Comment by stcredzero

I'm willing to bet a small amount that the leader of the "No Man's Sky" project either "lost the battle" with his subordinates or was unable to fully get his vision across to his team. To meaningfully create an interesting procedurally generated world, you need to approach certain things one step removed. For example: Game Balance. If you're not going just bolt a simple hand-crafted game on top of your procedurally generated world, you might want factors that affect game balance to be significantly affected by the procedural generation, which means you can't directly game balance the game anymore. Instead, you have to indirectly balance the game.