Comment by beloch

It's actually a little bit ironic that today's AI has capabilities that closely match what Bioware was looking for quite desperately a decade or so ago. For several of their games, they tried to get procedural dungeon/world generators working so they could have a hand-made main quest-line and generated environments for side-quest content. Their attempts at procedural generation typically didn't work very well, so several Bioware games feature dozens of hours of side-quests in monotonously repetitive environments.

It's an interesting conundrum for players. Some of us, when we play great game, just can't let go. We want to spend more time in that game's world even after we've exhausted the lovingly hand-crafted content. So, many developers throw us a bone and include side-content that is occasionally brilliant but frequently very low effort. Bioware did this in many of their games. You could easily tell when you were on the main story's track and when you were off in low-effort-land.