[kibwen]

But why would you want that, though? If you make everything procedural and unique, then players have absolutely no shared experiences to bond over. Think of a game like Elden Ring, and imagine how diminished it would be if you knew that nothing you encountered was ever encountered by anyone else, and would never be encountered by anyone else. Instead of a shared cultural experience, now you have an isolated one. That would be a strictly worse game.

[duckmysick]

There are games with procedural events and worlds: Dwarf Fortress, RimWorld, Nethack. The players bond over by sharing their personal stories in a familiar setting. There are common elements like fundamental game mechanics and scripted events so it's not isolated. The communities of those games look engaged and I wouldn't call them strictly worse.

[yyyppp]

Not everything. Imagine a character that has a certain agenda/motivations/personality, but is able to 'naturally' react to the player's actions in a non-scripted way. NPCs is future AAA games are going to be insane.

[k_eshav]

I'd like to wait for companies to strike a balance between isolation & culture. They have so many tools at their disposal, the setting, the mechnanics, the environment, the story, the quests. I would wait for such an where I still feel like I'm discovering things even after multiple play throughs. Maybe sometimes, I prefer having a unique experience that I know nobody else will for that specific game & everyone else will too. We could still share about our unique experiences. It's not really that bad. In fact, its fun & beautiful.

[ianbicking]

Just pregenerate a large corpus of characters that is shared with everyone. Especially if you want human intervention in the creation (which is the right choice for now). Then you have potentially hundreds of characters. And you can invest in things like secrets... who wants to add lots of secrets to their NPCs now, knowing that maybe no one would ever discover them? But if they are cheap, then sure. Now any player has a real opportunity to discover something truly new in the shared world.

[kerpotgh]

It could be procedurally generated the first time someone stumbles across it and then gets added to the corpus of the world that everyone shares.