If you racked-up 10, 20, 100+ hours of play before you decided NMS wasn't for you (in it's current state) then you're just being unfair and dishonest.

It took me ~2 hours in game (several crashes resetting me to old ass saves, futzing around with settings to try to get it to run well on a beefy 6700K/1080 system) to get the game working the first time, so I returned it. After the patches came out to fix some of the major issues (crashing, stuttering, resolution problems, etc.) I gave it another whirl since I was very interested in it - even with the lack of multiplayer and a hint that the endgame was dumb. It took me several hours to get out of the "tutorial" of making your first warp to another system, things seemed neat but I was noticing a lot of repetition (dialogue, trading, terrain, even the animals on each planet were very similar).

It was around the time I made it to the second system, expecting something different. I arrived in a new system with a different alien race and...it was almost exactly like the other system. Had a few extreme conditions planets, mostly rocky planets, one "nice" planet, and a similar space station. All the interactions with the new aliens were the same as the old aliens. The animals still looked mostly the same. I checked the subreddit for pics from other users, and they had a lot of terrain / animals like I had seen. I realized then that the "procedural generation" likely had a limited asset set, and that the meshes for terrain objects and animations/parts for animals were pretty limited. That, along with the entirely shallow dialogue and trading systems means there's not much to do in this game than fly around hoping you find a neat planet. It's screenshot hunting game.

But it was too late at that point to refund; should it have been? This isn't a game where you can demo it in 30 minutes and know "this is my game." Not even in two hours. I've forced myself to play more, so I don't feel like I wasted my $60 bucks, but now that I've maxed out inventory slots and upgrades and spoiled the "ending" for myself - there's really no point to play. Everything is same-y (pirates, animals, planets, dialogue, buildings, ships, etc.), money is worthless, and the only resources I need are to make warp cells/charge weapons and shields. There are no starships to customize, there is no faction system to work with, there are no quests, there is no easy way to navigate to previous discoveries, there is no dynamic trading system (prices are the same permanently for each system you go to), there is no point to the "story," there is no point to cataloging animals as your only reward is useless credits (they're very same-y animals; mammalian rodent things, spider legs with brain heads on nearly ALL planets, big dumb horse things, dinosaur looking things, blob things, jumping pineapples on FOUR planets).

So yeah, I (like 90% of the player base according to steam spy) will be moving on. It's up to Hello Games to add content to this shell of a game, and maybe I'll revisit it. I sure wish I could have gotten a (second) refund, but the time it took to discover just how hollow this game is was more than two hours.