Why not let the lesson be that space content is pretty boring, or that resource management is boring. Just because they did it poorly doesn't mean that the type of content they made was the problem.
Procedurally generated content has been around for a long time and has been done waaaaay better than NMS did it. There are plenty of rougelikes that have interesting procedurally generated content.
I agree. I don't think the point is that generated content is boring, but that HG's generated content depth was quite shallow.
As stated in the article, if they doubled the size of the art team, they could have had hundreds of times more models from which to generate creatures.
The possibilities could be near-endless but the execution in NMS was poor because clearly not enough effort was spent on building up the assets. The author believes that it would be madness to create such a full-featured engine and then abandon it so soon. I'm inclined to agree, until HG or ASA say otherwise, and then folks will probably start knocking out the NMS clones.
I also don't understand why your second sentence is controversial to first. I'm not talking about space content, but about generated content in general.
Could you please provide an example of the game where generated content is interesting enough to explore? Where it's not just decoration.
Of the console based rouguelikes my personal favorite is probably cataclysm DDA. It is a survival zombie apocalypse game. One of the most common features of the world is small to medium towns that have a handful of building types consistently available, various wrecked cars all over the place and a wide variety of building layouts, building types, street layouts, loot on bodies and distrobution/strength of zombies. Not to mention all of the other special places it has. That being said I am obviously bias as I was a contributor to the game.
It seems like the emergent story in dwarf fortress continually draws people in (you might find this a stretch, but I'd argue that the game was explicitly made to procedurally generate a story).
It sounds like Ultima Ratio Regum is aiming to have deep procedural content.
Why not let the lesson be that space content is pretty boring, or that resource management is boring. Just because they did it poorly doesn't mean that the type of content they made was the problem.
Procedurally generated content has been around for a long time and has been done waaaaay better than NMS did it. There are plenty of rougelikes that have interesting procedurally generated content.