People tend to think on black and white and not grayscale.
If you objectively compare the mechanics, writings and factions to fallout 4, Starfield is almost a direct upgrade from fallout 4 in several aspects. Gunplay, gun customization, rpg check choices that play more role in having a unique experience, factions that arent totally terribly written like it is in FO4, where almost all factions are unlikable or not interesting.
The people who are let down by starfield expected bethesda to not make a bethesda game in simple terms.
Do i think its GOTY material, hell no (im basically at the point of no return point in the game). Its a helluva lot better than FO4, but people treat the game like it killed their first child.
Well, I wouldn’t necessarily say the exploration is as good, I think the issues about not having maps and there being a lot of loading screens are valid, but those problems don’t automatically make the game horrible, and while the optimization isn’t awesome after the recent update and Nvidia driver it looks decent and runs at an almost always locked out 60 FPS on my RTX 3060 with the settings lowered, so if you want the better visuals you can get there, and if you wanna play with smooth frame rate you can make that work, too. Again, not that that excuses it, but it’s not irredeemably bad.
I think it’s important that people understand what works about the game and what doesn’t, whether they come to an end result of liking it or not, I hate to see people shit on it wholesale, and I also hate to see people defend it wholesale as well. It’s got problems, but it’s got successes, too.