I went in expecting a space-skyrim with typical Bethesda jank, and that’s exactly what we got

I won’t say I disliked it. There was a lot of stuff I liked, and the gunplay was substantially less painful than fallout. But the thing with Skyrim that makes it easy to get hooked for me is the fact that from wherever I am, I can just wander, and I’ll find cool places to go. I’ll find a cave to wander down that goes through more than one civilization before letting me out somewhere different, that I can also just pick a direction and wander.

There’s nothing really in Starfield that does that. I still really liked a lot about it, and some of the city stuff pushes into feeling immersive-sim-like. But I would have preferred less solar systems, but ones that were (or had been) more fully populated by humans and felt like you were really exploring each world instead of a small area.

It’s still worth playing, and the base is potentially there for some really cool total conversion type mods. But it doesn’t really do the open world feeling that Bethesda was one of the few who consistently did really well.