> Oblivion, one of the first high-profile games to use procedural terrain/landscape generation
I might be misremembering but wasn't the Oblivion proc-gen entirely in the development process, not "live" in the game, which means...
> "In the best case, a skilled artist uses automation to fill in mechanical rote work"
...is what Bethesda did, no?
Yes, but I beg to differ on the "skilled" part. I find the result very jarring somehow; the scale of the world didn't seem right. (Probably because it was too realistic; part of the art of game terrain design is reconciling the inherently unrealistic scales.)
WoW had this but you never really thought about it - even the massive capital cities were a few blocks at most.
The problem with procedural generation is it's hard to make it as action-packed and desirable as WoW zones, and even those quickly become fly-over territory.