> It turns a fun 1-hour game into a much longer fun game.
First procgen game I ever played was Starflight 2. (Pre-Internet era, so I couldn't get hold of Starflight 1. SF 2 spoils you, hard, on the major spoiler in SF 1, so if you're playing them from GOG or other sources then you should definitely play 1 before 2).
My ten-year-old mind was boggled. Hundreds of star systems, each one with several planets (usually), and you could land on each one? And explore the whole planet (in a very limited top-down 2D view, because this was the 1980's), harvesting minerals, and the map was quite a bit larger than what would fit on one screen? And it all fit onto one 720K floppy disk?!??!?
Now, of course, I know how they did it. But there was an actual game there. There were half-a-dozen alien races you could interact with (talk or shoot, as required), and there was an actual story. With a twist at the end that 40-year-old me would see coming, but 10-year-old me was shocked and amazed by. (And the twist in SF 2 wasn't even as good as the one in SF 1). And you progressed that story by following the gameplay loop:
- Fly around looking for planets with valuable minerals
- Land, scoop up what you can carry, fly home to sell them
- Gradually increase your ship's capabilities
Then eventually you would be able to make your way to planets with plot on them, at which the loop changes to:
- Collect plot-important artifacts, fly home to get them researched
- Research tells you "go talk to these aliens".
- Do a fetch quest so they like you, then talk to them.
- They tell you where to go to kick off the next plot point.
After only a few runs through that loop, it's on to:
- Find out where the Big Bad's home base is
- Find out where the MacGuffin is that lets you access that location
- Take MacGuffin to right place, fight Big Bad, save the day.
Crucially, once you had gone to talk to those plot-important aliens, you probably had enough resources that you didn't
need to do much mining anymore. You might land when you spotted a target of opportunity — "Oh look, scanners say big pile of platinum just sitting there on a nearby planet, let's make a small detour" — but that was just to keep the bank account topped off. You could afford enough fuel to fly all the way across the map and back, so you could focus on the story.
And they timed it well: the core harvest-resources-and-upgrade-the-ship loop didn't have time to get boring before you were off to collect plot coupons. And there weren't too many plot coupons before it was time to find the MacGuffin, use it to beat the Big Bad, and save the day.
Star Control 2 did it really, really well, with better graphics since it was released a few years later. BTW, if you haven't played SC 2, search for "The Ur-Quan Masters" to download and play a totally free, legitimate, open-source version of the game, with full original assets since the copyright reverted back to the original creators who released it into the public domain for the UQM project to port to modern machines. I wish that had happened to all the old classics, but Star Control 2 is truly a good game. Definitely seek out The Ur-Quan Masters.
But before you do that, I would strongly recommend to play Starflight 1 and Starflight 2, to get a feel for the origins of the procgen-with-good-story genre that Star Control 2 did so very well.
P.S. Edited the "core gameplay loop" paragraph to better make it clear there were two or three loops, and you progressed forward through them, rarely having to go backwards.