Pretty sure OB didn't lack in quest.

The problem with the quests was that there weren't enough "filler" quests to justify your character's rapid advancement. Also, the lack of filler meant that the questlines were completely very quickly leaving you wondering what is left to do.

I think the "Diablo" essence of randomization, as someone wrote, actually adds to the re-playability of RPG's. It's fun and exciting to be able to discover something totally new by the luck of the die, and also helps to give every new character a different experience. I say among items, NPC's, treasure and monsters, randomization is key.

Animals and monsters should certainly be randomized, although that's already the case, so that's not a big deal to mention.

Randomized quests might be nice, although they're not going to be terribly complex affairs, but they might be some nice filler content.

Definitely want randomized NPCs. Anything that can give us city populations in excess of 50 is A-Okay in my book. Besides, it's actually more realistic to have some generic "commoner", "noble", "scholar", etc characters in the game. There's no realistic reason why our characters would know the names of every person in a city, nor does it make sense that every person in the world is ready to sit down and share their life story with a complete stranger.

I'd like the world to stay hand-made; and if items are randomly placed in the world, I can't see that not causing some weird placement issues at times (walking into a house, only to find that the game has randomly generated half a dozen watermelons on the occupant's bed, or something like that).

Randomized content can offer a good "supplement" to stretch the fixed amount of hand-crafted content a little further, but makes a terrible "replacement" for such artistic input. A few "random" quests thrown into a sequence could be used to boost 10-12 "designed" missions up to 15-20 or so total, and give a little more "replay" value by introducing a few "new" quests from those of your previous character, in places you haven't been before. Having over half the missions as "random content" could begin to look a little obvious and pointless after a while.

All of the previous games used some form of randomized tables for creature or enemy spawns and loot lists, along with varying amounts of hand-placed static content in the later games. Again, the combination of static and random content worked better than one or the other exclusively.

Answering the question in the topic heading, Randomization in moderation can be a solution, in excess it almost inevitably becomes a problem.

In my opinion, the more dynamic and chaotic, the better. That chaos can only be achieved through sheer randomization.

The problem with hand-crafted worlds is that they are - repetitive. Once you do a quest, it'll be the same forever. Whereas "dynamic" questing still offers an amount of variation which amounts to enough surprises in gameplay.

Plus, there's the possibility of margin of error. Something which does not happen in Oblivion or MW, where there are practically no schedules, and all the same tasks must be done repeatedly. Oblivion in particular is a grotesque mix of the effective hand-crafted approach of MW and the sheer randomization of Arena and Daggerfall.

I think both things can be effective set in balance inside a title. A world could be mostly procedurally generated, and that would be realistic - I mean, most of the time, the world is repetitive: you see the same architectures, the same styles, the same vegetation. You don't stumble upon a different cave every time - in sum, most things are fairly generic. Then the hand-craftedness goes: special landmarks, cities, dungeons and places could be painstakingly done to give areas their own uniqueness.

But I think quests above all should be random - this adds an unbelievable amount of freshness to the game.

Wouldn't mind random quests and maybe some creatures could be random encounters, but other than that I don't think randomization should be used in game. I do however think they should use randomization at first to create a huge map then save it and get level designers to edit it and seem a bit "human" in places. There's no harm in big save game files in fact i love big save game files, I hated how in oblivion they made it so only some chests would keep your belongings in them. Big Hard drives are pretty cheap now a days anyway so there's no reason Bethesda should be worrying about keeping the game a small size. Also doing in game randomization would be using processor power that could be being better put to use for amazing game mechanics to make the game feel much more alive.