A huge game with all the Bethesda trappings that somehow manages to feel really small. This is Bethesda's biggest game to date, with a thousand planets and hundreds of named characters and quest. All the marketing pointed to there being an entire universe full of interesting things to explore. The reality is that while Starfield is a good game and I enjoyed the 35 hours that doing the main quest (1 time) and most of the major sidequests took, I'm still a little disappointed and feel like there's a lot of unrealized potential here.The biggest problem the game has is that there's simply no reason to explore the vast majority of the planets. Outside of the couple dozen handcrafted planets that the main story and big sidequests railroad you through, everything else is procedurally-generated and every planet just has a few POIs - abandoned factories, research labs, caves, and bandit camps. All with terrible loot. The novelty wears off after just a few times clearing them. 

This essentially turns the game into a series of fast travel markers and makes the game feel tiny. There's no point customizing your ship; you're just using it to jump to the next mission. It's disappointing that 12 years later Skyrim still feels like a much bigger game. That game gave you reasons to explore, the smaller landmass allowed for more handcrafted content and something exciting to find around every corner. Starfield, in contrast, opted for a gigantic scale and obviously couldn't fill even 10% of that scale with content. Some players may have fun walking slowly across barren planets looking for something interesting. I can't.

The companions and roleplay were also a bit disappointing. The companions are all goody-two-shoes milquetoast people who with rare exceptions have nothing interesting going on. There's no room to actually roleplay as a space pirate or as a 'bad guy' - your companions will hate you if you do as little as destroy an automatic vacuum cleaner. You're railroaded into playing as a good guy, or as a good guy who sometimes acts like a smartass. The lack of choice in dialogue and in approaches to quests is disappointing.

That said, it's not all bad. The UC Vanguard and Freestar Ranger questlines are well done. There's some genuine suspense in some of the quests. The game also looks great (though not so great to justify how poor it runs at times) and nails the "NASA-punk" aesthetic. You can tell a ton of love went into the look of the game.

The main quest is just okay. New Game+ is really heavily encouraged. It's not a feature I really take advantage of in games. Once I complete a game I'm usually ready to move on, and that's the case here too. I appreciate the direction they took it in and see the value of running through the main quest again and again, but some of the pre-release hype that 'the game doesn't start until you hit NG+' is complete nonsense. I'd recommend doing everything you'd like to do on your first playthrough. There's no benefit to waiting to do side stuff on NG+.

I wish Steam had a middle road option for recommendations. I enjoyed the game; I was never bored in my 35 hours, and the game feels good to play. Even as someone who's far more into fantasy than sci-fi, I was drawn into the world that Bethesda built and am interested enough to play an expansion when one releases. This gets a soft recommendation from me. If you're on the fence, I'd maybe wait a while for a sale or for the mod scene to mature a bit more to clean up some of the weird design decisions. Starfield is a good game, but it's disappointing that at its core it's basically Skyrim with a sci-fi coat of paint. I think everyone was hoping Bethesda's design philosophy had evolved more since 2011, and that hasn't happened here.