Totally! Imagine an AI that seeds a world with a core story line, then lets a procedural engine sprinkle quests, factions, and random events around it. You give it a few anchor points—maybe a central mystery or a set of conflicting powers—and let it weave small, interconnected threads through the map. The trick is to let the AI generate a “world grammar”: rules for how a town’s lore can tie into a distant volcano’s myth, or how a band of rebels can affect a merchant’s caravan. Then you add a human touch to polish the big beats so the chaos doesn’t feel random. That’s how you keep the open‑world feeling vast but still narratively anchored.

How about a world where the moon itself cracked into shards, each shard falling somewhere on the map and giving a region a strange power—think floating crystal islands, fire‑forged deserts, or water‑swallowed forests. The core story is about retrieving the shards to heal the moon, but each shard‑region has its own mini‑quest chain—like a pirate gang that stole a sea‑shard, a cult that worships a fire‑shard, a hidden academy guarding an earth‑shard. The loop is that as players fix one shard, the moon’s glow shifts, subtly changing the environment in other areas (light levels, NPC behavior, new NPCs appear), which in turn gives new clues or new enemies. The chaos feeds back because every fix ripples across the world, keeping the narrative alive while the engine keeps generating side arcs that feed back into the main moon‑healing plot.

You’re right, the shards need to be more like sparks than fireworks. Maybe each shard just tweaks a single system—like a magic storm that only affects weather, or a shadow that makes night longer. Then the AI can drop modular quest hooks that play off that tweak, like a trader who only shows up in the new weather or a creature that’s scared of the darkness. That keeps the core story tight while the world still feels alive and responsive.