My opinion of Starfield is going downhill the more I play it. I've gone from "Eh, a 7/10, maybe?", to "No more than a 6/10", so far.
The UX is just atrocious, and clearly built around a very limited set of buttons ("press and hold" to exit the map, really?) to make it controller friendly, but they couldn't even be consistent in which button does what across UI elements (Tab? Hahaha, no, this time it is Escape).
Needing a mod to disable the obnoxious "toggle to sprint" is mind boggling and, in my mind anyway, a clear indication the UX really was built around controllers. In summary Bethesda clearly learned nothing from the terrible UX of Skyrim and/or Fallout 4, and even managed to make it worse, somehow...
Which brings us to lock picking which is now also much more annoying. Thankfully someone already modded it out. But can we, please, stop these obnoxious mini-games and just go back to skill checks, like in New Vegas? Especially for things you have to do every five steps?
In a similar vein, outposts seem worse than the Fallout 4 implementation (outside buildings, like solar panels, don't snap to a grid, so things look like they are just haphazardly thrown around. But even inside decoration is an exercise in futility as the "rotate" granularity is abysmal, so aligning anything to a wall is borderline impossible).
Additionally finding a good, resource rich, landing zone on a planet is just a dice roll since the granularity of the map isn't good enough to actually land where you intended, so you think you're landing on the intersection of 3, or 4, desirable resources but after touchdown one of them is nowhere to be found. I mean that spot may exist somewhere on that "the size of Fallout 4's map"-map that you can only traverse on foot.
Which they clearly did to try to hide the inability of their engine to stream in entire planets by making it unreasonable to traverse the entire thing (well, until modders mod in vehicles or other faster ways of getting around, anyway). Especially since they're mostly empty and things are 700/1400m apart, so trudging on foot through vast tracts of nothingness to get to randomly generated events (to be fair, some of them are pretty good).
Maybe if reviewers would start picking on the lazy choices Bethesda made instead of praising them to the moon for doing nothing new they'd actually try to make a better game next time. But for some reason Bethesda consistently releasing mediocrity is praiseworthy. Or am I simply unreasonable in expecting that if they make the same game every 10 years or so, it would at least have improved over its predecessor in some tangible way? Especially when they somehow think it's worth charging substantially more for it?
As usual, underneath the technical/UX disaster is a decent enough game, but well, we are, once again, going to need the modders to do what Bethesda couldn't be bothered to, which is to actually make it enjoyable to play.
At least by then the price should've come down, hopefully...