The thing with Bethesda games is that their strength - if you can even call it a strength - was their gameplay loop. As Todd himself used to say, "you see that mountain, you can go there", and you would find various random events, enemies, or dungeons along the way. Bethesda's post-Morrowind games are a perfect example of theme park design, you have a new toy every ten steps. These games are perfect for people who were either born with an attention deficit or are intentionally looking to play something without using their brain.
And this may sound like criticism here but it really isn't. Skyrim is the perfect example of the formula that Bethesda has managed to come up with after years of refinement, it's not by chance that it was released and re-released so many times. You open the game, pick a random direction, and just go. Things happen around you, you talk to NPCs, but everything is really vague and secondary. Nothing is really of much importance, the exploration itself is what matters. You can stop playing at any point and come back at any point exactly because the in-game events are irrelevant, you are stuck in the loop of exploring, killing enemies, collecting items, and going back to exploring.
But then in Starfield they decided that you no longer have a single big world to explore, which causes the first break in the loop. Now you have to go through 3 loading screens to go from one place to another. But unlike what happened in previous games, you don't find several different random things along the way - it's quite the opposite, you follow a whole path to find a single random thing. Essentially, they managed to break the only vaguely interesting thing that existed in their formula. And without it, you are left with having to interact with the rest of the game: the story, the dialogue, and the gameplay. And this is where you see that the king is naked. He always was, but now you can't help but look.
