TLDR > A lot of the repetitiveness isn’t a problem of “Lack of disk space”, it’s just a matter of not making good use of procedural generation. Seeing “the same building blocks in a different configuration” is better than seeing “the same thing”.
the space that they would need on your hard drive to make the game really non-repetitive visually would be out of this world
Not necessarily. You can procedurally generate textures, sounds and geometry, but that becomes a huge CPU hog in a game that already blows CPU usage. But most of the repetitiveness can be “fixed” (read: reduced) without adding more than ~20MB of new textures and geometry.
One of the problems is that there’s no variation within a planet. Every grassy planet is the same mechanically. Sure, one might have bubbles in the air, another might have yellow grass instead of red, but they’re mechanically identical. It’s the only planet type to find starbulbs and minerals with parafinum. No grassy planet has an ice cap, or a desert patch, or a volcano. If you ever need to find cactus and pyrite, you have to go to a desert planet. If you need uranium and gamma weed, radioactive planet. Then you have the caves, which are completely identical in every planet.
Some planets may have bio luminescent plants, which are gorgeous to look at, but because there’s no variation within a planet, you see them everywhere. There’s never a point where you think “This is the spot on this planet”. Because everywhere is “the spot”, so it’s just “the planet”, which can also be found on the next star system.
Save for airless planets, if I’m not mistaken, every planet has the same 3 “trap” plants (man eater, whip, spores in a cave). There’s not even a color change depending on the planet. Same damn plant, same damn damage, same oxygen amount on death, whether on ice or on a volcano.
Another thing that compounds on the lack of planetary variation is the same sin that Starfield did, of every point of interest being the same everywhere. Every market is the same, every small settlement is the same, every infested facility is the same. This one is easy to give more variation, just create some building blocks and chain them together, like how rooms are generated in ARPG games like Diablo or Torchlight. You know how each star system has a different market rating? Use that to calculate the maximum size any one POI can reach, or as a weight to the POI that can appear (small settlements become more common in 1 star system, markets more common in 3 star, etc).
They do the above in a limited capacity with derelict freighters, so it’s not like there’s “no way” to do it or “they don’t know how”.
Yet another thing that breaks the immersion and “want” of exploration: the vast majority of the galaxy is “settled”. Star systems without any alien presence are the exception. What the hell are you even exploring if there’s already someone there with a working teleporter in space, plus several POI dotting every planet?