In fairness, seasons and varied terrain aren’t guaranteed.
Of all the bodies in the solar system, only Earth has such a wide variety of landscape. Mars is rocky desert or rocky desert with canyons. Pluto is ice ball or rocky ice ball. Etc.
Also, if humans were colonizing earth from outside, we would probably just build cities on the river deltas and skip the less habitable spots. Stories set here would then just be cityscape or river delta, even though the ice caps/mountains/jungles/deserts still exist. Colonized worlds will have different population distribution that organically settled ones.
Some Sci-Fi planet types are reasonable.
The Kepler program found a lot of exoplanets and has categorized them generally as Hot Jupiters, Cold Gas Giants, Ocean Worlds & Ice Giants, Rocky Planets and Lava Worlds.
If you ignore the gas giants because there’s no surface to land on, rocky planets (and maybe desert planets) would be extremely common. Water or ice planets would also be incredibly common. And, if you’re really unlucky, you might end up on a lava planet – one that’s small and very close to its sun.
What wouldn’t be common are things like an entire planet that’s a swamp, or an entire planet that’s a forest of Earth-style trees. I’m sure it’s entirely possible that on some planet there’s a life-form that becomes the dominant form and that looks vaguely like Earth-style trees, but not the kind you see on a typical SciFi show filmed near Vancouver.
I imagine No Man’s Sky is doing this specifically to reference the trope as was originally commonly portrayed in e.g. Flash Gordon serials and various golden age comics. Similar to Starbound, this also has an intentional gameplay implication in that it forces you to leave the planet and find another one with the biome appropriate for whatever resource it is you need. Otherwise you could park your butt on one planet and never have any compelling reason to go anywhere else which really rather defeats the intent of the game.
As far as other works of fiction go, though, yes. It’s just lazy.
It can be relatively justified for NMS too, considering that its setting seems to explicitly be some sort of simulation in-universe, the rules it operates on don’t have to match physical reality
No man’s sky also did it because of lazy. People may have forgotten, but that game released as pure hot garbage and only got better after tons of updates.
Nonsense, those of us who weren’t plugged into gaming journos 24/7 enjoyed it on release. I couldn’t have cared less that it didn’t have multiplayer or whatever. I wasn’t even aware of any controversy at the time.
There aren’t that many first person space exploration games outside of nms and elite and nms is much easier to get into. It was fun, and still is
And I don’t count starfield because starfield is just a loading screen simulator
Being a hot mess and being enjoyable are not mutually exclusive. 1.0 was a buggy mess with worlds that had the depth of a puddle populated by Mr potato head animals, the same half dozen outposts, and a suit screaming LIFE SUPPORT FALLING the moment you stepped out of the ship.
Doesn’t mean it wasn’t enjoyed by some.
That’s not true of it now? I love No Man’s Sky, and have since launch, but still, it only takes about 10 minutes to see everything there is on one planet
“Wait wait, you’re from Doloron? Oh my god, I work with someone from the Swamp Planet!”
“Why does everyone call it that. It’s a planet with one or two famous swamps.”
“What was it like growing up in a mud hut?”
“We have other ecosystems! You know, mountains, fields, outlet malls…”
“How did you get to school? Bark canoes? On the back of a swamp snail?”
“No, like everyone else… In hover cars.”
“Is it true you all have eggs sacs? Take off your pants.”
“No I’m not taking off my pants!”
“Aha! We got a swamp monster here!”
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! (sigh) 50 years ago, Dread Trooper scouts landed in a swamp on our planet, and for some reason didn’t bother exploring anywhere else. If they had gone one mile to the left, they would have found some beautiful beachfront condos. But they didn’t. And now… we’re the (air quotes) swamp planet. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“I uh…”
“Don’t say anything. Let’s just eat our lunch in silence.”
“… Is that moss!?”
“It’s a delicacy!”
Earth is not your average planet. We’ve been looking for YEARS for goldilocks planets.
If anything, all those single-biome planets aren’t extreme enough.
Stargate: every planet is either desert or Canada.
It’s an ice planet!
Carter, after exiting the second gate on Earth
