I expect the great leap forward in LLMs and AI art to dramatically change this at some point. They can already write pretty interesting plot with OK prompting, surely only a matter of time before someone is able to wrap that in a game.

I agree with you 100%. The difference could be in the "uncanny valley" of proc gen... Minecraft is blocky, so you suspend judgement and just find the attention to detail a wonder, while perhaps realistic-looking proc gen games are not quite realistic enough.

Funnily enough I was talking to my teenagers on this exact subject last night. At a basic level, nms appears to have what Minecraft does, plus spaceships. Why doesn't it work the same?

For us, we decided that nothing in Minecraft is difficult to get at the level you need it. Wood is easy, always there. When you learn that you need coal for torches, it's just in that rocky outcrop. Start digging, here's some iron for you.

In Minecraft you don't need to understand anything complex, until you're ready to understand something complex. And if you want to spend a week running around on the surface and collecting chickens, you can do that too.

I restarted a nms game the other day and remembered that constant "warning, warning" as the planet inevitably tries to kill me. It was disheartening.