That's not the only issue it has. They could've made procedural generation work, with having a combination of hand crafted and procedural environments. But it doesn't seem like they have the skill to pull it off.

Issues this game has, and probably one of the major reasons why it's so dead feeling, is how the world doesn't react to you.

Tell me, what happens in Skyrim or Oblivion if you walk around town with your sword drawn?

What happens if you start randomly casting spells where the guards can see you?

What if you managed to get a certain artefact, wear a certain kind of armour, or work on upgrading a certain skill tree?

See what I mean? See what's missing?

The dead, empty, open world tiles only compounds this. And how everything feels even more limiting because of how the game is strictly chopped up with loading screens.

And still Star Flight did the same thing and was a all time great game, oh and it fit on two 360k floppies.

And some of them are duplicates ! I discovered THREE identical locations just roaming about ! the same dungeon layout ! but different loot. Can you believe that shit

Which is just frustrating because there's some real improvements in mays of their usual systems elsewhere in the game. The I think the persuasion mechanics are a real step up from previous games and I'm amazed the system hasn't been ported into Skyrim. They got flight mechanics to actually work in the Creation engine. Zero-G and low gravity works great. Gunplay and combat is even more improved over Fallout 4 (though it's an incremental improvement over the revolutionary leap made with Fallout 4).

Imo, Starfield is mainly lacking in only a few (though critical) things. They need more than 4 fleshed-out companions, and have them for different factions; there's a couple of NPC's that I expected to become companions. Since they insistend on having procedurally generated content, they needed to add way more pieces to their tilesets and, more importantly, have an algorithm to stitch things together and have some actual variety. As it is right now, you get the same exact facilities copy-pasted as whole spaces with no variation. And they needed to not force you into the main storyline, or at least pull a Fallout: New Vegas and have multiple paths through the main storyline.

There's a lot of good bones to be had in Starfield, which just makes the cock-ups more disappointing since they'll lead to those imprpvements being abandoned