i played the game at launch for about 15 hours or so and thought it was kind of a shitty, boring game. the generated flora and fauna and planet terrain were by far the most interesting bits, encased in a massively tedious framework. resource gathering was utterly hateful. flying around was janky and felt awful. lots of weird performance stutters (including relatively frequent crashes, iirc). miserly economy and progression, requiring you to perform vast amounts of incredibly tedious tasks.
unfortunately, the best bits were themselves way undercooked when weighed against what they’d need to be to actually sustain a game like this. every planet was just showing minor variations on things i’d seen over and over again, and the promise of something beautiful or interesting on the next planet became completely untenable to believe.
i did have some fun with it, because i do like exploring and messing around, and i liked that feeling of being somewhere no one else had been, but ultimately i thought it was mostly bad and a good portion of the time i played it, i was really not enjoying myself - just hoping for something interesting around the next corner that never came
idk i guess i really can’t picture having nostalgia for release NMS. i find it hard to imagine that the current NMS could possibly be worse than the OG shit, even if it has lost some of that weird empty vibe. the actual play was just miserable!