My plan is to have a world history played through with some events being triggered/handled by the development team on their own schedule while players can advance/alter the history of the main world by their actions. Thus it will play out differently depending on player action, but it won't be generated autonomously. Develop with a future in mind, not an ever present... present.

Working title, Reclamation.

(Of course, there are a few weirdo games like Minecraft that don't really have a story, but let's not drag them into this discussion).

Erhm...
Shall I spoil you then?

There is indeed a story, and an end of game credits roll if you do kill the dragon in "the Endworld"...


but upon interacting with other world entities a rising action builds, and depending upon how the player responds to said rising action more quests are generated and the plot is developed further.

Aside from the fact that the content is not generated, Skyrim comes pretty close to achieving this. A series of otherwise accidental events leads you into one or many of the main quest lines which are optional. Skyrim developers were however kind enough to provide a "main questline" as a fallback/tutorial.

The problem is, I can't think of any way to do this other than assigning predetermined quests after the player has reached a certain point within the game.

What worries me if not the procedural portion of your idea. To a certain extent, progress quest managed to do this fairly well, even though it was absurd.
The real challenge comes from taking into account previous quest to determine the following quests.Narrative plays a big part in getting events lined-up.

To put it simply, you need to emulate a tree of the different outcomes without knowing how to even begin or end any of the branches. I would recommend the use of advanced metrics. While a game like Ultima has nothing to do with this, the idea of virtues, and how you scale against each of them could be a start to determine where you're headed.

You could plant a few "non-generated quests" in the starting whereabouts of the game, and check against the player actions (much like the player must answer initial questions). This would determine what they are good at, and what they suck at, and you could either focus on their strengths as this would probably define their playstyle, or challenge the player by introducing his weaknesses (preferably, you'd do both). Your approach to define each quest should have parameters that would take into account certain threshold.

Example of the top of my head
Metrics:
- Courage (Would you fight or run, where a positive value is fight, negative is run)
- Piety/Sacrifice (Are you self-sacrificing, where positive is taking the blame or hit for someone else, and negative is taking care of self first)
Here's how they can play with one another or against:
- You encounter an enemy who is stronger than you (fight: courage+, run, courage-)
- You encounter a man that is up against a troll (fight: courage+, Piety+, run: courage-, piety-)
- A tribunal made of your pairs has found you guilty, do you fight them off? (fight: courage+, piety-, Run: courage-, piety+).
etc.

Now, assuming the player is good at courage, but sucks at piety, you'll try to put him in situations that challenge him from time to time by using the piety drawback against him or by bringing larger-than-real threats that he'll have to consider escaping. Also, because the player has clearly determined that he wants to fight, you'll put him more often than not in belligerent quests.
You can easily scale this by adding metrics, especially those that have common ground but that can also be turned against one another by the nature of the setting.

This wouldn't make a great story, but players are good at tying the knots.
The real downfall to such a system is that it would feel like a sandbox game, and ultimately, people resent that. When you figure out there's no "greater plan" and you're just toying with mechanics that are interacting in a complex but nearly predictable way, it tends to all fade.
I would recommend the inclusion of a final boss, and perhaps a final questline that has very little optional/custom content. When the time comes, whatever you metric is (say, "player_level==50", you can activate this questline and the player now has the option to complete the game. Alternatively, you could activate it at the very start, and let the player know what the endgame is, but that the journey is entirely up to them.

Which comes to show my last point: open up many paths. The big advantage of this system is that you are not confined to the intricate narrative of a regular game. Capitalize on this, open up more than one path. This will allow the player to express themselves, which in turn will refine your metrics, and will allow you to feedback even better quests.

Your initial issue is that you need information in order to tie the knots, and metrics help you achieve that. They even allow you to calibrate gameplay via your players' expressions.

I may be slightly off-topic here, but I've never liked the idea of being told a story in a game. It's nice in some cases, but generally I prefer to be the one making the story as I go along. After all, the player is supposed to be the hero, not just some bystander who just happen to play an important part. It's like being told what to do, sure it's a good way to direct the player through the experience, but hold his hand too much and he's likely just gonna quit the game.

Just look at how brutal Minecraft is to the player (I know, but these games do matter to the discussion because they're not as weird as you might think), in terms of leaving him/her to figure out what the game is all about and what they need to do. A similar paradigm can be found in Demons' Souls and Dark Souls too, and I don't see a lot of players complaining over those games to.


But to redeem my comment in terms of topicity:
A random/generated story can be really nice, I think, if it's general enough and doesn't tell too much. I thought the random quests in Daggerfall, for instance, where awesome - even though their syntax repeated themselves all the time with just a minor change to names and objectives.

The bottom line is this, IMO: Plot and story is important to a game, but telling a story isn't just about explicitly telling it through language. Just seeing a monster in a world, for instance, can tell a story onto itself - the demography in this world, biology, history, you name it. But because it's not explicit, it also provides a sense of mystery too - which I think is superior to any dialogue-based storytelling device.

In writing you are almost always told, "Show, don't tell." Which is exactly what you are saying to do. Don't tell the player what to do, let them do their own thing and have the story just happen around them as they go. If they miss out on some things, it was meant to be that way, and you can always funnel them towards a certain location by providing them the desire to go there. Don't tell them, show them why to go there.

I guess I go the other way on this. Oh well, an opinion's an opinion.

I don't really think games are a great way to tell a story in the first place, precisely because video games are very self-centered as a medium, and a really good story can have a lot of mundane things. I've never felt that I was being "dragged" through a good story, only through a stupid, pointless one. A good story, crafted by a human being, also has a point, and the best ones always have to be digested more than once, and enjoyed almost every time. A good story also usually has multiple roles, and even the main character's role can be pretty "mundane" compared to what you'd expect in a video game. (For example, Michael Corleone only kills 2 people himself in the Godfather, and the most hot-headed Corleone who gets the most action, Sonny, also gets murdered half-way into the story in a very big way. So neither character would be very fun to play. It's also funny how this generally self-centered medium usually requires a love of violence to be interesting.)

I've also been told that an interactive story puts more importance on me and puts me in the story and it's all me me me. (A recent ad for Halo 4 that I saw in a movie theater (!) was similarly egregious about this.) So? Why would I want that? I'm not all that interesting, and it's not like I'm going to save a fictional world anyway, or even enjoy wrecking it.

Yes, data can be generated. That's no surprise. But in the history of all randomly generated data, it's always been pretty easy to tell that it was generated, because the data repeats after a while whatever you do. You still need to hire artists and writers to fill in the blanks and give the algorithms something to work with, and at some point, you might say to yourself, "Boy, I wish there was an easier way to do all of this..."