No Man's Sky Cosmos

It has a Steam Review Score of 84%. What are you talking about?

Visiting planets is just a very small part of the overall game. That was more the first NMS.

Wildlife for example you can train as pets, mounts or milk/harvest.

Once you get access to the Space anomaly the game opens up more and if you are social you will find outposts, pet arenas, race tracks and dog fighting/pvp zones. Ship building and freighters.

The latest update appears to allow groups to control areas of space.

All games eventually get boring but there is plenty in now.

NMS's art-style is low-detail, but highly aesthetic. It can look amazing at times, but only when you're looking at grand cinematic vistas. It rarely looks good in closeups. This parallels the game's systems in many ways.

NMS is a technically impressive game. You can build a custom-spaceship, either with the in-game editor or by importing one from outside the game, dogfight in it, land on alien worlds, etc. and that's just one of the loops. However, the spaceships you build aren't simulated physical objects. They don't even feel as substantial as styrofoam fins tacked onto a model train. There's no real challenge to flying them. They all just float through space like nothing.

The game has dozens of ways to progress, finding resources and earning cash. They're all so easy to break that you have to consciously resist doing so. Craft a few donuts and you're rich. You don't have to worry about finding buyers for your obscenely high-end pastries. The market board will buy anything at the listed price. Game breaking bugs that trivialize finding resources have been left in the game forever because the developers were afraid that some people might be upset if they actually had to grind for resources. Why what is, ostensibly, a single player game with multiplayer support tacked on even has grind mechanics is another valid question.

I log into NMS occasionally, but my big problem with it is that it's gameplay devolves into a sequence of grinds that are all optional. The things that should offer a challenge (e.g. ship combat) don't. Every play session becomes a case of, "Where do I find this stupid mineral I need to build an upgrade that will make what's already too easy even easier?".

The technology on display in NMS is absolutely impressive, but the gameplay isn't. I'd love to see a fork of this game where they focus on more challenging gameplay with less focus on grinding and sandbox elements. I see the expeditions as an attempt at this, but they don't go far enough.

I think maybe you're discounting that people have agency and can decide that a game they are playing actively doesn't tick their boxes. I reinstalled it last week and put in about two hours before uninstalling again. Mile wide and inch deep is exactly the way to describe it.

FWIW, I was there from the beginning, and stopped fairly quickly (maybe 20 or so hours in).

I hopped back in a couple years later after a few updates, and agree that the quantity of content was pretty big. But the quality was not -- it still felt "empty", and never held my interest long.

Last year, the same thing happened. I hopped back on after a few big updates, probably spent another 10 or so hours on it (I think I started over), and felt like I had explored all there was.

I feel like all the criticisms it gets are valid. I agree that the effort of maintaining a game after 10 years is incredibly admirable, especially since ever update has been free. That's amazing. And the devs should be acknowledged for that.

But the game itself still feels largely empty. The progression feels mostly repetitive without feeling like you're really moving forward in a meaningful way. And, as others have said, the proc gen still feels "vanilla".

I probably won't hop back in after this update. I've learned, by now, that while many praise the new content, it'll probably just feel like more of the same to me.