Some of the side missions I have done do feel better than the main one. I made it until the first temple on the main storyline. I just joined the UC Vanguard and got my first mission with them. Unfortunately it doesn't change all the issues I have with the gameplay experience itself.
Why are robots from the 24th century speaking like robots from Earth's 1970's? Vasco' speech pattern is so annoying that I never want to talk to him ever again. I guess in the future mankind lost both Google Maps and voice synthesis technologies.
I'm not holding my breath performance-wise. If after one year of extra polishing (initial launch date was in late 2022) this is what we got, then I guess it means that's all we're gonna get out of what is just a bad engine that no longer cuts it with 2023 hardware. Imagine how Starfield might have looked like with, for example, RED engine.
I'm still playing for now, but I doubt I'll put anywhere close to the number of hours I have put in Pathfinder: WOTR, Cyberpunk 2077 or BG3 (after I have done a planned second playthrough). Maybe that game would have felt better if it hadn't come just a month after a masterpiece like BG3.
Considering everything is locked behind grindable skill levels, it probably will be weeks before I can start looking into outpost building.
Elite Dangerous is admittedly not for everyone. It's generally a very slow-paced game (unless you focus on pirate hunting or piracy itself), which can be very relaxing to play. Last winter I loved spending a few quiet evenings just flying from system to system, scanning planters, and just piloting my ship around them. Space exploration was pretty rewarding money-wise, so I was able to quickly customize an optimal exploration ship (with very long jump range). I have seen vistas that were actually amazing to stare at, something that was hyped as existing in Starfield, but I have yet to experience anything even remotely close to what I experienced in Elite. I remember watching a sunrise on a barren planet (think something like the moon, that planet was all rock with no atmosphere), while I was prospecting on that planet in my surface buggy.
One of the nice things is there are many different playstyles possible: explorer (both planets and xenobiology), trader, cruise ship captain, asteroid mining, bounty hunter, pirate, mercenary in the war against the Thargoid aliens... And what's also nice is that you can do any of these, as you can have multiple ships specially tailored for specific goals. I have a ship designed strictly for deep space exploration, another for mining and cargo run, and a third ship for pirate hunting. When I stopped playing last spring I was even considering saving toward buying my own fleet carrier, and parking it in deep space as a base to make it easier for me to explore further deeper into unknown space. The first time a player explores a planet, his name is associated to it. There are many dozens of planets with my name associated to them as "First discovered by". And that's a game that launched in 2014. It gives you an idea of how insanely HUGE the galaxy is in that game if in 2023 I was still able to easily get first disco on so many planets.
Their last expansion also added the FPS playstyle element as you can go on foot in outpost and do sabotaging/spying/bounty hunting missions. However their game engine is pretty bad for this aspect, so it's not very popular with players. I never bothered with it outside of the tutorial so I could see what it was about.
BTW, Elite Dangerous' ancestry goes back to Elite in the 80's, which I played on my C64.
It's very possible that BG3 and Elite Dangerous are largely responsible for ruining Starfield for me, as I have seen what Starfield's promises could have been if properly developed.. I never played No Man's Sky but I suspect the same might be happening with people who played that game before playing Starfield.
