Clearly, No Man's Sky faced a lot of criticism upon release, but they continued to work on it, and the planet exploration it offers is far superior to anything Starfield provides. In No Man's Sky, you can fully explore planets, even terraform them a bit to establish your bases. There's a tremendous variety and some truly alien landscapes to discover. Plus, there are legitimate reasons to build outposts.
The planet exploration is entirely unique within video games and if you have the
it might be enough for you, but I think there are many space game enthusiasts who aren't happy unless they get the Star Citizen as promised by Chris Roberts. It has to have the most advanced space dogfights seen in a video game as of yet, it has to have a fully simulated economy, it has to be an MMO, it has to have unique Ubisoft styled point of interests on thousands of planets. You can't just find a neat planet in NMS, land on it, interact with the wildlife, find some unmarked place that's neat and then take off. That isn't content. Content is when you speak to a character and get a checkbox and then go to a bandit camp in space, clear it out and get a purple item. It also has to be a great first person shooter (impossible with modern game design and fidelity, extra impossible with procgen).
They're retarded because they will shit on all the games that do one part of this great. No Man's Sky has the best procedurally generated content on the market, seamless space to planet landings, no load times, etc. Outer Wilds has the best handcrafted content and science fiction plot since games in the 90's and people are shitting on it for not being Elite or something, idk, it got a pretty bad response in the Codex thread last time I checked.
Then they get first person Diablo in space, now with extra loading screens and none of the features that made the TES series noteworthy and they gobble it up. They can even shit out a turd of political agitation on top of the goyslop stew and they'll still slurp it up. Or they'll sign over their entire bank account to Christ Roberts who's selling jpegs instead of jerry rigging netimmerse to make a woke "space" game.
The major fuckup of Sean Murray was making a game that was at all appealing to this crowd.