A good game doesn’t have to be that deep. As a matter of fact, I don’t have time to invest in a game (or show) that deep. Give me endless 42 minute episodes of easy to follow formulaic slop that I can watch as I cook dinner for the fam after getting off work.
NMS has found their niche of easy fun mini games in a vast somewhat predictable universe. They aren’t trying to capture players who are looking for the kind of deep stories and mechanics like you and that’s okay.
Another good example: My uncle is a father of 5 with a job who occasionally has time to jump onto NMS and run a quick mission. Over the last decade he’s racked up 1k+ hours of distraction. 10/10.
KiloGex@lemmy.world 16 minutes ago
There’s a disconnect there though. People have dedicated their time to this, and without at least a decent amount of depth it wouldn’t be able up keep their attention that long. If you’re not able to find the depth, or it’s just not your style of game, that’s totally fine. But clearly many people have.
Look at corvette building, as an example. If you just take it as surface level, you can bust out a ship and come up with a pretty okay design in an hour or 2. So that a few times and you’ve pretty much done everything you can. However, if you start messing around with glitch building and really diving into the excitement of recreating your favorite ships from sci-fi, or just seeing how far you can push things, you can spend dozens upon dozens of hours just building ships.
This same thing goes for base building, farm building, settlement development. And this is all on top of the story, expeditions, daily quests, etc. So yeah, it’s a sandbox game without one specific thing driving it, but that’s what a LOT of people really like about the game (including myself).