[majormajor]

A while back "deformable terrain" and walls you could destroy and such was a big buzzword in games. AFAICT, though, it's rarely been used in truly open-ended ways, vs specific "there are things behind some of these walls, or buried under this mound" type of stuff. Generally there are still certain types of environment objects that let you do certain things, and many more that let you do nothing.

Generative AI could be an interesting approach to the issue of solving the "what happens if you destroy [any particular element]" aspect.

For a lot of games you'd probably still want to have specific destinations set in the map; maybe now it's just much more open-ended as far as how you get there (like some of the ascend-through-matter stuff in Tears of the Kingdom, but more open-ended in a "just start trying to dig anywhere" way and you use gen AI to figure out exactly how much dirt/other material will get piled up for digging in a specific place?).

Or for games with more of an emphasis on random drops, or random maps, you could leverage some of the randomness more directly. Could be really cool for a roguelike.

[talldayo]

You can still scale up the Power Game/Noita mindset to larger games, with pretty good results. Teardown is a very fun current-gen title that combines physics and voxels to create a sort of fully physical world to interact with: https://youtu.be/SDfWDB1hGWc

There's still a ways to go, but I don't really think AI will be required if game engine pipelines extend PBR to destruction physics. The biggest bottleneck is frankly the performance hit it would entail, and the dynamic lighting that is inherently required.