And this whole conversation overlooks one of the major complaints a player would have of Bethesda did the same thing.

Entering an atmosphere changes the physics and those physics are different for all sorts of reasons on every planetary body for every ship. From gravity to atmospheric density the ship would fly differently on every one and that ignores the fact that ships are near enough to infinite in configuration in this game due to the builder.

If Bethesda did this, players would be complaining it wasn't realistic enough.

This is basically what No Man's Sky did. When Bethesda took their crappy RPG engine and mocked up interplanetary travel using loading screens and then started writing quests and storylines, NMS focused on building a very good engine that allowed you to go from surface to air to space to interplanet / stellar while mostly ignoring the rest of gameplay and storytelling.

And not to be too hard on No Man's Sky given the resource differential, but ultimately all it is is one really rock solid system thats not quite a full game surrounded by a lot of hollow feeling stuff to kinda flesh it out on paper. Ultimately Starfield has way sharper hooks almost immediately simpy because while it has a relatively crappy engine and at time frustrating amounts of loading screens and limitations, they spent more time writing content and dialogue that makes the universe feel actually alive and rich, and polishing each individual system until it's fun.

I think The Outer Worlds is also worth comparing to as Obsidian is even farther down the same route as Bethesda imho, making a much smaller universe that feels even less free than Starfield but having even better writing and I would argue it's possibly the best game of the three though I have to withhold my judgement on Starfield until I atleast finish the main quests.

There's a mod for that

Elite Dangerous is by far the most fun I've ever had landing and taking off in a space ship. No other game comes even close. It genuinely never got old. The entire docking process was so damn fun with a HOTAS.

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

Star citizen has become one of my favorite dev hell sagas. I had such high hopes for it when it was announced over a decade ago.....

I just don’t think it’s good to let a company get away with not improving.

The small improvements they have made in Starfield are alright, but it feels like the bar was set with Skyrim and they can’t even really match something from 12 years ago.

I do not have high hopes for TES VI and I’m half expecting something extremely dated, as based off FO4 and Starfield I think the studio’s best days are behind them at this point.

Oh wow. A truely stunning achievement for this small indie studio.

I see. In that case I fully expect someone to make a 'open cities' mod for systems. If you can reach the billboards it should be possible to create a transition to planet space. Maybe.

Lol, that's actually fucking hilarious.