It’s Solo the video game in that regard. It’s not bad, it’s just…definitely a space video game.

In my experience and talking with friends, it's a very love it or hate it game. I stand firmly in hate it but others think it's the best Bethesda game

I really don't understand the dog pile this game has gotten.

It's similar to the situation Cyberpunk 2077 faced. When expectations are set extremely high, nothing can meet them, and Starfield fell far short of the immense hype it generated. And frankly, the mistakes Starfield made are the same issues people have been criticizing Bethesda for since Fallout 3, and even earlier with Oblivion, depending on who you ask. Combined with Fallout 76's disastrous PR and release, this has left many people frustrated with Bethesda. Consequently, there's a strong wave of negativity surrounding the game.

For what it's worth, I'm a big fan of Bethesda's formula, and I genuinely enjoyed Starfield. However, I'm not surprised by the negative reactions. In fact, I'm somewhat glad that people are expressing their disappointment because Bethesda has a unique style, and I don't want to see them stay stuck in this creative rut. If they finally genuinely listen to the complaints, there are a lot of valuable suggestions they could benefit from.

This will sound weird, but I believe these complaints stem from a place of love for Bethesda's games. People know that Bethesda is capable of so much more, and that's why they are so passionate. Other game companies don't inspire this level of passion. Hence why I feel it is reminiscent of the negativity that surrounded Cyberpunk 2077. Both games were genuinely good, but they felt generic, safe, and they were overhyped and well below the potential of their respective developers.

The negativity doesn't make it a bad game, it really is a lot of fun. But it is warrented all the same.

P.S. I agree that some of the story lines in Starfield were fantastic, especially the faction quest lines.

Edit: Someone replied to this and then deleted it saying something to the effect of, "Cyberpunk's biggest issue is that it tried to run on old consoles, while Starfield's biggest issue is that it feels old and outdated".

Which in a lot of ways is very true. In adding my 2 cents regarding the "complaint dog pile" on Starfield, I only intended to compare the two games hype and lack of quality compared to what fans expect from their respective publishers as a way to explain why Starfield (and Cyberpunk) got more vocal hate than worse games.

I realize that my comment makes it sound like I'm saying both games have similar design issues, which I do not believe to be the case. Fwiw, I think Cyberpunk was a much more enjoyable and polished game than Starfield.

Man flying my ship has been a massive disappointment. I did not expect NMS, but it is truly soulless and seemingly pointless. The only positive thing I can say about it is sitting in your cockpit floating around is incredibly eerie and the sound design is cool. That’s about 60 to 90 seconds of entertainment.

A buddy of mine on a gaming discord also put it really well: The game has little to no culture. Cyberpunk, for all of its flaws, drips with culture. There’s language, fashion, architecture, just so much style and feel. Starfield is very same-y outside of 1 or 2 locations. Very little variety.

Character models are also a little iffy. The look and the changes in expressions/movements are not on the same level. You get some really uncanny valley moments

I am fine with most of the game. It's basically what I expected from a Bethesda game.

Two things stand out for me in different ways:

1. The space travel feels implemented in a way that seems to show their helplessness in getting it right. It ends up with a weird mix of Freelancer and just lazy fast travel and the game doesn't portrait a clear line for me what it would actually expect me to do with it and how they would like me to travel. Especially since even the "manual" travel involves a lot of kinda-fast-travel steps. It's just weird.
2. No maps in cities. It's the damn future with space travel across the universe and they forgot how to cartograph cities or planets? Come on!

To me, beyond being very generic (freestar collective and united colonies, had to regoogle them to remember), the very basics of the game felt not fun; from tedious resource collection to the world's first joint loading screen and fast travel 'space exploration' system. I felt like I was missing something, but it really was just a worse no man's sky. When the very basics are this boring of course a large amount of people will have something negative to say. I don't want to explain how quickly I was done with the crafting systems, both for weapons and colony building, which they somehow made less fun than I had in fallout 4.

Like cyberpunk I got this game for free and I still felt ripped off. But unlike cyberpunk I wasn't hyped, so now I'm left standing just wondering where all the time spent on this went.

When fallout 4 was in development, Bethesda had to crunch and have non-developers who had little to no experience in the engine (like writers) work in the creation kit to flesh out the rest of the game. This led to many quests being implemented entirely separate from each other with little to no input from other teams or staff members and is a major reason why fallout 4 base game feels so disjointed once you actually start exploring it.

It wouldn't surprise me if they had to do the same thing with starfield.

I'm in the same boat. I feel like most new games that come out that aren't a clever indy title or on par with Witcher 3 need to be perpetually shit on. People were kinder when Fallout 4 released, while it was buggier than starfield at launch, and also has disjointed mechanics und a subpar story. I personally enjoyed Starfield more as well but both are more than ok games.