Considering this article is four years old, a lot of this didn't pan out. Spore failed to come remotely close to its hype, Borderlands' gun system turned out to be unpopular (too many guns were completely useless). Diablo 3 uses procedural dungeon generation, just as 1 and 2 did, but with plenty of predesigned set pieces scattered throughout.
The problem still seems to be that the set of things that you can generate on the fly and all result in something fun is fairly small. The other interesting thing is that we're seeing the opposite trend in terms of the growth of user-created content as a central game component (thanks Minecraft).
Procedural generation will certainly be used to keep games replayable (D3's dungeon and loot generation, L4D's director AI, etc), but to claim that it will replace designers in any way is silly.
Huh? Borderlands gun system was unpopular? Its as good as the loot system in any other Hack&Slay: some things don't really combine or do not fit your style, but technically, it worked really well. I see the procedural gun system as one of the biggest achievements of the game, especially because it yielded guns that were shooter-worthy and totally nuts at the same time.
That said, I think the problem is not only level layout, but designing interesting architecture. D3s levels could be played on white squares with properties, but a custom-built staircase makes the game interesting.
I thought people generally liked the Borderlands item system. They're keeping it for the sequel that's coming out later this year. There were some useless items, but that tends to be the case even when designers make the weapons if the game is the sort that boasts a huge number of them. Crap finds go hand-in-hand with big item catalogs, because the point of that kind of system is to create a sort of lottery.
The effect you're noticing is that it is a lot easier to get variety into random content when you don't have to provide graphics for it. It's also easier to make a world feel real (w.r.t. the baseline the game is establishing via its interface).
Considering this article is four years old, a lot of this didn't pan out. Spore failed to come remotely close to its hype, Borderlands' gun system turned out to be unpopular (too many guns were completely useless). Diablo 3 uses procedural dungeon generation, just as 1 and 2 did, but with plenty of predesigned set pieces scattered throughout.
The problem still seems to be that the set of things that you can generate on the fly and all result in something fun is fairly small. The other interesting thing is that we're seeing the opposite trend in terms of the growth of user-created content as a central game component (thanks Minecraft).
Procedural generation will certainly be used to keep games replayable (D3's dungeon and loot generation, L4D's director AI, etc), but to claim that it will replace designers in any way is silly.