They basically wasted an entire console generation working on this instead of Fallout 5

Playing Starfield made me want to play Skyrim again.

Instead of 1000+ worlds that are empty, they should have given us our solar system, asteroid colonies, and like 4 other star systems with better planet locations. That would have been more than enough.

I think what bethesda was hooing for was for modders to fill in the blanks. It was a gamble, and it seems bethesda lost. Will starfield dethrone skyrim? At this point, i can say nope, skyrim is still a much better game.

Akavir is a continent we've never been to but we could probably describe it in better detail than the any planet in Starfield!

Starfield was doomed from the start. They should’ve focused on just one solar system, with hand crafted planets and cities and lore. But noooo, there just had to be 1000 planets. Also, the writing sucks.

Yup. Jumping across 15 solar systems to get from one side of to galaxy to the other literally feals the exact same as going down to a pub in neon. Both are seperated by the exact same single loading screen so no matter how "big" everything is you feal like a toddler playing in a literal sandbox

Starfield has provided nothing but varying degrees of disappointment.

There are times when I've played for 30-45 minutes and realized I've done nothing but fast travel around and talk to npcs. Starfield's universe is unnecessarily bloated and disconnected

You've hit one of the key problems with Starfield. I commented elsewhere that Skyrim and the Commonwealth were almost characters in their own right, with dimension and a kind of personality that pervaded their respective game. Playing FO4 on survival mode drove this home for me: I would frequently walk from one end of the map to the other, encountering all sorts of things along the way, being compelled to pry into previously unexplored corners, coming across surprising encounters and bits of lore. Starfield offers none of that.

The game genuinely feels like the human population is like a few hundred thousand max if that across the entire game. Like how are all of the main cities the size of a university

They lack the cloud district.

I feel like any open world game set in space as ambitious as Starfield is just not possible to build at the moment. Our reference point for a planet is Earth. How many cities and environments does earth have? How is a game developer ever going to meet those expectations when they're trying to build a game with dozens or hundreds of planets? Building one city on a planet is a lot of work but building dozens of cities per planet would be monumental. I think thats one reason they killed off earth in starfield, they knew it would be impossible for them to build what people would expect earth to be like in the future so it was easier to turn it to dust. Like others have said, Bethesda seems to have gotten in over its head and should have built a smaller space to explore. Something like the Expanse tv show would be much more manageable, where only earth and mars are inhabited planets with large cities and theres a handful of asteroids with colonies on them around the solar system. Then they could have spent more time developing a few game areas rather than trying to fill hundreds. The emptiness of Starfield is evident though

I feel that a starfield-like game would be almost beautiful if everything was just on a single planet. Doing an entire planet itself would be a huge feet. Give us vehicles, planes, ships, etc to travel across oceons/continents and many many cities, factions, cultures to explore. A single planet would already be hugeeeeeeeee.

less planets, more polish, more content per planet, better player choices

i first played skyrim when i was 15, i was stupid so i didnt know how the fast travel mechanic worked. For a full year, i just ran to every place y had to go, taking days to complete quests because i fell into random dungeons on the floor or found weird caves on the way. To this day, the music playing in the back while you walk aimlessly is one of my fondest memories and even though i played hours upon hours of the game, i still know that i could download the game again, play and still find more stuff ive never seen.

I think they tried to bite off more than they could chew. If they maybe kept travel down to a group of select planets in the galaxy it would be more memorable. Like mass effect, there were plenty of planets to traverse but i distinctly remember Noveria's snowy peaks as well as Ilos' overgrown ruins. But it all seemed like a complete system. Idk

The only thing they can do now is exactly what No Man's Sky did and load the game up with systems that make the weak exploration feel better because you're building towards something. Something like an upgradeable base that persists through NG+. It's funny how the way they do NG+ completely negates ship building, outpost building, legendary hunting, and wealth accrual.

They could remove half of the space and dialogue and it wouldn't be missed. The bloat is detrimental

The prison in the Sysdef/Crimson Fleet questline is probably bigger than most of the cities.