Hot take: Starfield *might* be Bethesda's best game.
For context, this is a barely altered text I sent my gf a short while ago trying to explain how Starfield could, in some ways, be Bethesda's best game. I'll add a short bullet point list of other things to do/reasons for my opinion that I didn't think to include in the text message.
Starfield is the first Bethesda game that seems to keep getting more fun the farther you play as one character, like earlier I did my first 💯% survey of a planet, had to travel to 3 biomes (frozen ice, mountains and a tropical forest) to scan the 8 minerals and I think 7 Flora and 7 fauna, you have to find 6 of the same creature to consider that creature scanned and it's pretty cool bc you come across animals hunting each other and fighting and if you get too close they will try to fight you but to summarize what I'm trying to say that's just one aspect of the game and could take infinite hours, I haven't even messed with ship building yet and I had two crappy Outposts w/ my character before I stepped into the unity multiverse, I haven't set any of those up yet either and I'm still collecting artifacts and finding temples to increase the Starborn powers and replaying the story as Starborn lets you skip the main quest and alters a lot of dialog choices which makes replaying missions pretty fun. Meanwhile I have a pharmaceutical lab to create chems and first aid and a research lab to keep creating 5 different categories of items like wow 🤯 the game is most definitely underrated, probably bc the meme is actually true that it gets better after 50 hours 😂
Other reasons:
*Ship combat is actually pretty well done
*The 🌙 buggy is a literal game changer, makes surveying planets enjoyable and the controls remind me of Halo's Warthog w/ rockets.
*Spacesuit and Weapons Modding, two more optional features I personally haven't touched in my 💯+ hour playthrough
*The faction quests, while not perfect, are all definitely worth doing, especially for the perks such as the Star Eagle ship and the New Atlantis Penthouse
*Zero G exploration and combat are both really well done
*Ship and Home/Apartment interior customization are well done and pretty rewarding once you have an awesome surplus of spacesuits, guns etc.