NMS was pushed out way too early. They had a lot of really big dreams about how they wanted the game to look and they ended up falling short of what they wanted before the game was released. A lot of people who bought NMS on release day felt like they’d been sold a bill of goods that Hello Games didn’t fulfill, and IMO their feelings were justified at that time. Launch NMS was buggy and had very basic functionality problems, and many players left it after a short time.

That was ten years ago. NMS has been developed and worked on for all ten of those years, with multiple huge content patches released every few months. NMS now is almost nothing like NMS at launch. There’s a whole lot more to do now. Hello Games has produced and added nearly everything that they promised during initial development of the game like player bases, player freighters that you can customize, a player hub where you can group up and do quests together, and more. They also massively revamped the inventory and storage system so it’s easier to manage.

If you already own it, give NMS another try and treat it as a new videogame. I enjoy it a lot more now then I did at launch.