Procedural generation, and why it's better than hand crafted assets.

[Cosmos]

I do wonder why more effort hasn't been put into PG for (at least side-) quests in games - e.g. to generate backstory, overall rational for a quest, plot points, branches if and where necessary. Sure things like Skyrim and FO4 have the Radiant AI system for generating 'one-shot' quests that amount to 'go there, do <that> to character X, come back for reward', but what about mission branching - OK if you spawn two new missions for every win/lose condition from an initial point, things get out of hand quickly, but has anyone played with things like L-systems for story generation, from a system grammar based on linking key story tropes and elements?

In answer to my own question - possibly because it's really hard to do and get consistent, coherent results. (Bet there are a few billion howlers of planets in amongst NMS's quintillions - in the same way that Elite's Stellar Forge throws up the occasional oddity (e.g. how many times is the Roche Limit seemingly ignored without visible consequence?)

For missions I suspect it would be extremely challenging to get right and there would be an ever increasing amount of complexity. We'd likely see some very odd results.

Where I do think PG could be used is in the various signal sources and combat zones. It could be a good way of adding variation but its gonna be hard for FD to manage QA on that one.

Its gonna be interesting to see what NMS is like and if those guys have cracked it