PIGS IN SPAAAAAAAAACE
I have a few friends who have given Starfield a try, and they have all bailed on the game after a few evenings. These are pretty big RPG people, so I'm a little surprised (well, not really.) Turns out, space is hard to get just right. You can't just slap a continent on a map, throw a few mountains, rivers, deserts, a forest, and tell the player to get moving. Space is... well, to put it politely, it's somewhat fucking immense. And while I get that Bethesda has a building full of reasonably intelligent people at their disposal, and for the avoidance of doubt I'm giving them a pass on everything they've produced post Fallout 3, I don't think anyone in a position of power stopped to think that space is anything other than Skyrim with guns.
I love the idea of Starfield, because space exploration games are few and far between these days, but I wish Bethesda would just fuck right off and stop making games, because quite frankly they're borderline terrible at it, and worse yet have demonstrated an inability to learn from their mistakes. They have a mid-20th-century-era Soviet bent to their idea of scope, which is "more is better". A thousand towns full of the same thing! A thousand planets full of the same thing! A hundred caves full of the same things! Moar. Moar. Moar!
Anyway, if I were going to take a pitiful stab at it, I'd start by using Star Control 2 as a template. It made space exploration challenging, and fun. The only thing that was missing was a little more detail for the individual planets in the star system. You could land on most of them, and a little minigame played out where you tried to collect resources before you lander got fried. Surely there's a way to expand on that. Beyond that, the game handled space exploration as though it were a literal sea of stars. You had clusters of star systems you could 'fly' between on a 2D axis, and when you got to a system you could drop in and take a closer look, flying around on an exploded map of the area that showed the individual planets and their orbits around the star.
Encounters could happen at either map scale, and there were also wormholes to allow for even faster travel. I think I'd take it a step further and add in a type of highly-compressed space that allowed for faster travel (think something like the nether), with the right equipment. Let the player get close to where they want to go, then risk going further into the unknown. But simply jumping from one fast-travel point to another, just to 'land' and 'take off' again isn't a good scheme. You have to work to make space less boring -- this is one moment where any sort of realism will bury your experience.
You need to strike a good balance of letting the player explore, without bogging them down in the near-infinite nothingness of space, while giving them a hint of danger, and giving them granularity to the travel experience, without resorting to picking points on a map and instantly jumping there. Yeah, that's non-trivial. I'd love to take a stab at it one day. Who knows? Maybe I will.
By Jove, I had forgotten how good it is to fashion a right and proper rant.