I keep trying NMS hoping to find a good game in there somewhere. I'm over 100 hours now, mostly because I'm a dork who likes collecting spaceships.

But all the mechanics -- the crafting and movement and languages and even the terrain generation -- are frankly pretty terrible. It's like Hello Games intentionally hired people who don't know how to design these things.

Why do all the space stations look identical inside? Why do I have to learn one single alien word at a time, including "a" and "the"? Why are there no rivers or waterfalls or glaciers or swamp basins? And why can't I customize my ship appearance when the game itself can clearly generate one from a dozen random parts?