God damnit, Starfield is such a typical Bethesda product, it's not even funny. You look at the world and stuff and it really feels like this could be something. I really like the visual design and even the way the gameplay feels, with exception of annoying bullet sponge enemies. But then at the end of the day it's still just a Bethesda game -- wide as an ocean and deep as a puddle.
There was a quest with some collector dude that started out really interesting. You had to get an artifact from him in whatever way you want... yeah, right. Either you shoot him dead or you shoot him until he gives up and let him live. Great choices. If this quest were in an Obsidian game, you just know you had at least 3 or 4 ways to deal with the situation.
Now I had a quest where you have to get some super dangerous top secret data from an archive. All the time on the way to that point people kept telling me how I have to be on my best behavior, how I can only access the data I need, how I am NOT supposed to look at anything else... Well, guess what... Once I was in the archive, I had to press 3 buttons to open a door, walk down a corridor and basically press another button. THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE. You couldn't do anything else, even if you wanted to. There is no way not "to behave", there is no way to look up any other data. Nothing. It's a linear corridor.
I swear, the writers must have a word budget of less than 250 words per NPC, otherwise I can't explain this crap. In the main story I had to talk to one person from each big religious faction about some mythical mumbo jumbo. How does that interaction look like? Player can ask 3 questions and the NPC replies with maybe 2 or 4 lines. End of it is you saying "Hm yes, now I understand everything" - meanwhile I'm sitting here like wtf did just happen.
EVERYTHING in this game is like that. What's the point of a gazillion quests if all of them are like this. Please just scrap 50% of them and instead make everything else 50% bigger...
At this point, the only good quests in the game are the ones that are (almost) unmarked and entirely localized in small areas. Where you don't constantly fast travel from one planet to the next to a point where you lose the sense of scale in the world, because everything is a black loading screen away anyways.
Man, it's such a shame. This could be so good, but it's... Bethesda. It's the same crap every time with all of their games. This is why I stopped bothering with Fo4 and why I would have never even tried Starfield if it weren't included in Game Pass. Deep inside, I knew this is exactly what the game would be like, and I can already tell you now that TES6 will be exactly the same.
/Edit: My companion just told me she is part of House Va'ruun. NO ****. Please, man, don't insult my intelligence. That was obvious from the very first moment. She even wears clothes that are like whatever the Va'ruun guys are wearing and now I was forced to act all surprised and what not. If at least my character could be like "yeah, I kinda expected that" ... but nope... "wow, you lied to me, this is so disrespectful." ... bruh, just stop.