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Now, maybe kinggath will get bored and accidentally code an autogenerating room-by-room dungeon maker one day, but the overworld is going to stay premade.
But it was not randomly generated a mod creator or group of them working together created all of that by hand using modding tools like the creation kit.
The question in the op is about a random world generator.
The closest I could possibly see is someone making a lot of interior cells piling all the doors at the same location disabled then having it randomly change which door is enabled to give a semblance of a randomly generated interior.
It might even work decently for internal cells (i.e. dungeons).
The tricky bit is when doing exterior cells. Unless whatever procedural generator you make is extremely sophisticated, you're going to need to generate LODs, previs, and precombines separately and manually, all of which takes time - and manual intervention removes one of the main benefits of automated content.
With the way the engine works, I don't think it is currently possible to do any sort of "live" or on-the-fly procedural generation for exterior cells because of that. Even if it worked, performance would be in the single digit framerates. Even interior can see very poor performance without previs/precombine, but it's at least manageable. Exterior, not a chance.
There are plenty of games with procedural levels - most roguelite "classic" shooters these days (Ziggurat, Strafe, dozens more) do this, and generally it works ok, but they focus on limited graphical fidelity and performance/simplicity is a primary concern. Hell, the original Diablo was a good example of procedural level design. It can work, but it works best in endless grind action games rather than RPGs.
No Mans Sky and the endless-but-not-that-interesting worlds are good modern example of the tech. But again, the limits of what you can really do are pretty glaring, and I can't see that being a good Fallout experience.
Yeah, those dungeons you physically couldn't get out of were a prime example of why it doesn't always work so good.
XnGine also didn't need the same level of optimization to hit a decent framerate.
www.reddit.com/r/ElderScrolls/comments/4os0fj/clearing_misconceptions_on_netimmerse_gamebryo/
and this -
https://www.gamesradar.com/au/elder-scrolls-6-engine/
Yes, I'm familiar with that. The front end - i.e. the renderer - is one of the prime sticking points to procedural content. Especially with the amount of placeable objects used in modern Creation games, a huge amount of manual labor goes into optimization. That's something you simply can't do with procedural content unless you simplify it greatly. And once you remove all the clutter, the piles of refuse, and all the other little touches that go into something like FO4, you're left with some really bland environments.
I'll cover the arcane stuff, then the rest should make sense. (note to pedants - simplified for clarity - yes, I know it doesn't cover the differences between rendering/drawing/calculative pologyns/culling correctly, deal with it).
Precombines -
All those various piles of junk with tires and toilets and whatnot sticking out are created in the Creation Kit (Bethesda's modding/development tools) by just piling all those various objects together.
If left that way, when playing the game they would all be treated as separate objects, and have to be fully drawn by the game, including all the parts that are obscured by other parts. Think about it like this - if Bob Ross had to also draw all the individual rocks and boulders that make up the inside of a mountain, it would take him more than 20 minutes to paint a picture.
Precombines are done by combining all those loose objects into a single item. The hidden parts inside are simplified or outright removed, so the game only has to deal with and show what is physically visible to the player.
This process is also done in the Creation Kit (hereinafter "CK"), per cell (area), and with a good amount of manual intervention.
Computer generated content likely wouldn't be able to do this perfectly, and definitely not "at run time" (as in live, while the game is being played) in real time. This would result in either much less visually interesting worlds if you leave these combined objects out, or worse performance if you leave them as a pile of separate objects.
Previs -
The game also uses a few different methods to avoid drawing things that aren't visible to the player. For instance, if you were to delete the giant projector screen (an example, I actually don't know if that screen has previs calculated) at the Starlight Drive In and then look across the Commonwealth, you'd basically see a mostly blank hole in the world (I think you'd still see distance LODs, more on those later) because the game has pre-calculated visibility for that area - i.e. it doesn't draw anything that would normally not be visible in the base game by checking what should be blocked by large objects.
This step is very essential to performance in many areas, and takes a good while to pre-process using the CK. So again, if you're asking a computer to make open-world exterior cells, with the way this engine works, I don't think this important performance step could be done in real-time.
LODs -
Short for "level of detail". If you've ever noticed that distant buildings, trees, etc., lack detail or look like cheap cardboard cutouts, it's because the game is displaying the distance LOD to save performance. This is a separate file from the actual real objects themselves that has to be pre-generated for basically the entire area that will be visible.
Other, newer games often don't have to worry too much about these because in many cases they do have very efficient ways to do that kind of thing live, or they simply don't allow modding and those things simply never have to be rebuilt at all.
But in essence, if you have a computer randomly generate an outside world as you are exploring, sure, I bet it could generate that cell-by-cell as you wander.
But it's not going to be able to do precombines, previs, and LODs in real time as it does that - at least in the way that FO4's engine handles those things.
If you omit those features by removing the need, you're going to get a very dull and boring world - a blank void in the distance, and a lack of environmental clutter and lived-in quality.
If you simply don't do those - well, if you think framerate is bad in downtown Boston, try it with no LODs, absolutely no previs and no precombines. You'll see sub-1FPS on some occasions.
This will give the illusion of having a random dungeon while ensuring all the parts are snapped together correctly so we do not fall outside the map and have the proper navmesh so npcs could actually function in the interior.
Damn, I forget about navmeshing - add another problem for automatically generated content :D
That's not at all to say that procedural content is impossible, but generally engines are built from scratch - or at least substantially customized - to allow it.
The radiant quest system is a form of procedural content generation, but that exposes the limits of that type of system.