I'm with you on the campaign based space games. Starfighter and Jedi Starfighter were the shit, I recently found them again when I was digging through some stuff and started playing both of them. Maybe it is a bit of a loaded question to suggest that they are all aiming for the end result, but that is the holy grail of space games imo. I think it is interesting to consider the tech involved behind the creation of the space sims because there is so much involved in making them. Space Engineers, for example, has a ton of stuff going on with building and physics that you don't really see in any other kind of game. My main issue with sandbox games is anything randomly generated ceases to be fun eventually, because it isn't truly random. It's the same shit in a different order. No Man's Sky is probably the best example of that. Other games, like FTL or Binding Of Isaac, managed to get the randomisation/actual content level right, but in the realm of sandbox games the ones that get it right are few and far between. Given that this is one of the major problems, would it be a good idea to crowdsource the content for space sandbox games? Having actual content made by actual people could make the games way better. It wouldn't necessarily need to be made by people who know how to write changes to the game, like mods or something. If there was a builder in the game that was simple enough to use, but with enough variation, we could actually have what was promised in No Man's Sky in a fairly short amount of time.