>It has so many features that's simply killed by feature creep
I wouldn't say feature creep, but rather the story killed it.
It used to be a really open game where you had fun discovering shit, could dash across the map and stuff. It just needed more content on top of it. That's it.
Now there's a full "you're the tragic survivor of a monster invading your school, I mean space school, so you run away and end up saving the universe from the baddies" gay story with unskippable cutscenes and an unskippable tutorial. It's not about the player anymore, it's about the story and the player needs to change to accommodate that. Techs aren't technology you find in ancient ruins and use to upgrade yourself into godhood, techs are special powers with a cooldown (but also use stamina because fuck you) you use and wait, but bosses still teleport around just to tease you.
You don't explore planets to explore anymore, dungeon loot is shit, you just go to the planet that shows up on the radar as having the quest objective and you just look for the quest objective to progress the story because otherwise you can't do shit. Monsters and dungeons are a pain in the ass because, again, shit loot, there's no reward and it just stops you from mining which is a pain in the ass because you need a fuckton of ore to unlock everything.
You want tech? Complete a mission and a tutorial dungeon. You want an upgrade, complete a mission and grind for materials. You want a new item or a tier up? Complete boring ass story missions.
It's just grind on top of a story no one cares about with quirky characters no one cares about. The dungeons are kinda cool, but when it's interrupted with "eks deee I heard of this mythical species called X, go to the planet that shows up as a floran planet, ignore everything else, and just scan the blue floran items. Tehee", which is really fucking stupid when there's a nonhuman in the party, so the annoying fuck is just telling you to go suck dick for a species that's right in fucking front of her. It doesn't even make sense because it's just "go scan for this species", "oh that species exist, by the way people are fucking dying over there, so I'll teleport you when you get back from scanning shit. Don't worry, just scan their floor, there's no need to even fucking talk with the species you are supposed to be researching".
It was a WIP terraria in space back in beta, now it feels like a current year game that tries too hard to be another game, in this case terraria, without even understanding what made it good in the first place. "Those kids like blocks and NPCs right? Put cutscenes in so they won't miss the NPCs and make them scan the ground so they won't miss the blocks".
Fuck video games.