I haven't really followed this game in the last year, or the drama surrounding it, but I looked into it recently, and I don't think it's for me. My two cents on the game are as follows.
The sentence that stood out to me from the Jim Sterling review was "The game’s biggest feature – that no one planet is the same – means very little when your interactions on each one are practically identical." That in itself articulates why this game isn't for me. The main reason that DF and Space Station 13 are two of my favourite games is the massive potential for emergent gameplay in both games. No round is ever the same in SS13, and few forts ever play the same. A wave of meteors or a megabeast can completely change the dynamic of the round/fort, and a good antagonist in SS13 can make for a game you'll never forget.
From what I see, there's none of that in this game. All I've heard from my few friends who have this game sounds the exact same. "I went to this planet with these weird creatures on it," and the limited amount I've played it with a friend seems to stay true to that. You travel between planets collecting resources and running out of inventory space. The problem is it all feels so pointless. Proc gen content doesn't matter if your interactions with it are repeated, and DF stands out to me as an example of a game that uses proc gen content to specifically craft stories and create exciting emergent gameplay. But Fallout 4 is a nice counterpoint to that, with the Radiant quests being randomly generated, but also the most tedious and annoying part of that game, failing to create any meaningful content or interactions. In the case of No Man's Sky, it seems that the procgen is just used as a landscape, an environment that you traverse through as you gather resources ad infinitum. If there's no variables in play to throw you for a loop, the game will inevitably get stale, and quick. Even story-based games can throw you for a loop with an interesting twist, creating new exciting scenarios for the player to delve into. However, the same experience with a different backdrop makes for a dull game. There's only so many times you can mine resources, only so many times you can kill an animal and then deal with the janky gunplay as you fend off the sentinals, and only so many times you can see the same permutations of animal/plant/planet before it all begins to grate, and I feel like that would come all too quickly in NMS. I've been playing SS13 since 09, and I still enjoy it. I still have crazy rounds in it that make great stories. But I can't see anything like that coming out of NMS. It seems like a game of pointless busywork in beautiful environments, and if I wanted that, I'd go back to my old job at the Conservation Authority. With my limited time, I want a game I can play in short bursts and have a ton of fun. Normally I'd like just chilling and exploring, but when there's nothing to sustain the exploration besides cosmetics and a vaguely defined endgoal that comes after hours of repeating the same mundane actions, why would I want to play this?
(That's an actual question btw, not rhetorical. Is there something I'm missing in NMS that can provide lasting enjoyment? I doubt I'll buy it when it's out for PC, but B12 has changed my mind on many games before, and I'd like to see discussion in this thread that isn't just tearing apart the game based on what it isn't, but instead what it does and how it does it, whether that may be good or bad.)