.

Spore, Diablo, Skyrim were named as positive examples. But they are also exceptionally good games. The average game probably uses it much less or to much less positive effect.

Did that come from a Malkavian generator?