Like seriously, let’s look at this: in Mass Effect the player is a high-profile military careerist who’s about to become space James Bond complete with the license to kill, starts hallucinating weird portents of doom after finding an inscrutable alien relic, gets their legal murder license, follows their hallucinations to find more weird alien shit, has to chose which of their crewmates dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with revelations about what’s going on and an elaborate multi-stage boss fight.
In Starfield the player is just some random asshole who’s decided to take up space mining for no clear reason, hallucinates something cool and neat after being told to grab the weird thing by their chortling coworkers, gets to join a country club of amateur astronomers who think those weird artifacts are kind of neat, goes on an adventure to look for more sort of neat artifacts and hallucinate some more, has to chose which of their fellow country club members dies in a hackneyed false dichotomy, and ends with the revelation that everything going on is fucking stupid and pointless and there’s an elaborate multi-stage boss fight that’s buggy as absolute fuck.
Meanwhile the aesthetics are just Mass Effect blandness taken to a whole new level of blandless. If Mass Effect was oversanitized corporate slop Starfield has been further boiled into a completely flavorless mush. Same for the overall plot: Mass Effect had a generic eldritch horror plot that pivoted from being a climate change allegory to just being “so yeah turns out the eldritch robots are just really stupid, like absolute buffoons, and their whole mission is literal nonsense and even they know it but because they’re just big dummies they don’t know how to stop doing galactic genocide, whoopsy!” thanks to corporate meddling, but Starfield skips the pivot and goes straight to the vapid “so yeah it’s all just meaningless accumulation of pointless nothing, nothing’s going on here and there’s nothing at stake at all, just lobotomize yourself and join the race to accumulate meaningless accolades!” which uh, framed like that actually reads like a call for help from the writers.
They wanted to do colonial era global exploration but in space. If they included intelligent indigenous aliens then the colonising you do is literally the same as the settler states of the British empire era were doing. And people would genocide the natives.
You’re supposed to feel like Darwin or whatever, hopping around islands checking out the local wildlife and geology while documenting it for science. But without the whole genociding all the tribes you meet stuff. The result is directly caused by going for a specific aesthetic vibe but also sanitising it of all potentially awkward features due to wanting to avoid having literally any ideological point whatsoever.