Games

Starfield got a lot of flak for using procedural generation which was technically impressive but...it's a game that doesn't really benefit a lot from it. Like, the player doesn't need to do much to adapt their gameplay to the procedurally-generated environments. It mostly just provides aesthetic variety.

I wonder...like, roguelikes have tactics that rely on the environment. If someone were to go and mod Starfield such that the tactics in the game relied on the environment a lot more, that might be interesting from the game's shooter side. Like, say someone got the ability to morph into something that could slide through pipes, or there were enemies that could walk up magnetic surfaces, or water had a meaningful role (it did in Fallout, with the Aqua Boy perk). Maybe have vehicles or enemies that can only travel on certain types of terrain. Get the ability to lock doors. Right now, the procedural environments are just outdoors, but if it included indoors, maybe stuff like the ability to leverage with electrical systems or lighting. As it stands, the only things that really affect tactics is the availability of cover and the ability to climb on something so that some melee-only enemies cannot reach someone. The environments are basically just eye candy, don't really create different gameplay problems for the player.

Or from the base-building aspect. If, for a given outpost, the resources became a lot-more significant, so that a base really had to be designed around the limitations imposed by the environment. Like, I don't know. Temperature of a given piece of equipment, taking shade into account. Being able to make use of hydropower off waterfalls. Some machines having outputs that create more issues that the player has to deal with, kinda Oxygen Not Included. Designing a defensible base being more-important.

As it stands, the layout of a given base is virtually irrelevant aside from choosing a base location that has a circle that contains a given amount of easy-to-build-on flat ground and as many different types of resource as possible. Like, Bethesda built this whole fancy landscape-generation engine, can create a huge variety of realistic-looking environments, but didn't really do much with it in terms of gameplay.