[aaanotherhnfolk]

I'm hard on story-driven games as well, I don't think games are very good at telling narratives because the narrator's desire to control what happens next is at odds with the player's freedom to choose what happens next.

The ideal game is somewhere in the middle where the designer focuses on mechanics which combine to produce more than their sum, and then anchor it in handcrafted content meant to show the best angle of the mechanical emergence.

One way to split the hair would be to say the mechanics are procedural (I would rather reach for the programming metaphor of composition, however) while the environments are hand crafted.

Nintendo is the king of this, but I also mentioned multiplayer games because they intentionally focus the designer on the mechanics and the levels while leaving the challenge generation to the players (and a whole conversation about how best to matchmake them.)

[setr]

The key point I had meant to make is that procgen allows wide exploration of the simulation space -- which ofc is only interesting if the simulation is itself interesting. There's nothing wrong with that, but it only works with a sufficiently enabled sim -- Dwarf Fortress is the target here.

In a more shallow simulation, procgen falls on its face, and mostly wastes time as it fails to note any interesting aspects of the sim (or repeats itself, or only points it out once every so often). Hardcoded levels wins out here: its more concise.

That is, as simulation complexity increases, the amount of procgen can be increased. The scaling between megaman (weak sim, all hardcoded) to roguelikes (decent sim, mixture of hardcoded/procgen) to DF (sim porn, procgen porn).

Of course, you can also have a complex sim with hardcoded levels, but this is unsatisfying as it leaves a lot on the table -- you don't play a grand strategy for the campaign mode.

Nintendo games are intentionally fairly weak sims (few general behaviors, usually explored throughout the full game), and thus hardcoded levels works well -- there's little of the simspace remaining to explore when you finish a title -- so procgen would just be a noisy, verbose explanation by comparison