Not mutually exclusive, procedural generation simply means you let an algorithm make stuff for you. Take GTFO for example, the devs procedurally generate rooms and everything that connects them, then hand-pick the best ones, and tweak whatever else they want.
You now have a curated, hand-crafted (they made the assets) experience, that was also procedurally generated. Not to mention there’s more to procedural generation than just levels.
I will remark that you can have both. It’s not very common, and I can’t remember an example right now, but you can have a main/official seed for the world/levels, providing a curated experience, while also including a randomizer mode that lets you replay the game with a randomized layout.
Not mutually exclusive, procedural generation simply means you let an algorithm make stuff for you. Take GTFO for example, the devs procedurally generate rooms and everything that connects them, then hand-pick the best ones, and tweak whatever else they want.
You now have a curated, hand-crafted (they made the assets) experience, that was also procedurally generated. Not to mention there’s more to procedural generation than just levels.
I would still call that handcrafted, the devs just use procgen tooling that the player never sees.
I’d say most players think of procgen as the stuff that’s actually generating content on the fly for the player
I will remark that you can have both. It’s not very common, and I can’t remember an example right now, but you can have a main/official seed for the world/levels, providing a curated experience, while also including a randomizer mode that lets you replay the game with a randomized layout.