Oh definitely. Minecraft does this in a simple but effective way. Though the interestingness of the landscape lasts until you've seen a few instances of each ty

Oh definitely. Minecraft does this in a simple but effective way. Though the interestingness of the landscape lasts until you've seen a few instances of each type, and then you have a model of the system in your mind, because it's just a few simple functions composed together. There is a lot of fun stuff to do so the terrain is only just the backdrop to that fun. Instead of {noise(x,y)>0.5 = desert} let's simulate eons of weather, geological events, floods, and then feed that back into the lore of the game world. Dwarf Fortress is one of the few games I'm aware of that attempts this level of world generation. Unfortunately it's quite impenetrable as a game, due to its complexity.