Procedural or manual design in games

Often with games like diablo series or upcoming games like no mans sky you will see something called procedural generation for levels. And what that means is using algorithms the computer can generate the content without someone having to design them.

Where it can work really well is for things such as forests where you can program how forests form and how leaves and branches form and then the system can generate a realistic forest. Same could apply for space sims for star systems and even planets.

Often games would use it for levels. Diablo series is one of the bigger examples with areas having different layouts.

Now for the level design people would say it encourages replayability which to a certain extent is true. My problem with that though is you miss things that if was manually designed would have such as memorable level layouts or landmark places and often you would see a lot of the same features which are recycled.

Upcoming no mans sky is supposed to use procedural which i can understand due to the scale but i really hope it would not get repetitive.

I would say use a combination of both use the procedural but also put some design into levels  features to break up the reusing of assets.