zerebrush: So for me NMS is quite the contrary of being large, you are constantly visiting one generated "room", entered via a nicely masked loading screen.
Actually, speaking gaming and their engines, that's what it
all boils down to, since
forever. Especially with space games. X-Wing Alliance for example has a top limit of four "rooms" as you call them, and they're all the very same 4 rooms over and over again - it is for the content displayed in them that has to do its job of convincing you're somewhere else now, and most games manage to do just that by storytelling, interesting locations and carefully crafted objectives.
It's only when you add in exclusively randomly generated maps / worlds that the game inevitably begins to feel empty and soulless. The same is true for Minecraft, to me - what's the point to keep going and going and going, without setting up a base of operations somewhere and making the land yours? There is LOTS of land all around you, more than you could ever see, but this, here? This is
your land, and you keep adding and building and improving on it, and when you're done with that, you build
down into it.
Here though, you only have your same-y mechanics and your ship as a "fixed point" - your home without being much of a home to customize or walk around in. So, that part of the equation just doesn't exist in NMS.
You see...
NMS's fault is not that it's all randomly generated, like Minecraft before it. It is that you don't do anything but just keep moving, just keep moving, just keep moving. Sure, eventually you encounter something interesting and fascinating to look at, but, the problem is, it's focusing on you keeping moving. When it should be all about stopping, and admiring the soon sadly few, interesting and outstanding things you still happen to run into.
Take away the further depth added by figuring out and mastering how to control your ship and do stuff and instead hold the players hands all the way through flight, limiting what they can do, and you have a game appealing to mass audiences for casual play sessions, but ultimately disappointing people who expected there to be more to it. Mastering controls, navigation and even basic flight maneuvers might be too much for those people, so better have the ship on autopilot all the time. Invisible walls without any actual walls.
tldr; There's nothing to do other than fuel your ship, keep moving, farm to upgrade your ship every once in a while, and sometimes, stop and take in your surroundings - if you've been lucky enough to hit the jackpot of an actual interesting, fascinating to look at location after seeing so much of the game that you begin to see
through it.
... I would still play it.
