Gaming

Beat you to it! 😛

Yeah, releasing this year.
I have no idea if they can strike gold twice.
We've seen the sequels and those did not do as well (never played them) and they have to do a lot right in order to achieve that goal.

• Create something akin to a five-star music album and matching sound effects
• Make all the jokes land, unless they're told by an Umgah
• Tell a story about diverse cultures clashing with each other all with rich histories,
  without going too serious (tedious) or too silly (unrealistic) but do teeter on both sides,
  especially on the silly side.
• Go for a clear recognizable emotion when creating each new culture or draw inspiration of the animal kingdom.
  Go into deeper explorations for what a culture with such emotions could lead to story-wise for the existing ones.
  And even evolve the emotions of existing races. The Pkunks already did upon introduction.
  Have the Supox become depressed for example due to lack of sunlight with the Utwigs becoming their therapists.
• And have yet again a story unfold of each of these cultures and the likely result of what will happen without your meddling, with a clear set of or just one dominant alien race that decides the overarching story.
• Add crises like those present in Star Control II to break from the exploration phase, mostly as consequences of your actions and what the alien races would naturally concoct on their own.
• Also this time around have cultures become aware of your meddling and act on it.
• Create a sense of wonder and danger during exploration. Here I would suggest manual atmosphere entry into an element of the game, you can lose your ship from the heat and also 'find out what's under the clouds' to create expectations.
• Create a sense of mystery during the game for both plot twists and sequel expectations
• Fix the very fun but unbalanced battles to reach level of SSBM, Roguebook and other addictive games. It already was great, and having a super-powerful flagship that no one else has early in the game is necessary to excuse the adventure aspect, but it should have been challenged more than just once at the very end of the game. It needed encounters with story elements where the bad alien races decide that you're a real threat and so they have been preparing specialized fleets to hunt you down, in order to have a fighting chance against your awesome flagship.
• And not to forget that one needs to balance the economy, so it won't take too long or too short to upgrade your flagship.

And those are just the things that I can think of on top of my head.