The unfortunate reality of the game is that it is a “Bethesda game” with a lot of the magic stripped out.

Interesting. I don't find "Bethesda game" to be unfortunate, and I don't agree that a lot of the magic is stripped out. No, we do not get the Iconic fallout Vault Boy attitude, but tES never managed to brand itself like that anyway. What "magic" should I be seeing missing from Starfield? It seems pretty magical to me. I'm REALLY holding my breath for a Ve'ruun expansion, maybe some "Legacy of the Starborn" style expansion that leans into the Artifacts and the cycle. And I KNOW space stations are coming (data leaks confirmed there's code for them), and I'm so excited for when they finally do.

The promise of 1000 planets rings pretty hollow when a vast majority of them are desolate chucks of rock, and procedural generation is just an exceedingly lazy way to achieve a bullet point on the hype sheet.

But isn't that what you'd expect? What do people expect from this? 1000 full-size planets all lovingly hand-crafted on a $1T budget? Micro-planets like some other games did? Taking a step back, remember that Starfield has more hand-crafted content than Skyrim... THEN adds 1000 planets to explore so you have a Daggerfall-like procedural exploration game on top of it. Because a lot of us missed procedural exploration.

The fun of “discovery by exploration” – going to continue on a quest and getting stopped by a dozen different interesting things along the way – is completely broken by “fast travel”. A “Bethesda game” that requires you to skip a lot of the in-between and not lose focus on a singular objective does not feel like a “Bethesda game” to me.

Are you that guy who does no-fast-travel runs in Skyrim? Quite literally, Starfield feels like the exact same amount of fast-travel as any tES game to me. FT to this city, kill this person. FT back, report what you did. FT to this area, and go find a dungeon.

Unfortunately, they spent a lot of time hyping their pride on being their “least buggy” game on release

For the record, that's true. Starfield was largely downright stable from day 1.

they should’ve spent that time rebuilding something modern from the ground up instead of cramming their ambition into their aging platform

"Should" is a hard point. They're clearly trying to stay Iconic Bethesda. As far as I've heard, Creation Engine 2 is largely a from-scratch engine. The thing is, the goal was for it to still work like a Bethesda game. Largely that goal succeeded. Many of us were craving Exactly Skyrim in Space for 10-15 years now. It's weird how many people are complaining after they gave us what we asked for.

I'm IT. I get it. Sometimes you asks for things you don't really want and it's my job to say "no" to you. But I actually really wanted Skyrim in space!!!