This is a false dichotomy, plus you're implying that anyone who disagrees must bear a grudge, which is not at all the case. Games that promise the things NMS promises are games for me. NMS just doesn't deliver.
Years of free updates have turned a barren tech demo into a fairly middling game, without solving the key problem: there are ten squillion planets, but no sense of discovery. The same three races, who have already populated every planet before you get there, with the same space station, and the same few outpost buildings. No cities. No history. Nothing to explore that you haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. It's a dead galaxy.
Then there's the lack of attention to gameplay systems. The last time I tried it, I quickly figured out that I could turn element X into 10 element Ys, into 3 element Xes. And I could do this with just about any element in the game. And thank God for that, because everything is gated behind collecting far too many of those elements.
NMS is not a good game, and the same gaming community that was hyperbolic about its failure nine years ago is now hyperbolic about its comeback, because 'content creators' need narratives to peddle, and a redemption ark makes for a great narrative. But there is no narrative here. 'Bad game remains fairly bad' isn't going to make any YouTube videos go viral.
Finally, I don't agree with the 9 year point at all. I honestly think that if the studio spent those 9 years making a new game, applying the lessons learnt from NMS, they may have actually made something worth playing. Nine years is a serious chunk of a human lifespan, far too long to spend on a sunk cost fallacy.
I think your confusing my post. You can feel however you want about the game itself, it isn't for everyone. Your suggestion that they work on something else for 9 years is also strange. Why would they listen to someone who doesn't like the games they make instead of listening to the literal thousands of players who play the game each day? [1] It makes a lot more sense for a game company to focus on the lovers and not the haters, IMO.
You don't like the game, and may not like the style of games that Hello Games chooses to make. But 9 years after launch, and before this new update, they were still pulling 5-10k players per day just on Steam, so probably more overall if PlayStation, etc. are included. That seems like evidence enough for me that a decent audience believes it is something worth playing.
My actual comment, however, is addressing people who still hate on the developers. You can dislike the game while still respecting the effort the developers have put into serving their fans.
You're back to the false dichotomy. In effect, you're saying one can either hate the genre or love NMS. But those aren't the only possible positions. One can love the genre while thinking NMS is a bad example of it, and this is where most of the criticisms of NMS actually come from.
Imagine someone watches a football match, and then they say that it was a 'bad game'. They're not saying the very game of football is bad. They're not a football 'hater'. They're saying this particular match was bad. There's an obvious difference.
It isn't required for a game to have literally 0 players or 0 fans in order for it to qualify a bad game - that's a silly standard (and another false dichotomy).
NMS is not a bad game because I'm a 'hater' who doesn't like the genre, NMS is a bad game because it is - for the reasons I allude to in my earlier post - a bad game. This is not a reflection on the worth of the devs, it's just an unfortunate, but factual, state of affairs. I think if the same devs make another game, with the lessons learnt from NMS, it will likely be a better game.
I also think ten years of effort spent improving a game from 'terrible' to 'bad' is not a good use of ten years. Ten years is a very long time. You can count how many of those you will ever see on your fingers.
Years of free updates have turned a barren tech demo into a fairly middling game, without solving the key problem: there are ten squillion planets, but no sense of discovery. The same three races, who have already populated every planet before you get there, with the same space station, and the same few outpost buildings. No cities. No history. Nothing to explore that you haven't seen in the first 10 minutes. It's a dead galaxy.
Then there's the lack of attention to gameplay systems. The last time I tried it, I quickly figured out that I could turn element X into 10 element Ys, into 3 element Xes. And I could do this with just about any element in the game. And thank God for that, because everything is gated behind collecting far too many of those elements.
NMS is not a good game, and the same gaming community that was hyperbolic about its failure nine years ago is now hyperbolic about its comeback, because 'content creators' need narratives to peddle, and a redemption ark makes for a great narrative. But there is no narrative here. 'Bad game remains fairly bad' isn't going to make any YouTube videos go viral.
Finally, I don't agree with the 9 year point at all. I honestly think that if the studio spent those 9 years making a new game, applying the lessons learnt from NMS, they may have actually made something worth playing. Nine years is a serious chunk of a human lifespan, far too long to spend on a sunk cost fallacy.