Did you play Starfield? It's definitely got plenty of ideas. It just chickened out of some of them and wrote checks it couldn't cash for others. (Also, I think you meant astronomy, not astrology.)
I've got to say...both of those sentences are an absolutely wild perspective. The first on the history of the medium, and the second for thinking that Bethesda will make anything other than the type of game they've always made for the past 30 years.
For the author and everyone else. If they're not throwing away their entire tech stack and workflow for how they build this sort of game and starting from scratch, they're making a huge mistake. At least start with what Obsidian built for Avowed and work from there.
Honest question: can you name an asshole gaming community that isn't tied to a live service game? Because I feel like the shitty community comes from expecting everything to be continually improved, and lots of those improvements are subjective, so someone's improvement is someone else's regression. I'll happily revise my hypothesis with some good counter examples though.
I'd recommend playing them in release order. You can skip the MSX games and go right to Metal Gear Solid, but these games do build on each other. MGSV is probably the best-playing game in the series, but it has the least of the story bits that the series is known for.
Metal Gear is a series that will turn on a dime from being deathly serious into breaking the fourth wall for a joke or gameplay reasons. They're amazing.
A few dozen hours of content over the course of a month; I don't think it's strange that the player count dropped substantially. Live service games just broke how people think about video games, and this isn't a live service.
Not just pausing; it's poor value for the customer to not have an offline mode for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is longevity, because their servers won't be there forever.
Terrible name, likely online-only and with that kernel-level anti-cheat that makes it both intrusive and Windows-only, and it's got hitstun decay. It's like they're trying to tell me not to play it.