Isn't that pretty par for the course with mainline Bethesda games?

i just think the idea of spreading out a Bathesda RPG over an entire galaxy was flawed even if it had seamless planet landing from the beginning. constantly flying between solar systems for different quests, often in the same quest, is just tedious as hell even if it was seamless.

In order for it to work they need to make the spaceflight/combat/space itself more compelling and worthwhile. In Elder Scrolls and Fallout, exploration between quests is fun because there are chance encounters, side quests, unmarked dungeons, easter eggs, great scenery, etc. There was almost none of that in Starfield, although you could tell they tried to inject some.

those starving indie devs..

I played elite dangerous for a while, was fun. But I got tired of grinding for new ships. I was just going out to kill ships for money all the time. I dont remember exploring much... What is there to explore?

ED is OG too. One of the pioneers.

Nothing has changed enough to make it worth checking out again. If you didn't like it at launch, you still won't like it now.

It depends on where you go and how you interact with the game content, main story is the weakest part of Starfield you want to do it up to a point if you care about unlocking some extra gameplay features. Other than that, the factions storylines are much better and really fun. Also the game has few very good side quests you can google to find where they are and just go do them.

The procedural generation only control where and what POI spawn at the zone you land inside. The POIs themselves are handcrafted and they are actually well made. They are some of the best bethesda ever created in terms of dungeons and locations to explore, many of them are massive, detailed, full of stuff and pretty unique.

The problem is if you visit a POI once then if it spawn again you don't want to revisit it, because the PG won't change anything in the POI and they will feel very repetitive.

The latest update has added a few really good stuff too by introducing a new resource called X-Tech which has big effect on your character weapons, ships and powers. You get it from multiple sources, but most importantly you get it as a reward at the end of a POI. So, now you have this extra incentive and nice reward for exploring these POIs.

It also add way more handcrafted POIs to space through the new Free Lanes feature. Same thing apply from the planets POIs: They are really well made, but if you run into one you did before skip it.

It's overall a 7 out of 10 game sometimes even less, but there's some stuff that really fun and well done inside it if you are willing to look for them

I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.

Immersive "Open World" Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the "second class (star) citizen". Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.

To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the "You see that mountain? You can climb it!" game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that's a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar "You see that planet? You can fly to it!" design philosophy.

Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was... good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.

Us space flight sim enjoyers like that kind of thing. When Starfield was announced we kinda expected it to be a default feature, so obviously when we saw it wasnt a feature it was disappointing.

Adds a hell of a lot more immersion than a loading screen.

Yaaaay, now we can do something No Man's Sky could do 10 years ago, yaaaaaaay!