Really, really wanted to like this game. Morrowind was like, my entire childhood. Bethesda have been on a downward spiral for so long to me and I've completely lost my faith in their titles. Starfield felt soulless to me when I played. A game that's supposed to be about an organization of explorers, where the exploration consists of fast travel and loading screens. Starfield did a lot of things and it didn't do any of them phenomenally, and only a few of them adequately.
I'm curious as to how exactly the space exploration differs from Elite Dangerous.
Because in that nearly decade old game, space exploration does largely consist of fast travel warping to systems, scanning them and potentially any planets from your ship, scooping fuel from the stars, avoiding white dwarfs and neutron stars... And its absolutely enthralling.
Curious as to how they screwed up a proven formula.
The weird one to me is that they made it sound like a space survival game where the ship and its maintenance was going to be a primary game element, but other than the ship builder and random encounters outside a planets, it seems like it's hardly a thing.
The space exploration for Starfield only happens in orbit of another planet. From the few hours I played before I gave up on it you couldn’t even fly to a station nearby the planet, you had to fast travel to it which was a loading screen then you had a loading screen for docking on to the station and then another loading screen for getting into the station
Elite has a sense of scale and seamless transitions between places (even if they are just well-disguised loading screens). The planets feel planet sized, and you can move around them or between them freely in hypercruise (or whatever the system for traveling inside systems was called). There isn't any fast travel system as far as I'm aware -- if you want to get to the other side of the galaxy, the journey will take you days or weeks, even with a kitted out exploration ship. This, combined with the sense of scale and incredibly well made map system, makes it feel like an expedition, even if the journey itself is extremely lonely and repetitive. Despite Elite's many, many flaws - they absolutely nailed this aspect of a space game.
Starfield feels like clicking through menus to get to boring minigames with different skyboxes. It cannot be overstated how non-immersive the travel and "exploration" is compared to ED.
*Edited disclaimer: I gave up a couple of hours in. If there's a good game in this mess that you get to after 100 hours, as some people have said, I'm sure as fuck not sticking around to find out. More likely it's just the sunk cost coping mechanisms kicking in.