Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less. They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too. Only the most dedicated of Starfield fan would have the patience to sit down and do all the shit it takes to add a new quest for example. Iirc even Skyrim came with a mod editor with ui that was easy to understand. Right now all we have is a community xedit project that's somehow even harder to run on Linux than Starfield is.
Starfield's big problem is it's a huge universe built on an engine that really can't support massive worlds like that. The reason you can't fly around on the surface of a planet is because their crappy engine can't cope with that much space existing, and it can't load more environment when you get to the edges like every other game does because their engine doesn't support proper level streaming.
If you mod the game to force the issue it gets glitchy very very quickly.
The Starfield Creation Kit was only released a week ago (but I think to remember that there was a big delay in its release for Skyrim and Fallout, too - haven't done any modding since the Skyrim days).
There was this editor that let you make esm files. I can't remember if it was already in the game folder or you had to download from steam but it must not have been hard to set up. I remember using it to make one of the buyable houses really big on the inside.
Starfield could have been a way better game if all they did was fuck it up like 45% less.
Compared to the KOTOR series, it was lifeless. Compared to Mass Effect, it was very boring. Frustrating for a game with such strong precedents to land so weakly. But they put so much energy into quantity of content that they forgot to invest in quality.
They could have alternatively just delivered on their promises of making the game easy to mod and let the community handle the rest but they fucked that up too.
The goal was to create a game that procedurally generated itself, not one where individual hobbyists expanded it manually.