Starfield

Arguably, Starfield is full of handcrafted content that is pretty good. However, they decided to fill in the space they can't fill by hand with repetitive unsatisfying content. So as a new player, I went after these random things and got disappointed and bored and dropped the game.

I'm now playing a second time from the beginning, and simply stick to where quests guide me, and explore only very little by myself. Looking into a new star system is still fun, but if there is no reason to land on a planet, then I don't do that anymore. I mostly stick with quests. And that's so much more fun, many of the questlines actually have some interesting story behind them, and there are also fun random encounters when travelling between the stars. Now I actually enjoy it.

Skyrim did a better job at guiding the player, due to there not being any empty space, or space filled with meaningless content. You could basically explore everywhere and always find something nice and interesting. But then Skyrim also had a very small world compared to starfield.

I hope that in the next decades game studios will find ways to create these kind of immense worlds as in starfield, while making it very obvious where things are interesting and where not. It took a little too long to learn that in starfield.