I may have been terse due to time, but thought i was giving constructive criticism, and not just criticism. I'll try to be more polite next time
Nah, I just genuinely don't know what they mean by procedurally generated.
Ahhh. In CoD or Battlefield every tree is given a position in space (x/y/z), every box is considered and placed for line of sight, or game flow, should this be a solid brick wall or a glass window that can be shot thru?
Tightly defined games have the experience controlled or at least channeled - to stop spawn camping, to stimulate areas of action or inaction.
GTA less so, but still every tree is placed, they consider racing lines and obstacles: all placed by hand, by a human.
Procedurally generated content (broadly) is where the developers create code that describes how objects are placed and created (so you dont end up with houses below ground, and trees grow on grass not concrete). Then you run the code, and see what is built.
Some games do this with varying results, but from the dev's descriptions No Man's Sky has rules not only for object placement, so trees clump together on hills in a more organic fashion, but so "alien" landscapes can be generated.
One dev interview described a planet's chemical balance, which not only tints the colour of leaves and grass, but what rocks form say. Which may in turn effects how hills form (jagged vs smooth) or environmental types.
None of which is placed by a human, just from code. Which is why the team can be small, yet thousands of worlds could in theory be unique.
The potential issues are from extreme random things like a world entirely of diamonds, which breaks the economy, or an atmosphere which might destroy your ship instantly. Or a procedural CoD example might be a map where you can't leave the spawn created underground, or boxes hovering in the sky.
Wait and see how good their tools are, but the potential variety of Elite where every planet is unique and able to be landed on...