Jason Booth has some good things to say about “Procedural Content”, as well as how it continues to be misused by the industry. One snippet that’s great:

Often people talk about the procedurally generated dungeons of Diablo as content; but in reality, they aren’t actually content from the perspective of the design. You don’t actually explore dungeons in Diablo – what you’re really exploring is the treasure system. And while the treasure system does employ some procedural techniques, the real rewards of that system were entirely hand crafted.

In fact, the true success of Diablo’s procedural systems is that they managed to acceptably scale out a small amount of custom created content over a large amount of procedural noise. Thus, the ratio of hours played to custom content created is very high.

Put another way: content only feels NEW content if it actually feels different than all of the other content you’ve been playing. Whenever I see a game that promises 2800 square miles of land space, though, I know what I’m going to get: 1 square mile of expertly crafted game content that everyone will love, and 2799 square miles of random green heightfields with no sense of purpose or place whatsoever.
Original comments thread is here.