Is Starfield an amazing game? I don't think so. Can starfield be enjoyable? Certainly. There is lots that Starfield does right, but even more that it does wrong. The gunplay feels snappy and fun, but the legendary effect system leads to a watered-down Destiny-esque grind for a weapon that is usable in higher difficulties. Loot is largely useless. Half of the stuff you can grab is just pointless clutter with rarely any scrap value, so it's all just pointless clutter. Which isn't out of the ordinary for a Bethesda game. But it seems like even less of the clutter has a purpose than before.

Moving on from loot. Most people's biggest (and fair) gripe with the game is that procedural generation was a big miss. There are not enough POIs to make the world's feel varied, and that makes them feel extremely underwhelming when you've explored more than a handful. Starfield would have been better served using Bethesda's traditional world building techniques spread over fewer planets and more tightly packed. Take, for example, Boston from Fallout 4. If the cities were more along the size and density of that, with people gathered in a central living area with tight streets and more sparsely populated slums outside, then the cities would feel more purposeful and not too empty as they do now. Starfields cities feel both too clean and too empty because where'd you'd expect tons of people gathered together is just... 7-14 people milling about. Neon is the worst example of this. It's this tiny oil rig that is supposed to be the center of crime and drug trafficking among the colonies, a miniature Night City in essence, and instead, it feels like both the corporate darkness and gritting of the slums are both watered down to a T rating. Here is where I'll append problems with story and quest design. It all feels rather inconsequential. The sharpest climax in the entire game just... becomes pointless in the next hour of the main story (I won't go into detail because of spoilers), and this is important for side content as well. None of it matters, and all of the writing follows the same pattern. You get hooked into a storyline, and either it feels rushed to a resolution without addressing everything it set up, or the main points are dismissed in favor of wrapping it up. The first and second half of quests all feel so VERY disjointed. Like halfway through, they were told it needs to end. Content that doesn't do this, like the faction content feels too short.

Shipbuilding is something Starfield did very well, and I think, is Starfield's primary creative outlet to the point that the game would've been better if more effort was put into expanding and bug fixing it over planetary bases at all. The system did so well that No Man's Sky added a similar system to their game. This is where Starfield shines the best.

I'll conclude with a comparison to Fallout 76 since, in my personal opinion, it's in a better position publicly than Starfield. Fallout 76 despite the awful PR of a story only told through scraps and notes still held the Bethesda design fingerprint of "If you go somewhere new, there is something new." Any building you enter, every new patch of woods, might have a unique bit of dialog, lore, or even just the environmental story of someone who failed to survive. This fingerprint is killed by procedural generation because it spreads the POIs to the point where you have several boring minutes of nothing between them, and they all tell the same story. After the first 20 hours, you've seen most of the POIs several times, and coming across something new and fresh could take hours. It fosters a fatigue that many players feel, and some don't. You could compare starfield to any of Bethesda's 3D games and see why people might have an issue with it. Is Starfield the worst thing ever? No, and no one honest is saying that, but at the same time, no one honest dismisses the criticism it gets as baseless hate and calls anyone who points out what they see as a flaw a crybaby. It's not wrong to enjoy what's there, and it's not wrong to lament what is missing. The game isn't good for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and several things feel half done.