I was with you up until the shift away from multiplayer part. I do not see that happening at all, and I don’t even like multiplayer games myself. There’s no denying that more multiplayer has been the trend for the last 30 years, spanning multiple (people) generations, and I don’t see AI changing that.
yeah I would like to leverage AI for stuff like RPG NPCs. instead of hearing the same filler lines for 200 hours of gameplay, barely reacting to the context of your game you could have a vibrant array of endless dialog that actually keeps up with your game progress (or lack thereof).
I think the takeaway here is that these things are not important to gamers. a few of us complain about it online, but clearly we are outnumbered in the market.
Since OP likes open world games, in the later Bethesda RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout 4 you can have companions. not the same level of interaction as Bioware-like parties, but it’s something.
also not really an open world game, but in Midnight Suns you’re a mystical hero in a party with some of the avengers, other marvel heroes, and even some villains. there’s a lot of personal interactions with all the members between missions.
even without the loading screens it would still be terrible. get a quest, go to your ship, take off, travel to other system, land, exit your ship, walk to destination, reverse all that to turn the quest in, rinse and repeat. it’s just a tedious experience.
the best part of Bethesda games is just being able to wander around aimlessly in a pretty environment, likely stumbling upon little easter eggs or side quests along the way. none of that exists in Starfield.
Cyberpunk was buggy, unoptimized, and kind of unfinished, but the fundamental game design was sound.
Starfield on the other hand is broken at its core. The Bethesda RPG experience just does not translate to the open worlds space map they built the game on. So they can’t take the cyberpunk approach because they’d have to build an entirely different game from scratch.