[servalan]

I'll take you all back to 1986. Starflight was released. 270 star systems and 800+ planets. In Starflight, you have the freedom to visit any random planet, discover a collection of artifacts, select just one artifact to take, depart from the planet, spend an additional 20 hours exploring various other planets, engaging in battles, saving your progress, and more. Afterward, when you return to the same planet, you will encounter everything exactly as you left it, with the cluster of artifacts still intact, except for the one you previously took. You can't even do this in Starfield - perhaps from a glitch or something else, scenes can reset, loot can respawn.

[the_biot]

Or go back to 1984, when the original Elite had 2000+ planets -- running on a 48K machine!

[StrictDabbler]

Make a little stop off in 1996, when Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall was procedurally generated and the map took 70 hours to cross. Buggy, empty-seeming and many issues with persistence.

Procedural generation has always been Bethesda's goal. They pre-cooked the generation for a while instead of doing it real-time in pursuit of quality. They're just returning to their roots.