My favorite part about games is the ability to explore. I love the feeling of discovery. For reasons I have difficulty explaining, this feeling of discovery is dependent upon my assumption of intent in everything I see. If I believe everything I see is arbitrary, then I get no satisfaction out of discovery.
It's a fine line, because also important for the feeling of discovery is the illusion of being in a real place. So I want a place that is designed, but not constricting. Skyrim is great about this. When I discover something in Skyrim, I know that a human being decided to put it there - which means that if I think this thing is connected to some other thing in the world, then, yes, it probably is. Skyrim has little touches like this, where even minor caves and huts have a story behind them.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that I'm discovering someone else's story, but I have agency the entire time. If everything I see is randomly generated, then there's no story to discover.
I know it's brought up again and again, because it really is the perfect counter example to this, but have you tried Dwarf Fortress? If you get past the ASCII art there's a tremendous opportunity for discovering really rich stories that just kind of bubble up out of the chaos of DF's various simulations going to work.
I think part of the reason it has been so successful (in its own way) is that people share these stories and retell them to other players, which results in something closer to collaboration between player, game engine, and game creator. It boils down to taste, but I find it much more interesting and awesome.
It's definitely different from the kind of purposeful designed stories that are hidden in Skyrim, but I think it's a promising place for game devs to explore, especially if a large team of writers and designers isn't in their budget.
Dwarf Fortress really lends itself to creating narratives. From the DF dev log:
I visited a tomb today as the adventurer Cadem Renownletter to see how well the game retains the position of skeletons and treasures as I move them around. During the process, a mummy boxed me in the ribs, broke my finger, bit my hand and shook it around until the hand came off. The mummy then animated the hand and they both attacked me. The hand scored the killing scratch, earning the name "Drippedsieged, Cadem Renownletter's left hand" and earning the tomb an additional defender against further testing. Its middle finger is still broken.
But as you said, that's a very different kind of game. Part of the reason I have not tried it is that I would have to play it on a computer. When I play games, I want to sit on my couch, looking at my tv.
Skyrim (6 instance designers) is good to contrast with Oblivion (1 instance designer) because they're by the same developer in the same game timeline--Oblivion instances have a lot more pointless content, like a bridge that leads to a blank wall with no rewards. I think you can almost certainly procedurally generate "soulful" content, but we're not there yet.
It's a fine line, because also important for the feeling of discovery is the illusion of being in a real place. So I want a place that is designed, but not constricting. Skyrim is great about this. When I discover something in Skyrim, I know that a human being decided to put it there - which means that if I think this thing is connected to some other thing in the world, then, yes, it probably is. Skyrim has little touches like this, where even minor caves and huts have a story behind them.
Perhaps another way of looking at it is that I'm discovering someone else's story, but I have agency the entire time. If everything I see is randomly generated, then there's no story to discover.