Its good enough to spend time moaning about it not being great.

It has two or three issues, and the problem is theyre buried so deep in the design they compromise everything and are essentially unfixable.

The art, setting, bespoke quests are all great. Even the gunplay really, which is a shock but its honestly fun.

Ship building is possibly the best ship design system ever made. And its completely pointless, you will never see the inside of the ship as you teleport to PoIs and barely see the outside.

Inventory management is hell. Building your own mining base depends on very large inventory usage. And the reward is more materials for your inventory to do upgrades to weapons and armour you barely need.

The environmental damage system is incomprehensible so luckily it almost never matters. You take damage breathing in your sealed space suit?? Ridiculous.

The skill system does not feel good, all it can do is unlock stuff above that doesnt feel like it really matters, or gives more inventory management nonsense; or give incremental improvements to damage etc that do not feel good.

And the kicker, Skyrim draws you in by promising and delivering more and more new places to explore and once thats replaced with random pois the entire game collapses around it. When exploring feels pointless the entire game feels pointless.

I really liked Starfield and I played it for about 250 hours, multiple new game plus runs and all. It is not a bad game, I liked the characters and the story and especially the world with its near future NASA-punk setting. And yes, such a setting means that most of space is boring and that travel between planets (or even stars) in real time would take ages, very boring ages with nothing other then darkness around them. So the gravity jump mechanic and the focus on events around planets was only logical.

The big problem that Starfield had was that so many people had the idea or the fantasy that Starfield would be a game that it a) never was and that b) Bethesda never said that it would be.

I play, and I mod and create mods for, games with versions of the creation engine for over 20 years now, I began with Morrowind back then, and I have a very good idea and understanding of how the engine works and where its powers and limitations are, maybe that's why the picture that I had from the game was very close to what the game delivered (loading screens and all) and why I was able to had (and still have) so much fun with the game. There was no huge hype cliff based on wishes and imagination that I could fall down from.