I am a long-running Bethesda fan, and have sunk more than 2,000 hours into Skyrim alone. I was more than willing to give Starfield a shot, but ultimately this game disappointed me. Here are a few major issues I've had:

Procedural Worldbuilding

I can see why they used this approach to simulate the vastness of space. But both the Elder Scrolls and the Fallout games developed a real sense of place with their more limited maps. After playing for a while, you could orient yourself by the major landmarks, and everything seemed connected. With Starfield, this is only true for a few major settlements.

Outside of these settlements, locations are placed with little rhyme or reason. The best explanation I can come up with is that those who colonized space had a similar attitude as Americans who favored sprawl - everyone had an urgent desire to live as far away from other people as possible, but they had spacecraft instead of cars.

Too Little Lore

I am not expecting a new franchise to have as much complex lore as the fifth installment of the Elder Scrolls. Still, they seemed to have neglected this aspect of the setting - there are too few distinct lore books, and a good portion of those you find tend to be excerpts from old public domain works. I am always excited when finding new lore books in Skyrim, but Starfield falls flat here.

Too Little Enemy Variety

Most of the enemies you encounter seem to be humans in differently colored space suits with different types of weapons. A few robots liven things up, but there aren't a lot of different types to make things interesting. And while there are a bunch of alien wildlife out there, they mostly function as obstacles when traversing the landscape until you reach the next site - and you can easily avoid them, too.

Alien Temples

You get something cool out of Alien Temples, which means that you will likely visit them repeatedly. So why did the designers make the decision to give all of these the exact same three-dimensional puzzle? The Word Walls of Skyrim were almost always in interesting locations, and thus finding them was not a chore, but I was thoroughly bored by the tediousness of Alien Temples by the time I stopped playing.

Still, it's not all bad

Despite these criticisms, there were some aspects of Starfield I did like. Leaving the lack of enemy variety aside, I found the combat dynamics themselves to be quite fun. Fights are far more fluid than in either Skyrim or Fallout 4, with both you and the enemies zipping around the map.

I also liked some of the questlines, with the Vanguard quests being my favorite. I also liked the concept of the main questline to be quite good, including how they integrated "New Game Plus" into the story.

So if you generally enjoy the gameplay loop of Bethesda games, you should be able to get a few dozens of hours worth of entertainment out of this one. Just don't expect to play this game as long as the others.