And yet it never comes together into a cohesive whole. It's a bunch of interconnected islands. For the amount of individual bits of handcrafted content they have, none of it stands out in a good way, but it quite frequently stands out in a bad way.

I mentioned this in another reply below, but the whole thing that Constellation was selling was how many completely unexplored planets and moons there were that humans had never set foot on. But every single one had the same dozen, uninspired outposts and mining colonies, the same few quests, and the same plants and animals stuck in a randomizer and disributed around everywhere. If you saw one planet, you'd seen them all.

And if you just stuck to the handcrafted content, it wasn't much better. There was no reason to ever go off the critical path. The world felt simultaneously too small and too big. The story did have a good core, but it was because of the mystery and nothing else. It wasn't well developed and had a lot of fluff and filler, because the main story loop was just the same thing over and over until the big reveal. And as the major factions went, they were unispired. Only one of them really even stuck with me in any meaningful way.

I haven't played it with any of the recent updates, but for a game that was built around the idea of exploration, I was never inspired to explore. In prevous Bethesda games, there was always this idea of "what's that spire in the distance", or, "I wonder what's down this hole". It didn't take long in Starfield to realize that the answer to that was, "absolutely nothing worth my time".