I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I'm relatively late to no man sky, the original scandal burnt the bridge and I didn't bother trying to fix it until about 5 years ago when it came up as an option for a space game to play with my brother. He ended up a bigger fanboy space engineer and NMS stayed the only unplayed game in my library until last year.
I genuinely feel like it's a great sandbox. That is to say, the fun comes more from the people you play with and your imagination than the sand itself. I genuinely feel that it would be my favorite game if I still had 2 or 3 friends to play it with. RPing as the haywired droid pilot of the Vagabond Moon as it smuggles goods to and from free space just doesn't hit without a captain and crew.
See, I like my own private world. I can just build it and run around and discover stuff. That’s why I loved fallout 4 so much. No man’s sky is great for that because it’s infinitely generative. But that’s kind of all there is in that game. It’s just a big open world. There’s no real “game” to that game beyond the first 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.
Unlike you, however, the one thing I hate the most in any game is other people. I wanna be alone and do my own thing. I never ever encountered another game player who has done anything than just fuck up my gameplay experience. maybe I’ve just had bad luck, I don’t know. But co-op playing has never been anything other than an extremely negative experience for me. other people are assholes.
So, when left on my own in no man’s sky, it’s fine in small doses, but it’s easy to get bored. Because there are no Ongoing gameplay objectives. It really wouldn’t be difficult to build into the game, constant ongoing objectives and achievements that a single person could achieve on their own. Repetitive missions, etc. Star Trek online managers to do it. And it doesn’t have to be combat (although, combat in no man’s sky is actually very well done and quite fun). No man sky has ongoing rewards for discovery and exploration stuff, but it isn’t really structured very well and the rewards are really rather small.
No man’s sky feels like a really fancy version of Second Life, but in space, where you can have a bunch of your own planets and build bases and whatever. And have entire fleets of ships. But to what ultimate end? It doesn’t seem like there’s any purpose to any of it. That’s what’s missing from the game.
I think the key distinction is that you have to know and like the people outside the game. I used to have about 8 other people that regularly played Minecraft together and we did some impressively large scale things for a hand full of people with jobs and lives. It was honestly fun to just chat while we're collectively digging a massive tunnel to build a functional rail network. Crack open a cold one with the gang but the cold one is actually a 4 month civil engineering project requiring us to terraform a continent.