I got to hear a talk from a level designer who worked on Skyrim at Bethesda who had since left the company, and we needled them with some questions about Starfield and it was interesting at the time but even more interesting in the hindsight of now playing the game.

We kind of intuited through some of their answers that it sounded like they felt that with Skyrim, individual level designers and programmers and people had way more freedom to put stuff into the game; many of the more memorable side quests and interactions were never remotely planned to be in there but were just threwn together by a couple people who stayed overnight recording voices and programming in these quests and interactions and stuff, and it sounded like they did not think that was was the case with Starfield and it was a much more rigid and controlled dev environment, which would explain why so much of the stuff feels like it's randomly generated stuff you've already seen instead of coming across these weird handcrafted things.

They also talked a lot about open world level design in general and talked about how good open world level design is often inspired by Disney world, where they pay super close attention to sightlines where ever you are to make sure there's always (ideally multiple) interesting things to see and explore. You shouldn't need a waypoint or hud marker ideally, you should just walk out of one thing, look around and go "hey that looks neat let me go see what's over there", discover something magical, walk out and repeat. That kind of feeling made sense and resonated with me at the time and made me think of the new Zelda games and some of the better open world games I've played, but now in the context of Starfield, it feels like the loading screens between planets pretty fundamentally broke that cycle, and disrupted that feeling of exploration that Skyrim gave you.