In Skyrim you’re literally on foot and the world slowly expands around you and you become interested in it.

Yeah, and exploration wisey I prefer Oblivion even more. Skyrim feels smaller and less varied, and horses and other fast-travel options are cheaper and easier available.

I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.

We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it's randomly generated stuff you've already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.

They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there's always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn't need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go "hey that looks neat let me go see what's over there", discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I've played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.

It would have been infinitely better had it been 1 star system with like 4 planets and 20 moons. Each one with multiple locations on the surface. Instead of this thousands of planets but basically all randomly generated none of them really interesting.

They kept saying that's realistic because most plants are boring but it's a RPG not a SIM so that logic doesn't track.

The best space game is still The Outer Wilds and that game has only about 5 planets with the largest one only been about half a mile across. Scale isn't everything.

Not since Daggerfall, but been a big TES fan since falling in love with Morrowind. Each subsequent entry to the series has been more disappointing then the last, but Skyrim was decent enough that I still put a good chunk of hours into it. Now though, TES is basically a dead series to me. I'm not remotely interested in seeing where the series goes in modern Bethesda's hands. It will take overwhelming evidence that Bethesda has somehow changed for me to pick up TES 6.

I've thoroughly enjoyed Starfield so far, put about 80 hours in and haven't finished any of the questlines yet (largely intentionally, partially because I'll get sucked into another questline and get distracted). I like the outpost building, the ground combat is fun, the space combat is ok, not on the level of Elite or Star Citizen, but still entertaining.

Solid game to me. Maybe it didn't live up to people's wildest expectations, but I went in expecting an enjoyable experience and got it. I don't really get the hate for it.

Make your own opinion, don't base expectations off of the unwashed masses. Or do, or don't play it. You do you

I'm in the same historical boat as you. Arena was one of my first games on my 486. Here's my take.

Starfield is Skyrim in Space with Daggerfall's procedural generation. It may not be the perfect game (or for some people, even a good game), but it is the close-to-ideal Elder Scrolls experience in space.

Honestly, the only thing keeping me from even checking it out is that it sounds boring

I tried a Daggerfall playthrough where I went town to town looking for loot and doing nothing else. It got boring because the towns all started to look alike. So I stopped and just played it how it was meant to be played.

There's no "boring" take if you ignore the procedural filler content and outpost system (which Bored me in my last FO4 playthrough) and focus on the storyline and main areas. The other stuff is all there for those of us who enjoy mission-fun. I LIKE pirating ships again and again, but maybe you don't. Literally the boring complaints come from the fact that they gave us Daggerfall-level places to explore, with Daggerfall-level repetition.