Watched the Starfield gameplay, when Todd Howard pulled out his space laser to mine iron ore it was like my soul left my body and i watched the rest of the trailer in a dissociative state.
I like Minecraft. It's a good time. I also really like Satisfactory. But every single other game that has resource mining would be better off without it. It's like hacking and lockpicking minigames, the only thing it can possibly offer to the player is a minute of annoyance - but with mining it's often hours of annoyance.
YES. Too many games trying to be Rust/Minecraft/DayZ. If I smell that the game is trying to be "other popular gameplay thing that made lots of money" I judge it way harsher. Same goes for things that are roguelike - since people often use that as a cop out for not designing levels or writing a story, anything involving deck building, and anything simulator, as a lot of these lack both intrigue and depth.
Most of the "rouglite" games these days are just small games from indie developers who want to bite off something they can chew. A lot easier to make a game if you don't have to implement persistent state saving and loading and complex levels and player progression and a story. The artists can just focus on making art.
Yes, but procedural generation is a challenging thing to implement in itself! Great deals of time and effort must be put into such things to get a semblance of functionality. Comparatively, short linear games are the easier option. I would know. Take a look at the outputs from many game jams and you'll get what I mean.