That's also what I was hoping for, but yeah, NMS kinda just culminated into pastel drudgery. For some reason it just doesn't feel like there is either carrot or stick and I suppose the creative avenues offered don't really feel interesting to me in the context of the game. But maybe it'd be more interesting on creative mode or something similar. But the combat has always been really subpar, both in FPS and in-ship which would definitely be my forte.
Sca..ehm Star Citizen is such a weird subject. The game seem to be on a completely different timeline than any other game, so its hard to form an objective opinion on it. From one point of view it might look like vaporware on life support, but from another it might actually shape into solid game in a decade. We just have no real data to infer from, because no other game dev story comes close to SC.
I wish that game the best, and I so so wish for it to actually shape into something great, but at the same time I have given up all hope on it, and I still cant imagine investing a single dollar into it (I think they got more than enough money to make a solid game already).
To give you a little hope, I think it's hard to refute that the company is actually making the games at this point, it's not a secretive project and they have over 600 staff. There is so much information on it plus a very contentful Alpha game that thousands are playing. They recently announced that the singleplayer game was feature complete and showed off a lot of gameplay footage as well.
I wouldn't suggest people go sign up or anything because of that but as someone who has followed dev pretty closely, they look to be in the end phases for the singleplayer and probably like 50% into the open world game mechanics. I would bet on a singleplayer release in the next two years, and I would not place a bet on the open world because who knows. Their biggest risk is just running out if money and needing a publisher.
I think that's a bit unfair, they had barely put a team together by year three. They started from zero employees and had to put together a AAA studio from scratch, and kick off two massive games that had no fixed scope due to the crowdfunding goals. They have 600 employees or something right now, are feature complete on the single player and somewhat fixed scope on the open world. I am not a rabid fanboy, but credit where it is due, 10 years isn't unheard of even from established studios on known scope games, and they have two games plus all the overhead of open development.