I like a lot of the same aspects of games as you, especially exploration and finding cool places of interest, and I bounced off of NMS after about 60 hours for the same reasons people are listing in the replies. Puddle deep, no reason to really explore and repeat activities unless you want to do them just for fun. Found a nice fighter early on, never once had a practical reason to change and no way to upgrade the current one other than “more slots” for upgrades or inventory. I had my endgame ship in just a handful of hours, so the only reason to engage in the shipbuilding parts of the game was if I wanted to for looks or fun. There’s maybe 10-20 hours of story content. The rest is getting resources and making number go up, and every problem or resource shortage can be permanently optimized out of existence in an hour or two max
I like a lot of the same aspects of games as you, especially exploration and finding cool places of interest, and I bounced off of NMS after about 60 hours for the same reasons people are listing in the replies. Puddle deep, no reason to really explore and repeat activities unless you want to do them just for fun. Found a nice fighter early on, never once had a practical reason to change and no way to upgrade the current one other than “more slots” for upgrades or inventory. I had my endgame ship in just a handful of hours, so the only reason to engage in the shipbuilding parts of the game was if I wanted to for looks or fun. There’s maybe 10-20 hours of story content. The rest is getting resources and making number go up, and every problem or resource shortage can be permanently optimized out of existence in an hour or two max