Yeah I’d say it was an issue of not “clicking” at first, but I think I defined it a bit more before I dropped my first playthrough. For me, the primary appeal of a Bethesda RPG is that “take off in a direction, you’ll find a story” feel. Starfield kinda has it, but they broke it up with weird design choices. The insanely frequent, lengthy cutscenes cut into the continuous flow. Having to travel at all between planets broke up the action and flow. The choice to use procedural generation was odd and really took away from the more intentional feel of prior Bethesda games, and really cut away some of the quality and quantity of environmental storytelling.

That’s my very surface level opinions from what I remember. It’s been a minute since I played it at release.