I think the criticisms listed are valid, however I still support option #2, if not a combination of the tw.

Any hardcore gamer is going to meta-think. If you want to somehow flag "non-story-related locations" then why bother including them? Is there any real reason to go there? You might find nothing. So there's a whole grouping of content that is admitted to be extraneous. That's feeding meta-thinking, which is spoiling the immersion.

I can see your issue though, that the player might have to poke thru several non-engaging installations to find one with a story arc or crazy mission in it. By the same token, a totally randomly-generated game is no small task. So I think, if the outlying non-story arc locations had a chance of giving you some random crazy mission, and there were also scripted missions at the big-time installations, that'd make it ok.

I presume any game this size is going to have some sort of dynamic dialogue/text system:

"Hello %playername%, %mindless banter%, need a job?" (y/n) y "Well, head to %missionlocation%, find the %macguffin% while avoiding %faction%, and I will pay you %rewardamount%. %Banter indicating mission difficulty%, %joke that makes it seem as if we are old associates%".

"%Space Station Designation%, %prepostion-flavortext%, %moreflavortext%, %stats%."

Thus, if a place exists to take up space, just don't put in the "%mindlessbanter%" or "%joke that makes it seem as if we are old associates%", or anything other than the designation and stats of the space station. By leaving out the flavor text/dialogue, you can make places just seem bland. Theoretically, the player looking for a rollicking good time looks straight past the joint and the hardcore player recognizes it for what it is.

This directs players in a subtle fashion towards the places that really are interesting, thus increasing the time they spend interacting with the things you micromanaged into the world. This increases the ROI of these areas, and can act as the "Hand of God" pushing the player along any path the designer wants.

Note that if you want a completely emergent experience, this is precisely the sort of thing you have to stamp out. Unless you write a lot of variations of flavor dialogue/text, or spurn them altogether, you will present an oddly not-quite-random world.

A world on this scale cannot be completely random or designed ground-up, so there must be a happy medium- where along the spectrum should it be?

Quote:

Original post by Paradoxish This also strikes me as an effective way of dealing with the problem of minimal content areas. If all of your story events/characters are built around loose criteria instead of concrete locations, you don't have to worry about the player wandering around with nothing to do.

I really like this idea. If the player is looking for a secret base that he knows is around a big area in space, you don't have to chose a planet and abandon the player until he finds it! It would be much better if you decided that it's in the 2nd or 3rd world (meeting some criteria: "fit for having a secret base") he visits.
It's arguable that this will defeat the purpose of exploring, but exploration is always a gamble, usually with a low percentage of success versus time spent, and the player won't be happy if he loses. It's no fun visiting samish backwater worlds looking for something.
Of course that this example can be extended to finding characters, items, etc; suddenly the world seems a lot more interesting, and not a sea of uninteresting scenery sprinkled with a few interesting islands here and there (from the point of view of someone who is on a mission, of course :) )


I also had another idea while reading the OP: it would be nice to have an indicator of whether something is worth exploring or not, but this would seem rather artificial. What about if you had a spot in the GUI dedicated to showing a glowing light or something similar, informing the player that his character has a "hunch"? Maybe even with varying degrees of intensity if you like.
Because it doesn't tell whether the "thing" is good or bad, only that there's "something" that can be explored, this would also result in the player feeling a kind of a rush whenever the thing blipped intensively :) (if you know anything about psychology ;)

[EDIT]
How is the "hunch" indicator any better than anything else that has been suggested? Well, a light or something seems a lot less intrusive, and explaining it as a hunch makes a lot more sense than saying that the game has prepared something for you in that spot.