Let's be real. The other option would be a 10 year-old pre-alpha with barely 4 planets and a few moons with like 20 unique POIs total.
I think this is a totally acceptable compromise. And it's not like you can't explore more of the planet. It's just a small loading screen in between. Like going from the overworld to a dungeon in Skyrim.
Yeah, but i don't get the obsession with these 1000 planets, except that it sounds good. Why not 5 well crafted planets to actually do things. I know everyone likes different things but going from cutscene to cutscene to traverse seems like anti fun.
I think the idea for some of the planets is just to build a resouce mining factory on it, but i do still think 1000 was unessessary. Could have gotten away with only a fifth of the planets for various resources near some of the major planets.
It's primarily hundreds of hours of hand crafted content that's seamlessly integrated into a procedurally generated landscape.
So for example there might be a mine colony gone wrong after a disaster.
If you have been mostly interested in playing on desert planets that facility might be loaded into the desert planet. If someone else has been focused on arctic planets, it might be on their arctic planet.
The same handcrafted content, but dynamically integrated into the spaces that each player naturally gravitates to in their own open universe.
This also makes the modern behavior of using a wiki to guide play much more complicated, and encourages self-driven discovery rather than community driven guides.
I think people worried about procedural generation because of how it was done a decade ago might be in for a significant surprise.
People often overlook that aspect of Star Citizen, the planets, albeit few in numbers, are:
Unique to each other and have detailed moons with varying resourcs
Incredibly detailed given the real time, smooth transition from space to planet and vice versa.
Given atmospheres, clouds and weather events.
Given unique cities and POIs due to the lore.
So yeah, I'm almost as annoyed with the state of SC as the next person but I'm one of the very few people I've seen actually respect what has been done and compare that to progress from mainstream games. I'm as astounded by CIGs progress as I am their procrastination and marketing team.