After you beat the main quests, the faction quests and the companion quests there's really nothing left to do. With the exception of the Vanguard quest, I was bored and dissatisfied with the writing and story line of every other quest.

Almost all of the quests are very linear, with no real consequences to speak of. Every single NPC involved with a quest of some kind is marked as essential because Bethesda couldn't be bothered to make any branching paths off of the sacred timeline. This also makes NG+ pointless because the outcome of the quests will be the same no matter how many times you play them.

Your constellation companions will constantly be judging your every move, and if you do anything wrong they will scold you for it because once again, you can't deviate from Bethesda sacred timeline.

Ship building was fun, but ultimately pointless since the space combat is not very challenging. Outpost building was also equally pointless and unsatisfying unless you just want to XP farm.

Almost every mechanic in this game has been designed to waste your time and inflate the game play hours. This includes the horrible skill tree, which forces you to complete challenges for each skill, as well as unlocking useless skills for each tier before you can unlock the skills you actually want. The challenges are not retroactively counted either, so if you for instance already scanned 200 creatures, it won't count towards the higher tiers until you've unlocked them first. Bethesda also locked many game play aspects behind this awful skill tree such as piloting, ship building, weapons and armor crafting. Like every other Bethesda title, all shops including the trade authority (a large interstellar corporation) have a laughable amount of credits, leaving you nowhere to sell all of your loot quickly; this is also to inflate game play hours and restricts your ability to earn money. Its like they were designing an awful mobile game when they built the mechanics for starfield.

There is no exploration because everything is procedural generated with the same handful of dungeons on every single empty planet. The "cities" are actually small towns, and there are no local maps. There's also no land vehicles to explore the barren empty planets, probably because they don't want you to hit the invisible wall and realize how small the maps actually are. This is where Bethesda really messed up, because one of the main reasons for playing a open world Bethesda game is exploration of unique dungeons, unique locations, and unique lore. Also after about 30 planets you very quickly realize the same sets of animals and plants repeat on all of the inhabited planets.

The space magic from the temples was pretty pointless, I very rarely if ever used my powers and collecting them seemed like another massive chore designed to inflate gameplay hours. After I collected the first tier of every power, I didn't bother trying to upgrade them further.

Then there's the load screens, it's ridiculous in 2023 to have so many load screens. The Creation Engine 2 aka Creation Engine aka Gamebryo engine was never meant to build a space sim, and it's painfully obvious. Even for an RPG the engine is outdated, and it's limited map sizes and inability to load interior buildings dynamically WITHOUT a loading screen make it obsolete. It's completely immersion breaking to be met with non-stop loading screens between every step of exploration. I really have low expectations for ES6 if they decide to build it using this same engine or some other reincarnation of the same engine with minor upgrades.

Although I had a few fun moments, and really tried to find the good in this game, I can't recommend it.