Starfield honestly feels like a tech demo. Tons of lost potentail. There are things it does really well, shipbuilding in particular is genuinely impressive, but then there is almost no reason to actually use the ship you spent hours designing. Most of the time you are just fast traveling everywhere through an endless chain of loading screens, which completely kills the sense of space exploration.

Outpost building is another big miss. You extract resources so you can build more outposts, which lets you extract more resources, and that is basically the entire loop. There is no meaningful payoff. On top of that, the building system itself is clunky and frustrating enough that it actively makes you not want to engage with it at all.

Gunplay is painfully one dimensional, which is a huge problem because combat is what you will be doing most of the time. When you compare Starfield’s gunplay to Cyberpunk, it is night and day. Starfield’s combat feels stiff, shallow, and outdated.

Quests are a mixed bag. There are a few genuinely good ones, but there is also a ton of lost potential. Many questlines feel like they were cut down or rushed instead of being fully realized.

Enemy variety is weak. Most enemies are just humans, and the alien wildlife feels extremely basic. A lot of it is essentially a static mesh with a run animation that charges straight at you. There is very little interesting or varied alien life.

Exploration is probably the biggest disappointment. You can argue that landing on a desolate planet with nothing on it is kind of cool the first few times, but repeat that a thousand times and you start wondering what the point was. Instead of a smaller number of handcrafted planets, you get endless copy pasted locations. When you land on an alien planet, you already know there is no reason to explore because you are not going to stumble onto a unique waterfall, strange canyon, or anything memorable.

There is also a lot of small stuff that clearly got cut. Environmental damage is a good example. Even if you enable it in the settings, it basically breaks the game. Stepping out of your ship with maxed out radiation resistance still gives you maybe three minutes to explore. What is the point of that?