I think Bethesda “fanboys” (like myself) just really like the core experience (warts and all) I play NMS when I want to lose myself in a beautiful seamless scifi setting and i play starfield when my focus is on engaging with faction and character storylines and some campy space encounters. I kinda like how janky bethesda games can be, reminds me of playing tabletop RPGs and all the weird janky shit that happens in those games too. I like that I can be the golden boy of the crimson fleet and still join up with the freestar rangers. I make up a little story for my character and act it out and have a lot of fun doing so.
The only thing I could do without is the loading screens. I don’t mind that landing on a planet isn’t seamless, but i mean… loading screen to get on ship, loading screen to get into space, loading screen to fly to different planet, wait until scan finishes, loading screen to land on planet.
That’s the worse part for me. If it was just a short cut scene for landing on a planet, I think that’d be 100% fine.
Oh wow, I haven’t played since before you could land on planets. My issue with Elite was always feeling like there was exactly nothing to do at all beside mine and be bad at dog fights lol.