No Man Sky is suffering the same problem, cool tech demonstration now how do you fill it with a compelling "game".

The omnipresent nano-bot police shown in their recent video proves this point, it's a lame attempt at forcing the player behave a certain way in the world. It works in a game like Grand Theft Auto, start killing a bunch of people and the cops show up. Supposed "unexplored" planets, not so much.

Reaching the center of the universe isn't much of a hook either, there needs to be purpose to doing it in the first place.

I'm still waiting for someone to recreate a modern graphical version of Starflight, they crammed a lot of game onto a 540k floppy disk.