It's definitively not the same genre but Shores of Hazeron was an empire building MMO where you start as a simple caveman on a random planet in a fully procedurally generated universe and you are supposed to create a city from scratch and figure out space travel. Colonize other planets or moons in your solar system to create a FTL drive and then fight other empires. It looks awful and the developer made some questionable decisions but hey it was just a one man show. Nowadays the closest spiritual successor is No Mans Sky. Huge procedurally generated universe. Check. Randomly generated animals. Check. Spacecraft with combat and seamless transition from planet to space. Check. The ability to create your own spacecraft designs? Nope. The ability to actually do interesting things with the planets like build a colony on them? Nope. Massive multiplayer? Hell no.
No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy! You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see everything the game had to offer.
No mans sky is just eye candy. Imagine the benefits of reaching the center of the galaxy and thereby being teleported to a completely different one if you could colonize that new galaxy! You'd have a massive edge over the other empires. The reality is that all universes and planets in no mans sky are functionally the same. You can stop playing as soon as you see your first planet and nobody could claim that you didn't see everything the game had to offer.