I mean, "Skyrim in space" doesn't really sound as big a selling point when you stop to realize that Skyrim, which was never a vehicle of technical or gameplay innovation to begin with, is already 12 years old. There are some things people expect today that weren't even a thing back then, and no, I do not necessarily mean microtransactions.
Actually, Bethesda was among the first companies to implement microtransactions in games even before Skyrim, way back with Oblivion. When the game first launched, they provided the option to purchase horse armor for a few dollars. Just armor for your horses that increases their HP. And it supposedly sold fairly well, despite there being a lot of negative criticism from those not wanting to see content stripped out of a single-player game to be sold on the side.
That being said, this is a far cry from Bethesda's Oblivion launch, which I got on DVD on launch day without issues whatsoever.
Oblivion definitely had it's own fair share of problems. Most were not game-breaking, although some could be, like NPCs randomly falling to their deaths through bridges or getting launched through the air upon loading a save file. And performance was definitely questionable on nearly all PC hardware of the day, generally unable to even maintain a steady 30fps on most systems with what was then considered modern hardware. And there were graphical issues everywhere, including major pop-in of objects, and distant terrain textures at launch that could best be described as "pea soup". At times, the game could actually look pretty great, but it often tended to look rather janky and broken in motion.
What bothered me the most though was that all sorts of major game systems felt half-finished and botched together in Oblivion. Sure the game offered lots of classes to play as, but many of them were largely unplayable. For example, I initially started playing as a thief archer that specialized in acrobatics, which you would think would be a reasonable role to play as. Except there were barely any usable stealth mechanics in the game. And since the choice of role caused me to level up just from running, jumping and swimming, with the perks being related to those tasks, it wasn't long before the game's broken level scaling caused the enemies to become extreme damage sponges, without providing any sort of increased damage output to counter it, especially with the game's weak bows. And sure, the perks let me jump onto the roofs of houses and sprint away from enemies, but that provided no real benefit to actually getting through the game's content. There was nothing to do on house roofs aside from running into invisible walls everywhere, while the broken enemy pathfinding caused enemies to keep running in place against the walls of the building in a futile attempt to reach me on the roof, while I slowly pecked away at them with 30 arrows to the head. They didn't even allow you to enter buildings through upstairs balconies, despite them having upstairs interiors, which might have at least provided some benefit to the jumping perk.
They also allowed you to pick up and place any small objects in the world, but that system was completely broken too. You could freely jump up on a table in a tavern and kick everyone's food onto the floor, and no one sitting around the table would care in the least, just watching you trampling their meal. But as soon as you lift one worthless strawberry off the floor to set back on the table, everyone in the room freaks out and starts running around yelling "Stop! Thief! You won't get away with this! Guards! Guards!". Then a psychic guard immediately teleports in through the door with the line "Stop right there criminal scum! Nobody breaks the law on my watch!" And if you refused to pay a huge fine, they would chase you to the ends of the earth trying to kill you, and every guard in every city would immediately know about your criminal rampage of picking up a piece of fruit off the floor to set back up on a table. Even just picking up a piece of clutter that the physics system decided to randomly drop off a shelf could have a mother and her daughter that you just rescued come after you with knives. This broken crime system of course made actually playing the role of a thief impractical as well.
I found it shocking how broken much of Oblivion's game systems were, at least if you tried to do anything beyond the most common roles like warrior or mage, and how out of touch the game's 94 metascore felt. I picked up the game at launch to use with a new graphics card I got the week before to replace one that had failed, but vowed to never get a game at launch after that, since reviews couldn't really be trusted, and you are often effectively just paying extra to be a beta tester for an unfinished product. And those major gameplay issues never got fixed by the developer. Eventually, mods would address them, but those took a while, like the one that fixed the broken crime system for picking up objects that didn't come out until a few years after the game's launch. And a lot of these essential mods would have conflicts with one another, or in some cases create further performance issues, requiring one to spend significant time testing them, and hope that one of their 80 installed mods wouldn't bring the whole installation crashing down. I spent more time testing and debugging mods for the game then actually playing it.
It's probable that Starfield might actually be better than Oblivion in terms of performance, level of polish and core gameplay systems not being broken, but standards for open-world games tend to be a lot higher these days too.
The games not S tier visually.
The games got more loading screens than some decade old games. (having to load ur tiny spaceship or having to load a city store that is a small room with a vendor when you loaded entire city already? like wtf)
The games got input delay for just looting items.
The abundance of loading screens and the lack of the ability to fly freely between planetary bodies seems bizarre for such a big-budget production when you consider that games like No Man's Sky were allowing for seamless planetary landings in a procedurally-generated universe before production on Starfield even started. It undoubtedly disappointed a lot of people that free space travel wasn't available in the game when there had already been precedence for it for years. It was a similar situation with Cyberpunk, where people naturally drew comparisons to the sandbox gameplay in games like GTA that had been doing it far better for well over a decade. Game systems that were expected just simply weren't there, which seems unacceptable for games with massive budgets trying to pitch themselves as "AAAA" gaming experiences. They need to at least make sure that they are on par with what existing games are doing.
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