sure, who wouldn't? But who the hell makes those? Crobber can't even manage one in seven incredibly odd years. Bethesda will probably pull off 5 with Starfield and still be mocked for it's Bethesda-isms and NPCs.
What game hasn't been shallow as a puddle? We can't pull off remotely good AI in any game for any kind of life. We can do fetch quests, spreadsheets, and multiplayer jerkfests.
1) Who wouldn't? Well, ostensibly the diehards who think Elite: Dangerous' "size and scale" is a paramount achievement, and any deviation from this or lack of respect for it is tantamount to high treason. There are those who believe that infinite randomly-generated background filler is an ample substitute for carefully-constructed, hand-built environments. Me? I just think it's lazy schlock. Randomly generated background is well and good, but cannot stand on its own. Developers have been leaning on procedural generation like a crutch these last five years. If the poop-brown "color correction" era was the Dark Age of gaming, then the era of procedural generation is the "Dark...er Age."
Back to Evochron to illustrate my point. I'm not going to say that Evochron's world is ridiculously over-detailed (though it probably would be if the developer had the extra help to get that done), but someone on this thread used its lack of randomly-generated infinity as a blemish against the game, in Elite: Dangerous' favor. My answer to that is as stated above: infinite repetitions of the same, slightly differently-colored content does not equate substance. As background filler, it's fine. But there's no substance to Elite: Dangerous' vast galaxy, and there's not even that much that's truly "special" about it, either. There's nothing to
do with it, and therefore it's far from an inherent advantage. If I want vast, detailed exploration, I'll boot up Space Engine, whose procedural generation eats Elite's for lunch all day every day anyway. Even if Elite had SE's level of fidelity, there's still no
game in randomized heightmaps, no matter how pretty they are.
Star Citizen is failing because of gross incompetence, not because their primary scope or vision is wrong. They picked the wrong engine, simply due to it being able to make the prettiest tech demos (I wish I were kidding). Their leadership is incompetent, their dev teams disorganized and unfocused. They're not failing because hand-crafted is the wrong way to go.
Privateer is an example of a hand-crafted game with a contained, "small" worldspace with flavor and character. Primitive today, but an example that illustrates my point. You feel like a pilot in that world. In this game, you feel like an AI controlling an armed cargo delivery drone, and the world is droll, flavorless, and completely unbelievable.
2) There are plenty of games that offer depth and entertainment in nearly equal measure. Unfortunately, most of those games came from an earlier time, where developers were focused on details and fun factor rather than glossy graphics and "scratching the impulse itch."
We are currently at the point we can have extraordinarily detailed, practically hand-crafted worlds of, say, 300 km^2.
What is your argument here? Random generation is the literal antithesis of "hand-crafted."
More, more, more is the problem with procedural generation. Why do you need
more, more, more if you can do infinitely more with less by orders of magnitude? Realistically speaking, you couldn't fully explore a planet the size and scale of
Earth in less than years of intense effort. If we could get planets with even a percentage of the depth and detail of Earth, you'd have more - and vastly
richer - content than a trillion randomly slapped together spheres whose only real differences are heightmaps and coloration.
Put simply, I'd rather have, say, 50 contained systems in a bubble stacked with depth, detail, and things to do, than 50,000,000,000 randomized backdrops where the gameplay experience is exactly the same as anywhere else so long as you have a space station and an accretion disk somewhere.
