Procedural Generation VS handcrafted Scenarios

Like our community manager said in this thread and Ben Judd in the BCB, it's not used for level design.

Procedural Generation tools are a paintbrush or a mouse cursor. If you liked the artist's taste and choices before the tool was available you'll likely feel the same now. Likewise, if you had problems with the artist's work before that's not going to change because of a change in toolsets.

I'd like to applauded Pure Miriam's detailed analyst of backgrounds. Iga games are all about the small details adding up to a beautiful whole.

Heavily against procedural.
Handcraft everything, if you have to delay again do it.
Dont tarnish the game to save time.

Thank you =)

This is the important part. A lot of people have this conception that procedural generation (or random generation) is an all-or-nothing approach to creating games. What many people don't realize (and to an extent understandably so - some of the uses are surprising, if not outright arcane) is all of the things that happen in game development that are part of the concept of, or are actually a product of, procedural generation. A great example is that anything with a shader effect is technically a procedurally-generated texture. That is, anything that's shiny, or cel-shaded, or has normal mapping or bump mapping to give the appearance of physical texture that interacts with light sources. All of those are using a set of outside parameters (i.e. light color, intensity and direction, a glossiness value, other nearby geometry, etc.) to deliver the resultant image we see applied to the geometry to make it visible. This kind of procedural generation is used in practically every game that gets released nowadays - and none of it clashes at all with the concept of hand-crafted assets and levels.

On top of this, it's actually quite common to use procedural generation to come up with a "template" for certain kinds of level, area or map designs, which are then later hand-crafted - but it's noteworthy that this type of procedural generation only sees its end result in the final game, and the procedures for creating it are inside the developers' tools, rather than the game itself. Metroid Prime is a good example of where something like this happened - the physical path followed by the player was crafted using a combination of Excel (the deceptively-powerful spreadsheet program) and procedural generation to determine things like room types and controlling how many types of side-rooms, dead ends and paths-where-a-new-power-is-needed the player will encounter before they come to the next part of the intended path through the game. It actually wouldn't surprise me at all if this sort of usage was employed for creating basic room arrangements for level designers to create things in for Bloodstained.

It's a far cry from the Spore/No Man's Sky sort of thing - and I completely understand how notions of those kinds of games could be, to say the least, worrisome. However, the important part is that people realize what procedural generation can be used for, and how it's inevitable to see it in most kinds of game development. We saw in the comparison video that it's being used to create graphical variations, and I think that's a wonderful usage of it, and a great example of the kinds of things it could be used to create here - especially when you consider the amount of time it would take for artists to create the same level of detail by hand for everything (and as I'm sure we all know, time isn't cheap).