I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
It’s way worse about that than Minecraft, imo. I find Minecraft to be exceptionally boring, but building is at least passably fun (or was before hytale completely blew it out of the water), but it feels like NMS doesn’t even give you a real creative outlet. From what I’ve seen even starfield is better than NMS for creativity, although i haven’t played starfield myself.
Starfield? I would argue it’s much worse than NMS, though I don’t know how the current game is. Back when I played, a couple of months before the first dlc dropped (before the buggy update, even), you were extremely limited in choices for base building. You had like 4 or 5 prefabs of a living quarter which came pre decorated.
Starfield offers good ship customization (and stupidly talent-locks a lot of it), unlike NMS, which only added a tiny bit of that in an update last year I think