Comment by ryandrake
13 hours ago
I think Elite Dangerous had this same issue, at least the years after it was released when I played it. You have this whole to-scale galaxy to explore, but the vast majority of them contain no story, no life, no space stations, no other players, and are just similar rocks and noble gas bags over and over. Once you've seen about 100 systems, you've seen them all. Which is likely what our real galaxy is like, too.
The game is 2 million light years wide, but a meter deep.
I always find it interesting to read takes like this. I get it, I also bounced multiple times off Elite Dangerous due to boredom.
But in the end it was always intended to be Euro Truck Simulator in Space.
The main problem was that (just like ETS2 interestingly) there was no real satisfying end-game money sink.
For me the colonialisation update fixed that. But I also find interesting that it seems to be very personal. For me it is motivating that eventually you will have one or multiple systems that you made "your own" (I loved playing X2 and X3 back in the day for the same reason). But lots of people played Elite for years and just hauling cargo and honking systems for the heck of it, and just watching the credit balance go up was motivating enough seemingly?