Even Starfield's community patch modders are growing 'disenchanted' with the sci-fi RPG, as volunteers depart in droves: 'If nobody comes forward, we may have to retire the project'

Bethesda is such a garbage company. No idea why people buy these half assed games
- I never really understood that. Everyone hyped up skyrim so hard and when i played it it was... Meh? It was all grey and jank that apparently is enjoyable for some people.
  I really liked new vegas and when fallout 4 came out, i never watched a trailer or anything, but i was sick on release day, so on that day, i watched the release trailer and thought why not. I was truly shocked how god damn ugly the game was and how shallow and broken it was.
  People had high hopes for starfield and i thought i was taking crazy pills. It's just the same thing again but somehow even worse. I think i just don't get it.
- Because we all loved morrowind...
  
  I certainly did. That good will got me buying their games up through Fallout 4 which finally crushed it. Didn't even look at Starfield.

¯(ツ)/¯ non-FOSS software shouldn’t expect volunteers
- Fans patching the Bethesda games is as at least as old as Daggerfall, if not earlier. Daggerfall didn’t have Helseth and Barenziah as Dark Elves until fans fixed it. Pickpocketing in Morrowind is broken unless you use the code patch. The Oblivion leveling problem punishes you for playing the game.
  Like every guide for every Bethesda game is going to start with download this unofficial patch, and the unofficial patches for the DLC, and this installer. They’ve relied on fans and treated the community like it’s an FOSS community, without realizing that without good product, the volunteers won’t come.
  
  Yes, but that shouldn't be the norm, or an expectation, of the developer. "Oh, we don't need to worry about the game, the fans will just mod it and it'll bring us lots of money!"

My main gripe with the universe of starfield is that it works on fallout logic, as in, everyone acts as if telephones and cameras don't exist, despite being 300 years in our fucking future without any tech loss.
That "don't you guys have phones?" Blizzard meme is ironically spot on here. They don't. Communication only happens face to face while out of a ship.
The other thing is how a lot of the game runs on "nobody cares". Alien ship showing up on orbit? Nobody cares. Another alien ship showing up and attacking you? Nobody saw it, nobody cares. Alien space magic? Nobody cares. Alien space magic being used to wreak havoc in a big city? Not a word on it, instant amnesia after the attack.

The base game is fine. Once. Its just fine. Once.
When you beat the game and go thru The Unity to a whole ass different dimension and not one single detail is different in any way. That's what kills the drive to go onward. Because the game was fine. Once.
The whole story is predicated on a multiverse that effectively doesn't exist. Except on 1 sidequest for Barrett.
- Reading your comment, I've just learned more about the story that nearly 250 hrs of gameplay got me. So the end is hokey, huh? Big surprise. I hate Sarah.
  
  You want a fan fucking tastic game that you can put 250 hours in and never regret a minute of it?
  The Yakuza franchise. Start wirh Yakuza 0. Play them all. You will laugh. You will cry. You will get so irrationally angry at pixels you'll want to actually murder them. You'll fall in love. And cry some more. Your heart will break many times. And nothing will ever be the same.
  Ever had a game or movie or book leave you in stunned silence? You spend the next week thinking about it? That's the Yakuza franchise. It's silly and stupid and hilarious and it'll tear your damn heart out when you least expect it.

Lol it's such a tremendously boring game with dated gameplay. Bless your little heart if you enjoy it, but it's a bland, middling game at best and flat out bad in many ways.
- I hope they do a proper sequel that doesn't suck. Skyrim in space would be cool if they actually deliver that.

Hehe. So, I've got 243 hours into Starfield. Level 45.
For me, the game is side quests, killing bad guys all over the place, and taking over as many ships as I can.
I've completely ignored the main mission. Haven't really done any crafting other than upgrading weapons. I started a base and forgot where its at.
The companions are all horrid. I hang out with the robot guy. He's got good guns.
I use Heller's Cutter, Arc Welder, and Auto-Rivet. Nothing else. Seemed fitting for a miner. And people burn real good.
I mostly don't use ship storage except for uncommon stuff. I go through the ridiculous torment of tossing all my junk on the ground in a hold of my ship. Silly fun.
I don't do a lot of space combat. I've got a stack of Class C ships whenever I get around to optimizing them. At some point that will be a new piece of the game that I'll play.
I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb. Can't tell you exactly what I've found fun in this game where I've opted out of most of the game. But ... every now and then I quicksave and just start burning down all the civilians. A lot of em won't die. But I keep trying. And then I load my save, because I want to be able to land there again.
- I may never pursue the main mission. Looks kinda dumb.
  It very much is, and the 'ending' was enough for me to drop the game and uninstall it same day. I barely made it to the end, and goddamn was it not worth it.
  
  I don't really want any magic powers or some final culmination. If I've used the (100 cells!) on my cutter, you get to meet my welder, and if you're out of reach, eat some rivets. I'm not playing some bad guy, but almost the entire game for me is bloodshed, up close, and hardcore. Ya fuk the main mission.

It was bound to happen, modders can't fix a soulless game. There's no interesting characters, factions, or world setting to grab anyone's interest.
I thought modders would have abandoned it sooner though.
- It was incredibly mid. For something Bethesda hyped for over half a decade they sure made a bland game. Throwing aside all of the incredibly dated gameplay, you hit the nail on the head. It was boring
  You can tell every faction was decided by a corporate committee inside Bethesda and Microsoft. They couldn't be too risky, couldn't come close to possibly offending one person or risk having slightly fewer gamers. That results in a boring as hell game. Everyone was too goddamn nice in the game. No one ever got mad at you. You could punch someone in the face and the response would be "hey, that's not nice" and then they would continue on. Hold on there don't want to possibly scare off a potential customer by having a realistic situation there.
  
  Meanwhile a Bethesda game like Fallout 3 had its fair share of flaws, but gave you plenty of opportunity to decide if you wanted to be the good guy or not. Blow up a town? Kill off all residents of Tenpenny Tower, or whack all the ghouls that want to take up residence? Why not all of them? You decide!
  It also wasn't afraid of locking players out of quests if they behaved like an asshole. I liked that, why would somebody try to work with you after you just gave them the proverbial finger?
  Far better than 'oh golly, you just told me that I'm not a nice person. Well, that's not very neighbourly of you, but I'll pay you my life-long savings if you hop over to the next hub and return my package that I conveniently know is collecting dust over there, but can't be bothered to fetch myself'.
  
  My biggest issues were that the world building felt so lazy, in that every faction essentially boiled down to Space America in various aspects. You got the Space American Liberal Authoritarian State, you got the Space American Cowboys, the Space American Technocrats, and the Space American Religious Fundamentalists. I found all of these factions kinda repugnant for one reason or another, and uninspired to boot, and so I never felt a pull to experience the world on a deeper level once I had gotten tired of the regular gameplay.
  
  i'm kind of grateful for starfield actually. Feels like I can see bethesda as it actually is, even though it was obvious even before. Its so easy to just not care about anything they do. They can release next elderscrolls all they want, its all dead to me. Even if they manage to make it decent i still dont want to even look at it. Its going to cost 80€ or something like that most likely, so that is so much money saved for something more worthwhile too.
- Modders could fix that, but why bother making it a mod when you could just make a whole new game from scratch for just a little more work?

The problems of Starfield, the ones that prevent it from being great even if only through modding, are engine-level problems. Those can't be fixed without remaking the entire game from scratch in a new engine, and nobody wants to do that.
Maybe in a couple decades we'll get Starfield Remastered made in UE9.
- Not really an engine problem, but Bethesda not caring to make the setting even remotely believable and making the mechanical parts feel isolated and meaningless is what hurts the game the most.
  Exploring and collecting materials almost serves a purpose, as you need them to craft/upgrade armor and weapons, or to create stuff around your base, but you can just buy the stuff you need off vendors, which makes both the exploration and the point of having a base pointless. Crafting is almost something you might care about, but you can buy pretty much anything you need off vendors (heal kits, drugs) or get them as drops. None of the crafting targets the ship or its parts, for whatever reason.
  If the game was just Dungeon -> Vendor -> Dungeon loop, it'd be much, much better rated and less hated. The lack of variety is felt very early on anyway, it's not like cutting the bullshit would make it worse to endure.
  Also, considering how nearly everyone using UE besides Epic themselves seem to do a really shitty job, including Bethesda with Oblivion Remaster, I'd expect that SF remaster to be even worse than the original 😆

I bought it on confidence when it released. That was the last time I ever did this. I played 25 very boring hours and uninstalled it. It's very difficult to figure out how you can fail so spectacularly with such a budget, such a long development time, and such a carte blanche with making a new universe from scratch
- The thing for me is that it's a game about a guild of explorers, and the game is all fast travel. The bits you do "explore" were soulless.
  
  As other people have complained, it's a space exploration game without the space nor the exploration
  
  God how did they fuck that up? Who thought I'd want to fast travel there? Sure sometimes, but honestly I'd love it if it showed how many minutes to destination and then you started jumping.
  You're in the pilots chair, you see 10 minutes to the other side of the galaxy where your mission is. You hesitate because that's far, but 2 minutes away is your home base anyway so might as well swing through and drop off some stuff, make sure the pumps and extractors are working. 6 minutes past that is that side quest you've been putting off, I guess we can do that too. You hit the jump button, stars whizz past. You go talk with your crew, get caught up on conversations. You jump back in the chair when the 20 second warning goes off. You jump out and arrive, but there is a weird signal on a nearby planet in this system...
  Now THAT's the game i wanted. Altering one mechanic right there completely changes the entire style of the game. I will forever be annoyed that everything in the game is instant fast travel. Sure have a button there to skip if people want to, but personally I prefer to lay back and fully immerse myself
  
  Exactly. What made Morrowind's sauce was discovering all these places on foot
- They changed the recipe. Skyrim, Fallout 3 and 4, Oblivion, and Morrowind all had something in common: handcrafted environments densely packed with points of interest.
  Starfield used procedurally generated content. It generates abandoned mines and outposts from a tileset and then drops you in the literal desert between them.
  
  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 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
  
  And still Star Flight did the same thing and was a all time great game, oh and it fit on two 360k floppies.
  
  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

The problems with Starfield aren't so much the bugs as they are fundamental, often dated, design issues. Here's a sort of Let's Play from a podcast I follow with one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy. Around the 10m mark, you can start to see where this sandbox should have accounted for this kind of play. If you can't simultaneously do that while making a galaxy with 1000 planets, then you should probably scope down until you can. Starfield is not a terrible game, but Bethesda needs to evolve.
- The story is bad, the ship’s weapons selection is terrible, the outposts are almost useless, the temples are ridiculous, the powers are mostly unnecessary and soooo mmmaaannnyyy loading screens….
  
  It's Skyrim with a coat of lead paint.
  It's been clear for over a decade that the Creation Engine (let's be honest it's still Gamebryo) has run its course. It is not a viable option for a modern game anymore. It has architectural limitations that simply prevent a modern gaming experience.
  There have been so many Creation Engine apologists since Oblivion trying to justify its continued existence through multiple new Fallout and Elder Scrolls games, always trying to say that it's fine. Starfield was the chance to prove that the limitations aren't actually architectural and that it could be used for a modern game. Clearly that's not the case. Taking just about any other modern open world RPG to directly compare, Starfield feels like crap in comparison. Hell, even the launch version of Cyberpunk felt better than Starfield does now.
  
  "Starfield is my dream game."
  -Todd Howard
  
  All of your criticisms are spot on. The only thing is disagree with is the story. I thought it was alright. Some of the side quests were great, but there weren't a lot of those.
  I really enjoyed the ship building, but it was extremely limited and unbalanced.
  I will say the loading screens didn't bother me, though.
- one guy who loves trying to bend sandbox simulations to the point of breaking and a gal who writes comedy
  Abby and Vinny from Giant Bomb Beastcast
- It's not that it's outdated, oblivion does this sort of thing. It's that starfield just isn't good, and the older titles are better
  
  It can be both. It was impressive when Oblivion had 7 different interlocking systems but none of them were particularly good, but these days, I think we expect at least one or two of them to be significantly better.

Starfield would be fine if there was a way to get from place to place without constant reloads. This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
The thing is, we already have games like No Man's Sky which do this very well. Starfield may have been better received if it came out 15 years ago, but against modern space games, it just sucks.
That's ignoring anything else wrong with the game, of course, and there is plenty. But I could get over a lot if it didn't feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
- This is a limitation of the (ancient) engine the game is on, as I understand it.
  Old engine isn't always bad. It is if you do like Todd and just slap more and more plugins and technology on top and call it a new engine, instead of fixing underlying issues or rewriting/updating old parts.
  Which is why Starfield NPCs walk onto tables and become owls when the camera zooms into conversations, etc: It is the same code that is used in Skyrim and partly Oblivion. And Todd Howard doesn't want devs doing silly things like fixing twenty year old code, he wants new and bigger.
- Freelancer would have been fresher in memory 15 years ago, and that's one that had seamless intra-system travel. Gameplay in Freelancer even flowed better than NMS for getting from orbit to orbit and having encounters or discoveries along the way. It just didn't have the on-foot gameplay. I had the same problem with loading screens in Everspace 2. Killed the flow. Whoever tries to do this again is going to have to make sure transitions are minimal.
  And that's what I don't get about Starfield, conceptually. With this project scope, you're not competing well with NMS for ship-to-foot or orbit-to-surface transition, you're not doing better than Freelancer--a 20+ year old game--for all the in-space stuff, and the procgen hamstrings you with all the "Bethesda magic" their worlds are known for. It's like someone said "let's do Daggerfall in space" and went rigid top-down design with it, retrofitting whatever they could along the way to make a functional game around the procgen.
  
  I maintain that if they didn't bother with the space thing, or abstracted it more to a "blip on a screen" type of topdown play like in mass effect, it would be a better game. They could have spent that time on the shooter gameplay loop not being shit.
- But I could get over a lot if it didn’t feel like I was playing a menu instead of flying a spaceship at every change of scenery.
  I stopped playing mid-loading screen. My awareness just snapped into place, and I realized that the last 30 minutes of "gameplay" was effectively:
  bland fetch quest dialogue
  walk through corridor - board ship
  loading screen
  space (menu)
  loading screen
  Space over different planet (menu)
  loading screen
  landing pad - walk through corridor
  bland fetch quest dialogue
  GoTo step 2

If the base game has to be made better with mods then you’ve failed as a game designer.

I am a huge BGS and "game cinema" fan, and Starfield felt so... boring. Both the first bit I played before I dropped it, and YT videos to see what I was missing.
For lack of another explanation, its like all those fun side quests and nooks individual writers went crazy making lost their spark. Even ME Andromeda had more compelling bits.
So I can see modders shying away. Why put all that work into something one has no desire to replay, especially with the alternatives we have these days.
- You would have to basically make a whole game and rewrite characters and quests to make it better. But that's a lot of work for modders especially when they're not that interested in the game to start with.
- This video manages to say everything there is to say about the game in under two minutes 😅

The fundamental concept and theme of the game is trash. It literally makes everything you do meaningless, it inevitably leads to you becoming the jaded villain. It would be better if they had an end where you destroyed the universe shifting thing and were locked in one.

i don't even know how you could meaningfully mod Starfield. the game is rotten to the core, you would be better off making your own space rpg

I have almost 6500 hours in FO4, I played today.
I have maybe 300 hours in Starfield, can't be arsed to look. Haven't touched it in at least a year.
Bethesda knows how to make great games, but they chose not to. I don't know why.
That's my take.
- Coming from a long time fan of Bethesda RPGs They have gotten way too comfortable relying on radiant quests and proc gen content. Those aren’t inherently bad, but the way they were implemented in Starfield was. What’s so fun about landing on a planet that appears the same as another a few light years away and seeing the same fucking cryogenics lab with the same layout, items, lore logs, and enemy placement? Chasing the same bounties for a paltry sum of credits (not that you’ll need them it’s easy to break the economy) or legendary loot that you’ll likely just sell (for credits you won’t use)? There are cool things like ship building that could be further fleshed out but so much of the game ended up undercooked and uninspired (space travel with your ship was a glorified screensaver in a game about space traversal for Christ’s sake).
  
  Yes, the second I realized they were actually doing that with literally copy pasted areas and notes and characters it killed the game for me. I can be reasonable for a dungeon having the same layout but not written content and characters. It invalidates the entire experience.
- I think if Starfield had come out 10 years ago it would have wowed people and been a classic. But now it just seems dated when you have other games doing RPG better (Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher 3, Baldurs Gate 3) and open world space better (No Mans Sky).
  Starfield doesnt do RPG as good as those games, nor does it do open world space as well as No Mans Sky. I've heard it described as being as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, and that doesnt seem far off to me.
  I really hope Bethesda have paid attention and dont make the same kind of mistakes with Elder Scrolls VI. Big and empty is not the way to go.
  
  Maybe it would have been better received 10 years ago but I don’t know about being beloved like the elder scrolls or fallout games. 10 years ago was Fallout 4 but even in Skyrim era, it’d be great graphics but without the wonderful whimsy
  Starfield is too normal. Bethesda games excel when they take the weirdness of the world seriously. Starfield is too serious conceptually. Elder Scrolls, just the concept of everything being canon because of dragon breaks and other weird aedra/daedra/chim/godhead shenanigans lets writers write wild while it still fitting in as serious in universe
  They’ve managed to do that well enough with Fallout even though it’s supposed to be alternate reality world. Still wacky even if not as lore interesting as TES
  Starfield is too unimaginative of a sci-fi universe so far. It’s too normal and because of that, they can’t write whacky in a way that people buy into and love. So then they end up judging the game by its systems and mechanics and technical merit way more than they do elder scrolls games or fallout.
  Also base/ship building is given too much focus for a single player game. These games aren’t pretty enough to be a single player game that gets beloved for base building like Animal Crossing
- Damn dude, I'm glad you got so much out of FO4 I did one playthrough when it released and tried to play it again this year, barely got into it.
  That's when Bethesda died for me, didn't find Skyrims simplifications all that good either but it was still a fun game
  Feels like Bethesdas modus operandi is to make a game that appeals to everyone and that's unfortunately coming at the cost of its established fan base
  
  My Bethesda rant goes something like this: "they think the ideal video game is when you can treat everything like action figures, make anything happen in any combination just to see it happen, bash em together, pull them apart, make them kiss, make them join every team and do every thing, do whatever you want, and then fuck off because it never meant anything".
- There is just so much potential... squandered.
  Silly example- why are there elevators and LOADING SCREENS in New Atlantis - if you have enough jetpack or just abuse TCL, you can walk around the entirety of New Atlantis, without a single loading screen.
  But for some reason Bethesda decided it needed some loading screens for no good reason whatsoever.
- Your take makes me mad. Not because you are wrong or anything, but because you are entirely right and I don't want you to be lol! I wanted this game to be cool so badly.

Maybe they should just stay in their lane and keeping making Elder Scrolls and Fallouts..I'd be down with that.

Literally just No Man's Sky but worse.

I had super high hopes for this game. I hope its not abandoned completely and we can retry for a starfield 2 in the future. It has a great concept.
- It has a great concept.
  🤨
  The concept is literally "generic sci-fi RPG."
  
  "Bethesda game in spaaaaaceee" is more than that, you know it, and it was proven when one of the first costume mods on Nexus was the space suit with a force field boob window tyvm.

People still care about Starfield in 2025? I thought everyone went back to Skyrim a year ago.
- I really like it, I've got over 1000 hours in it i know its got its problems and I understand why people don't like it, but none of the things it does wrong are that big of a deal to me and I have fun running around doing little quests. It scratches an itch for me so I keep returning to it. Of course I want tons of support for the game, but if nobody made anything more for it I'd probably still put another 1000hrs in.
- The game isn't good, but reading how bad it is is a certain entertainment to me, not gonna lie.
  Funny thing is that I decided to pirate it around February 2024, after seeing how much people were hating it. "It can't be that bad, can it?" - my low expectations were disappointed by reality
  
  Ooooo shhhh you didn't go to the seas for it, I sold you my old copy at a discounted rate. Nothing more to see here big corporations.
- I started playing it again after going back to Elite Dangerous. I'm on an expedition in Elite Dangerous so there is no one around. I'm back in Starfield to try and remember where I left off.
- Yes. I enjoy the game. I wasn't expecting Star Wars, and therefore I was not disappointed. I got a Bethesda style take on Elite Dangerous or Star Citizen, without an always online multiplayer requirement or getting a game still in the alpha stages of development for the last 10 years.
  While there are certain elements that I don't like, they are small issues that mods can easily fix. I cannot do that with Elite or Star Citizen. And unfortunately, this genre of games is incredibly tiny. Like, basically the only other option I haven't mentioned is EVE Online. No thanks.
  
  I like how you got downvoted for liking it.

<Reads all the other comments>
Ok, but apart from that, it's okay, right?
Seriously - what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn't require a huge learning curve? (I'm not a fan of flying stuff and too much trading is boring, but I do like exploring)
- I second No Man's Sky.
  But if you want something a lot more serious, a proper simulator, but also requires time to learn (for when you get bored of the simplicity of No Man's Sky), maybe give X4 a shot.
- Ok, but apart from that, it’s okay, right?
  No. Not by a long shot. You're better off playing Fallout 4.
  what is a good space exploration/trading game that doesn’t require a huge learning curve?
  Freelancer. It's old (2003), but it's still effectively the Explore/Trade/Fight space sim that every other game gets compared to. I'll note that it's focus is on getting good combat ships and flying around, exploration exists but is the least developed aspect, I'd say. Gotta get it thru the high seas, tho.
  Evochron Legacy is an indie game that might scratch your itch, it also lets you fly into planets' atmospheres and it accounts for the friction, so while you can fly fast, doing so will damage your ship. I don't think its learning curve is too steep, but it can take some time to get used to. Try the demo before buying it, as one negative review suggests
  Lastly, check out Underspace's demo. Still in Early Access, but seems promising.
  
  Freelancer sounds interesting - I started searching and landed on the Amazon page for it, which told me " You last purchased this item on 29 Apr 2005". I have no recollection of the thing, but then I have played a lot of games. Still, worth a revisit - I'll take a look. Thanks.
- Have you tried No Man’s Sky or Elite Dangerous?
  Where do they land on your scale?
  
  E:D has a pretty steep curve, there’s a ton of external information that needs to be absorbed to get the most out of the game, and then once you get into it, you discover that “it’s lightyears wide, and one inch deep”. That said, I gotta hand it to the devs who are constantly trying to keep it interesting. I earned my carrier, thought “and then…?” and that was kinda it. Might give NMS a try just for something different.
  
  I bought NMS when it was released, and hated it. Ok, it's legendary as something that was released before it was ready and that undoubtedly spoiled it for me - endless running and nothing to do, and I'm sure it's better now.
  Elite Dangerous was quite fun for a while, but I got frustrated with the flying aspect quite a bit and after several deaths I gave up. I'm old enough to remember the first Elite, which was even more unforgiving.

I never played it, but believed the reviews that stated that there was basically no real metaplot, and there was a mini game involving floating through stars when you found an alien artifact that you couldn't skip after the first time.
Oh, and no real aliens.
WTF Bethesda?
- There was alien life but not sentient.
  The real problem was the size of everything and the lack of anything meaningful to do.
  
  You're correct, there was alien life, but... this is a SciFi game with alien artifacts. Not even a shred of contact with intelligent alien life?
  Like I stated, I never played it, but your latter statement was echoed by multiple sources, so I believe you.

That’s how projects go. But I bet it happens faster when enthusiasm for a game has the curve this title did.