Procedural universes seemed to see a real resurgence from around 2014, with e.g. Elite Dangerous, No Man's Sky, and a quite a few others that have popped up since.
I love a beautiful procedural world, but I think things will get more interesting when games appear with procedural plot structures that are cohesive and reactive.
Then multiplayer versions will appear that weave all player actions into the plot, and those games will suck people in and never let go.
Artificial storytelling has some promising directions for games and there may be some reasons to think that this can have benefit value aligned AI research.
we argue that the traditional goal of AI in games—to win the game—is not the only, nor the most interesting goal. An alternative goal for game AI is to make the human player’s play experience “better.”
-- Beyond Adversarial: The Case for Game AI as Storytelling
Also Storytelling may be the secret to creating ethical artificial intelligence but alas storytelling is hard.
"In one sense, because of the game’s procedural design, the entire universe exists at the moment of its creation. In another sense, because the game only renders a player’s immediate surroundings, nothing exists unless there is a human there to witness it."
"Through the use of procedural generation, No Man’s Sky ensures that each planet will be a surprise, even to the programmers. Every creature, AI-guided alien spacecraft, or landscape is a pseudo-random product of the computer program itself. The universe is essentially as unknown to the people who made it as it is to the people who play in it—and ultimately, it is destined to remain that way."
More at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/02/artificial-universe-no-mans-sky/463308/