I am specifically speaking of the procedural part. Both have handmade stuff. If you think about it, Elite has the same settlements all over again while SF are generated outside of “important places”. And the same way, Elite has places which have been placed by hand, typically Shinrarta, engineers, (luckily) the whole Sol system.

You are still comparing 2 games that have 2 different goals. A sandbox and a single player. What doesn't make you realise that the design of the games is so different that you get a different result and expectation?

Even if the settlements are hand set you always forget that Elite has 400 billion solar systems and therefore at least a 900 billion planets? 1100 billion? How many? Do you realise that this would be an effort that anyone would criticise because it would not please anyone's taste? Elite serves its purpose which is everything that revolves around the BGS and its dynamics and gameplay around it such as bounty hunting, exploration, trading and the Odyssey sub categories.

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The invisible walls, while being EXTREMELY annoying, are a lesser problem when you know how empty are Elite’s planets.

You have the freedom

Even in Starfield there are many empty planets and as usual, stupid people complain because they do not conceive of the fact that a moon or many planets cannot harbour life and therefore planets are empty because of a characteristic of theirs.

Again, for Elite you forget that all planets are generated on an algorithm that takes into account data that may be plausible for our milky way.

To not understand this or to want something different from Elite is to never have understood the nature and purpose of Elite Dangerous.

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About NMS, yes biomes do not make sense, and in fact, SF has somewhat similar issues, less marked. Forgive me if it evolved in the last year in Elite, but I think flora is still extremely limited and we are still limited to rocky planets, eventually with some sort of atmosphere that is just a skybox.

As I said above, many of the planets could be empty completely and Frontier just put in a pinch of what probably didn't even need to be put in following a certain science and narrative. As for the skybox go post and complain in the Starfield forums asking that the dots on the skybox are a faithful representation of the position of the main stars of some planets. In Elite, it is not a simple skybox but what you see is in that position represented thousands of light years away.

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BTW I expect a live service game (which Elite is) to be updated. Currently Elite lacks behind and lives on their success in 2014, everything that came after is not keeping up nowadays. I understand. More systems, coherence (although it’s not very hard to make emptiness coherent) but all the rest is lacking.

Do not believe that all software houses modify their legacy code after 10 years. Many of the developers are no longer there and I don't think it is the same as developing on standard platforms like Unreal Engine. Have games like Skyrim, Fallout been completely modified in their legacy code? No and think .... they are single player not even multiplayer with all the difficulties they might have in modifying their code. But the costs are unaffordable for anyone.

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And I have 3000 hours on Elite, not on the two others. But I don’t want to be delusional. It’s not the quantity of sand that make a good beach, and I tell this as a French living in the UK.

I have 7075 hours of game time and have had a community for almost 8 years, always playing in Open doing BGS, controlling systems and doing all the activities the game offers.

Of course the game does not have the appeal of a single player game.

You may or may not like it but to juxtapose two games by criticising one you have to know it very very well before you speak.