I get what you mean, but it makes sense in context.
Immersive “Open World” Sims with ground and space exploration have a hard time tying the two together. Often they feel like two separate games, and one of them often feels like the “second class (star) citizen”. Not that making them seamlessly connected actually makes the two mechanically complimentary, but separating them by a loading screen makes this dichotomy all the more obvious. Starfield was no exception.
To exacerbate this, Bethesda made its brand the “You see that mountain? You can climb it!” game makers (Which, to be honest, I think they started to lose the plot on what made their games good when they started saying this. But that’s a different conversation.). So when they made their foray into space exploration, they really had no one else to blame when folks expected a similar “You see that planet? You can fly to it!” design philosophy.
Though I think it would have been overlooked if the game was… good? At the very least, if it was way less bloated with low effort copy pasted fluff content. Complaints like this only tend to become so focal when people have more disappointment to express than meaningful critique can adequately convey.
That’s fair. And like I said, seamless landings and planetary travel are cool, but they don’t make a game good on their own.
That said, I’d call it less an “excuse not to like the game” and more a tangible thing players can point to when the real problem is harder to put into words. For a lot of longtime Bethesda fans, imho, that problem is that Starfield failed to deliver the Bethesda-style “believable world.”
Bethesda were never just the “see that mountain, climb it” developers. They were the “every object has a 3D model, every building has an interior, every town has a history, and not everything exists for the player” developers. That put them in a unique spot in the industry. That level of simulation let players believe in and explore their worlds in a way most games simply don’t allow. It’s why Bethesda games get such oddly specific critiques: where do the NPCs sleep, what do they eat, where do they go to the bathroom?
This doesn’t matter to everyone, so I imagine a lot of these complaints sound trivial or even insane from the outside. But for the people it does matter to, Bethesda was one of the few developers filling that niche.
So when I see complaints about seamless travel, or shopkeepers not caring that you’re standing behind their counter, or nobody reacting when you fire a gun in a crowd, or so many raider bases on an isolated planet with nobody to raid, I don’t see an excuse to not like the game. I see players struggling to express their disappointment that the game feels artificial and gamified, and that it failed to capture the soul of a Bethesda game.