You prefer game levels to be

I can agree.

so did i crap

I think most of us are guilty of this.

I'm sure Hand-made would still be the victor regardless.

IMO hand made may be better for quality where Procedurally generated would be better for replayability

Totally agree. I still prefer hand-made game levels because of the many much things a mapper can do with it. Also, it depends on the type of game you want to create obviously:
*cough* Minecraft with hand made levels *cough* (Whaaat?? :O) :P

technically we all hand make our own minecraft levels

we had a hand, but we had absolutely no control.

Creating a Minecraft world using a seed value is about as liberating carving a wooden statue with a wood chipper.

a perfect analogy. although if you factor in creative mode technically you could fashion your own map completely handmade.

That's not the issue. Even if it was the "winner", the survey would still say that x amount of people want generated levels, even though that's not true.

Edit: For some reason, my comment is a reply to Jasper, it was intended to be a reply to Lucifer.

It happens...

You and the other 29% bro

I VOTED FOR PROCEDURALLY GENERATED

Well, I WANTED to vote for it.

I think this really depends on the game. Hand crafted levels are generally more detailed and beautiful. Procedural generated levels are less varied on the art side but are great for dungeon crawlers due to randomisation. So it really depends. But due to my experiences with Stalker Misery, I am leaning more to the hand made side.

If someone made hand-made tiles that could form to each other when randomized on a world scale...

The best game world ever.

Some games make buildings then generate them around randomly in a game, so it can be kind of a mix between the two. Procedurally generated is the best for open world games cause it allows for a much larger playing field and almost endless amounts to explore (Though you might get bored after a while)

Yes, Skyrim did something like that, but even Skyrim started getting repetitive after a while of secondary missions

Warframe did something like that

Yeah, exactly my thoughts as well.

However, they can end up being predictable.

You are my hero mate, stalker all the way

Thanks, and don't forget to shoot Duty in their fat ******* face. Smug bastards.

No one is talking about AI. procedural generation is used in games like Minecraft. It's algorithms that generate random terrain, not an AI

It has nothing to do with AI, it's made with heavy coding.

Actually, in its own way, it is AI. You're giving the computer a specific and carefully made algorithm to follow, which is pretty much its behavior. It's artificial(manmade) intelligence(application of skills/knowledge). AI =/= NPC.

This exactly!

The only problem is that nowadays many artists over-artsy their levels believing it "tells a story" where in the end it's just an overcluttered place which is uninteresting and looks highly fabricated you can't relate to to begin with. Well made levels don't feel "fabricated" (aka hand made). There's though little levels falling into that category today unfortunately.

Otherwise as you said, it depends on the game. Best is a mix of the two to have the hand-made level but randomize certain stuff in it to contain some surprises. That said... if the game "is" actually worth it enough to play it a second time (another something many games nowadays fail at).

Tiles. The success lies in tiles. Tiles for everything, like clutter, NPCs, geological formations, everything.

Take for example SimCity (not the new one, God forbid). To build cities, you place blocks and tiles. However, you won't put a skyscraper in a rural area, so the game would automatically cancel that operation out. But in a farm can go a barn, a homestead, a garage, or pond. All of these are designed to have multiple "models" (maybe like 3 or something), and are hand-made. Thus, the artist gets to put creativity into tiles. By restricting the amount of tiles in a space, like a barn and a pond out of the original 4, 24 available options can be created. Thus, during a playthough, it could be one of 24 possible locations. Now if someone did this at a world level, a randomly generated world could work well with artistic intent.

For example, the world is 30 "cells" by 30 "cells". In each cell can go 4 tiles. So that's 120 tiles by 120 tiles, creating a total of 14400 tiles that are randomly generated. However, blocks of cells can make up a geological formation, like a mountain, where "mountain tiles" can be placed. Another would be a desert, a swamp, and so on. Each Cell would have quests relating to similar cells, or cells nearby. Seeds like the ones used in minecraft could create presets to play on, if you want to experience the same things as other people.

Scale the player however you want, but you have a fuckton of environment.

TL;DR: Basically make a game where tiles are handmade, and then randomly generated by the world.

Edit: Holy ****, that's a long post.

This method has my endorsement.

This is basically putting the effort into a handmade game, then using procedural generation to effectively stretch out that effort into more world space.

You don't get 'infinite', but you can do a lot more and not have to skimp on style, artful design or atmosphere, a few of the key things a game needs to really draw you in.

The art side of this comes in creating a rule set for what renders in each tile and however many subtiles there are. For instance, you can't have tree's popping up above the treeline or snow on a tropical beach, to name a few extreme instances.

Once you set up rules, you can set what assets fit into these rules and assign the chances of them spawning in a given tile. This can be done to get a base game world started for even static open world games, such as skyrim. Start a randomly generate world, then go through and basically impose artistic design on the results, kinda like how some artists do a random squiggle on the paper to spark an idea.

tl;dr, basically agree with you, wished to elaborate and add my own take on it.

"Nosferatu: The Wrath of Malachi" can be a good example IMHO. Hand-made levels with randomized enemies, items, weapons and ammo spawns every time you load or replay the game:
"Oh, there's a werewolf behind that door on the left that killed me! Ok I'll load my last save and I try to kill him!" *Opens the door* *There's a ghost insted of a werewolf, and it's on the right instead of on the left* - "WTF??? D:".

I agree with Metalspy 100%.

Proteus tells a pretty good story about someone who is abandoned on an island and is procedurally generated

All I had to read was Empire Earth and +1 haha

This...

Preach, brother.

Even though I prefer hand-made over procedurally generated.

But procedurally generated games allow more replay value.

I must actually say that I really enjoyed Minecraft, up to but not including the beta-patch 1.8 which implemented all the RPG elements. I prefered it to be very simple and let the players stand for all the creativity.

To me, pre-1.8 Beta felt like glorified Lego; not for everyone.

Ignore this, since I am a lazy *** bastard I didn't read the whole poll description, so I predicted we are talking about GAMES, not LEVELS OF GAMES.