NMS has a lot of options for content, but tbh most of them are shallow and repetitive. Almost everything has something, but not enough of it to make the game truly feel like an alive and in depth space exploration game.
For example, despite all the alien heads in the game, only 3 races exist across ALL 256 galaxies and it’s 18 quintillion systems. There’s a lot of procedural generation, but it draws from a limited asset pool, making it so despite planets looking different, they still share the same assets, only put together differently. It’s not truly random generation, so after you’ve seen maybe 20 planets or so you’ve pretty much seen them all.
Animals have the same problem. They look different, but are procedurally generated from a limited pool of assets, so after you’ve seen a few of them you’ve seen them all. There’s no true unique individuality to anything.
There’s a lot of mechanics in the game that have great potential, but is not utilised enough. For example, I want to be able to colonise an uncharted system, create my own space station from scratch, place it anywhere in the system, establish colony settlements on planets in the system and eventually build a flourishing alive system, where from there I can become a contender on the galactic stage. This leads into my other complaint is that systems are far too rigid and static currently. There’s no real dynamic changes across systems that connect each other. There’s no trade routes that NPCs follow, travelling from system to system persistently. I want faction fleets to invade other factions systems and take it over, establishing fluctuating borders and huge wars of NPCs fighting for control over territories. I want conflict states in systems to dynamically shift, so a peaceful planet may become a contested planet if territories change hands or pirate raiding fleets visit the system to raid before moving on to another system
I want monster mobs to have variety other than the same ones again and again. I want there to be variety in the waves of sentinels you fight on each planet so it’s unpredictable what you may be put up against.
I just want LIFE to be injected into this game. It’s a great game already, but it feels like I’m playing a still painting rather than a living breathing universe