(Before I begin, I kinda am thinking of making a 'War Stories' and general discussion thread to reminisce about City of Heroes. Any former players who'd be interested in participating? =D Sometimes nice to talk about The Good Ol' Days.)

I've kind of started thinking about the pros and cons of procedurally generated content, vs. hand crafting everything from the ground up, and inevitably I always come back to comparing two superhero MMOs I've played; City of Heroes, and DC Universe Online. I played CoH when I was much younger, and played DCUO a fair while after, before it had free to play options. Ironically, I started playing DCUO because I had no PC, (played it on PS3) and wanted to fill the CoH shaped hole in my heart. =P Surprisingly to me, (big DC and Marvel nerd,) I found I much prefered CoH, and I think a lot of it boiled down to the way CoH used procedural content, though there were some other aspects. (Keep in mind, I played both CoH and DCUO before they peaked in content, in DCUO's case without any expansions, so feel free to point out if game additions have improved things.)

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For some background, City of Heroes' missions were, for the most part, restricted to two types; the first were the 'kill x number of y' grinds that take place in the larger hub. The other type was private missions, which were done in procedurally generated Instanced areas; that procedural generation actually meant there were hundreds, if not thousands, of missions, usually very lightly story-wrapped with some before-mission text, a bit of written dialogue in-mission, and some after-mission text. Of course, the procedural generation led to plenty of repetition in terms of surrounding- there were perhaps a dozen or two 'skins' ranging from caves to underground bases to laboratories, office complexes, etc, with most of the procedural generation altering layouts and enemy placements. Maybe not super satisfying to someone who likes more exposition, but to someone happy to 'fill in the blanks' in their own head, which I definitely was, it went fine. 'I'm going to this same-y underground base to prevent the neo-Nazi supersoldiers from tampering with time travel this time? Okie dokie! =D Imma kick dem Nazis IN DA FACE!'

The sheer number of missions, and the time to hit the level cap of 50, also led to this nice sense of progression... you started off as this newbie hero who largely went around fighting street thugs, dealing with drug shipments, etc, etc, all kinds of basic stuff. As time went on, and you got stronger, you worked your way up to more and more unusual and extreme threats, in different zones of the overworld; dealing with criminal sorcerers hiding in Perez Park, trying desperately to navigate the Hollows alive without the benefit of superpowered movement, escalating to awesome things like visiting alternate dimensions, different planes of existence, fighting giant robots, taking on the game's equivilent of 'Canon' villains, just REALLY cool stuff.

It took days, weeks, maybe even months of hard work to hit the level cap, (and, one could argue a bit cynically, subscription fees,) with punishing deaths that halved your XP intake up to a certain point on the XP bar, but it was legitimately FUN, something that was helped by having an active, and really quite friendly player base. Forming teams, tackling missions together, desperately booking it OUT of the mission when things go south, trying to organize a counter-attack in the wake of a wipeout. Speaking as a guy who, normally, isn't big on the whole 'MMO Social Gaming' thing, this was a community, and an atmosphere I felt really comfortable mingling in.

Even though you were technically repeating the same actions, ("Find Bad Guys, Hit Bad Guys Til They Fall Down,) those actions were engaging enough, and challenging enough, (Eight player missions got chaotic as hell,) to keep you forging onwards, to the next adventure, and the next threat. When you hit level cap, now a powerful, extremely competent hero capable of clearing a dozen foes singlehandedly, you felt like you'd earned badassery, rather than having it given to you.

Don't even get me STARTED on the giant monster events.

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DCUO also had the same two types of missions; outer world 'kill x number of y,' and instanced missions. The difference is that the instanced locations used for internal missions were, as far as I could tell, not procedurally generated; they were designed from the ground up, which meant they all looked very distinctive, not much evidence of copy-paste... but there were not many missions as a result, certainly not CoH's sheer mass of them. Hit level cap in three days or so, at which point I apparently had nothing to do but grind for gear on the same 'epic' levels over and over and over and over and ooooover. The kicker is, despite the handcrafted content, DCUO ended up feeling MORE repetitive, because you'd literally be repeating entire missions, only with the baddies ten times as powerful, just to try and get epic gear tokens.

I didn't feel, despite apparently reaching the peak of my non-equipment derived power, like I'd earned badassery. I could barely keep track of the progression, it went by so quickly, and I was kind of left with a feeling of 'What? ...that's it? We ALREADY went full-on 'You Have To Save Superman!!' That was... quick... o.o '

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TL;DR What about you folks? Would you prefer a game that uses, say, procedurally generated maps and enemy placements, but as a result had a great breadth of content, (assuming of course the gameplay is engaging enough to keep you entertained,) or a title filled with handcrafted levels, all meticulously placed, but hit the story and development ceiling in a very short amount of time because all dat style came at the expense of substance?

(Before anyone asks, haven't played Destiny, but I've heard the main story hits its limit a bit earlier than folks anticipated, and that's what got me thinking about this again. xP I have no judgement about Destiny's quality, as I have not played it.)

Haven't played CoH, but I definitely felt the same about DCUO. Despite basically being the same thing over and over again, the varying stories and set pieces made it a good ride, since the objective of progression was so prevalent that It was ok....
Until I hit the level 30...then it all fell apart.

I've played neither game, unfortunately. Part of me wants to answer that handcrafted is better, because it is better, but I also know that feeling of "what's next" from playing MMOs where you run the same content over and over. You get to that point where you don't really want to do anything.

I've also played games with procedural generation of content, though, that I didn't like at all. Dungeons where you're looking at the same content, just rearranged, bothers me for some reason. It messes with my brain's attempt to organize it. Daggerfall, especially, used to give me a headache, especially since the parts would often fit together in ways that made no actual sense. There was always this disappointment of going into a random ruin and seeing that it wasn't a set piece.

The key to procedural generation, I think, is to have a LOT of variety with the pieces and a lot of rules in place about how they fit together. If done intelligently, I think it has a ton of potential.

Looking back on things, however, I think my favorite 'dungeon running' was this instance I used to farm in WoW. I ran it a ton of times but it was always fun because it was challenging as hell. It was a 5-person instance for players around the 60 to 65 level but I ran it solo at level 70. I couldn't kill the bosses or large packs, so it was really dangerous sneaking around and taking out patrols and strays, but damn if it wasn't the best stealth game I've ever played. Because of that, I think running the same instance over and be fun, as long as it remains a challenge.