Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

---

Between No Man's Sky, Starfield, and countless others, the space-sim genre has arguably never been in ruder health. But games that focus on space exploration have a fundamental problem: space is boring. It's literally just space. That's why we call it space. It's mostly empty, impossibly, unimaginable stretches of nothing, full of empty, rocky planets of no interest to anyone except NASA geologists and associated nerds. One of Starfield's designers, Bruce Nesmith, recently said as much in a rare podcast appearance, admitting that Starfield's biggest problem is that space is inherently boring.

So, how do you fix the space sim genre? How can Starfield 2 be better? Well, hear us out: by looking to games that are adjacent to the genre: space-based action RPGs, like Mass Effect or its Xbox Studios stablemate, The Outer Worlds 2.

#Eurogamer #Starfield #TheOuterWorlds

Become a Team Eurogamer member: youtube.com/eurogamer/join

Subscribe to Eurogamer - youtube.com/subscription_center?add_user=eurogamer