Edit: I've now hit the 40 hour mark. I stand by everything I said below, however I wanted to add on that I've now encountered several game-breaking bugs. New Atlantis is permanently broken - the entire floor of the Spaceport is missing. Quest markers are bugged - most of them don't show up anymore. The NAT Transit Train has permanently disappeared from New Atlantis. Bethesda's QA team are the most consistently awful team in game development.

I've come to terms with the fact that Bethesda are fundamentally incapable of innovating.

I'm very confused by the hype around this game. Todd Howard is notoriously dishonest in his marketing, and has been since Skyrim (first release). This game is no exception. In fact, this might be the most egregious version of marketing dishonesty Bethesda have engaged in.

As with all Bethesda games post-2007, most of what you see in the first hours of the game tricks you into thinking it's something that it's not. The interesting environmental design, attention to detail, character dynamics... It's all set dressing.

Unlike Skyrim & Fallout 4 however, Starfield doesn't even try to keep up its facade past the intro. The first planet you visit after spending 20 minutes in an intricately hand-crafted atmospheric mining cave... is a procedurally generated barren wasteland. Think year 1 of No Man's Sky level of bleakness.

The first CITY you visit isn't even a city. It's 4 cells with about 12 named npcs each, divided by 4 loading screens, and a bunch of "buildings" to enter into, including shops and apartments, most of which are square rooms with a single NPC in them. Think shops in Morrowind but less visually interesting. The game feels dead. If an NPC has a name, 90% of the time it's because they're either a fetchquest giver, or they're part of someone else's fetchquest. They're also immortal (yep - it's another one of THOSE Bethesda games). You're not travelling from city to city as a bounty hunter or a merchant or a pirate. There are no cities. You're on a set of rails, pushing buttons and interacting with NPCs whose existence starts and finishes with your presence. People on Reddit and in the comments sections of professional reviews defending the game (you guys are heroes and you're making your parents very proud please keep sending death threats to IGN that's a very good idea) calling it Oblivion in Space are misremembering Oblivion. Starfield doesn't have dynamic NPCs with their own schedules. Starfield doesn't have travelling merchants or people visiting family members across the game. Hell, Starfield doesn't have NPCs travel at all - everyone is confined to the cell they're spawned in (unless a quest dictates that they phase into a new cell). This is not Oblivion in Space. Starfield is far more akin to Pokemon Snap with guns.

Your first combat encounter is fast paced and dynamic and feels like they might have spent some time working on their AI between Fallout 4 and now. But that all goes away the second you visit the next planet. We've got Fallout 4 gunners in space in terms of dialogue, competence, and dynamicity (I.e. none). The Pirates can't spot you if you're crouched 10 metres in front of them. They've imported Fallout 4's stealth system and done ZERO iterative work on it.

The majority of the main quest in my experience so far has been fetch quests. The majority of side content so far has been fetch quests (and a single non-combat escort quest). As interesting as the backstory is on the major factions, they all act and engage with the player identically. The voice acting is great - I'll give you that... But the writing feels like a parody without any self awareness. Think Outer Worlds if it was written by a teenager.

Starfield is NOT a space exploration game, nor is it an open-world game. This is what really hurts. All the work they put into the space combat and ship design was a waste, because there is no space exploration. Space is a single cell. Think a portion of the road between Whiterun and Rorikstead, but without the dynamicity. Going from one planet to another is a sequence of events with a single player input:
Board ship > Pilot Ship > Enter Orbit > Travel to Destination > Exit Orbit > Land Ship.
Every one of these events involves a single button press and a loading screen. The only "piloting" is when you're sitting in a skybox cell between steps 3 and 5, whereby you can randomly be attacked by bandits or faction ships. This is not like in Fallout or Skyrim where you're ambushed while travelling between settlements. You are floating in a skybox between loading screens and sometimes the game decides to spawn a ship in your skybox for you to interact with. Todd Howard's egregious marketing of this game as a space exploration was an absolute lie.

Starfield is hardly an RPG. The skill system is like an early alpha version of Fallout 4's - you're a blank slate character with a bunch of "you are now 10% better and crouching infront of enemies" or "you are now 10% better at telling someone to piss off" points to invest in. Gone are the days of hand crafting a character, where you can look back at your 20 hours of gameplay and have your skill tree reflect your playstyle. Everyone will be playing the exact same character.

Starfield is confused amalgamation of a variety of games, all of which did it better.

If you want a futuristic RPG with decent writing but awful combat, play Outer Worlds.
If you want a good space combat game where you are wondering wtf there is to do after 4 hours of gameplay, play Elite Dangerous.
If you want a good space exploration game with decent procgen but non-existent writing, play No Man's Sky.
If you want a space colony building / management sim... there are dozens out there.

If, for whatever reason, you want a game that comprises the wost aspects of the above, and charges you double, play Starfield.

Bethesda is part of a multibillion dollar company. They have sold more games and are sitting on more funding and intellectual capital than 99% of their competition. They have been working on this game for 5 years. This is incredibly unimpressive, and not at all surprising for anyone who has played their games for the past 20 years.