How much of Starfield’s explorable areas are seamless like Skyrim’s? It’s not just explorable areas, it’s areas you explore without meeting a loading screen. All the areas in the world don’t mean anything if you have to constantly load them in and break immersion.
Thing is, with Starfield's structure Bethesda essentially killed it's own winning formula. And this is a hard statement from a guy who spent 50 hours in SF and kinda enjoying his time with the game despite some major flaws, undercooked features and sad state of a PC port.
Bear with me.
In every Bethesda game everything revolved around the emergent gameplay in clear big overworld that you can roam freely to your heart's content. Skyrim, The Commonwealth, DC, Cyrodiil and even Morrowind (depsite the loading between cells) were huge locations where you could visibly go anywhere, do anything and explore them at your own pace. Even the MSQ missions were designed to take the advantage of it: usually the quest markers were so far removed from one another, that you would've explore the map in a very unique pace even if you rush through the story.
Oh! I see a lanmark! I should check it! Oh, there's a quest there! Oh, some interesting abandoned mall with cool enviromental sidestory! Oh, I've found a dragon shout in a random mine! Wow, Oblivion gates out of nowhere! I hope you've catched my drift.
Starfield does not work this way due to it's essentially fractured structure. Story took me 28 hours (I've reloaded to a no-turning-point save and now clearing the side activities from there) and you can rush it TOTALLY ignoring the rest of Starfield world in it's entirety through the menu teleports. All because the game is not a continious journey through the vast overworld, but a set of moderately-sized locations separated by a menu. In essence, traversal in Satrfield is basically beam-me-up-Scottie sim. You can otally ignore base buiilding, space fairing and even faction quests. The game has ZERO hooks for you to even care about them. That's why at a two or three points during MSQ the game will kick you in the nuts and demand you to level up and obtain a huge sum of credits, because it has no emergent gameplay to draw you into the other content otherwise.
You don't even know what content will be interesting for you, because you can't see in with your own eyes while roaming the overworld. On one moon I've found a cave full of dead miners, raiders and some dino remains. I thought 'wow, that's the enviromental storytelling master-class from the Bethesda I've always loved'. The I've
found the exact same cave 5 times after that. Even the story mission are reusing random seed outposts and even dungeons.
The irony here, the only part of SF you can't just outright ignore is the story. All the space magic (basically quite lazy reskins on familiar spells and shouts) are locked behind the story progression. And unlike Skyrim, it's not the early couple of quests but the latter half of the plot.
I dunno, man. I kinda love the game regardless (it's a solid 7.5 for me), but Todd's unhinged desire to create a game to rival NMS/Skyrim/Destiny, all of them at the same time, essentially killed the core that worked so well for like 20+ years. And I'm not sure that the modding will somehow fix that. It's a Bethesda Identity Crisis.
