The entire aesthetic should have been wild west in space. Yes that concept has done before most famously in anime but Akila City is literally the only place in the entire game that is visually distinctive and interesting to look at.
Everything else looks like LA with a chrome filter put over it which I guess is appropriate since modern day liberals are genuinely unable to conceive of any other place existing than urban California.
Hate to be a broken record here, but Outer Worlds does a much better job with the retro-futuristic aesthetic than Starfield's ESG slop. Even the frontier towns of Terra 2 and Monarch do a much better job of instilling the atmosphere of being a space cowboy than anything that Starfield provides and the main focus of that game is exploring the cartoon corporate world of the setting.
That's really the crux of the issue, isn't it? I think me and a lot of people were expecting Outer Worlds, but bigger, more indepth and more expansive at the cost of characters and writing taking a hit. Unfortunately, Starfield did pretty much nothing better than OW, showing that a short but well thought out experience is better than a "wide as an ocean but deep as a puddle" Bethesda theme park ride.
These two games will both be compared for a long, long time, it should be noted that while OW is often seen as mediocre, it is rarely seen as straight up BAD. With Starfield, on the other hand, you will be hard pressed to find anyone complementing it outside of the shills and hugboxes specially curated for it.
At the end of the day, OW is infinitely more memorable because it had SOMETHING going for it, even if that something was "Firefly meets Flash Gordon but in a nightmare bureaucratic world on a verge of societal collapse". Starfield has nothing, the background elements are more interesting and if anything, the game should have taken place during the colony wars with the climax being who gets to win the battle(with a peace treaty that the game portrays being one of the options). New Vegas doesn't have a wild story and it more or less boils down to the same thing: Who wins the big battle and who gets to keep the piece of land. However, it is remembered for so much more, such as the quests and factions that surround the world, The Mojave and it's various locations and inhabitants, Starfield has nothing. Best I can say about the game would be all the memes that /v/ made for it, such as the bug-eyed staring people or how people joke that this is the bad timeline where all the straight white men died off. Akila is boring and forgettable, so is New Atlantis and Cydonia and every other nothing-town, even Neon feels empty and hollow. The urbanites of Constellation and New Atlantis are disgusting, even the left leaning Fallout players that I know found them unsettling and too much of a "generic good natured mary sues" at best and straight up modern Californians at worst. That would be like Obsidian was so tone-deaf that the cartoon caricatures in OW were supposed to be taken at face value, rather than showing off something being off about the town or society your character is part of(something a well written story would do).
Keep in mind that Obsidian is also stationed in California and they offered a much more memorable game world with OW and many other games they created, even more recently not to mention their classics. Bethesda, on the other hand, is situated on the East Coast, while liberal as well I think it comes down to the mindset between the two studios: Obsidian is very liberal these days but they still put effort into writing good stories and settings, Bethesda are soulless bugmen that want to create ESG friendly theme parks that are always oversold on what they are. Starfield had no chance in hell under this studio, in this point in time no matter how you slice it.
Frankly, with how Baldur's Gate 3 stole it's limelight, there isn't even much to talk about other than griefing Bethesda "magic", something that might not have even been there to begin with. Best to look forward, and I am very interested in Outer Worlds 2 and that Troika time-control victorian era RPG. They cannot be worse than Starfield, and I am looking forward to these two clowning on Todd once again, like OW did during Fallout 76's short lifespan. I just wish there were more open world-esque space RPGs so I didn't have to bring up OW as a comparison, sure there are KOTOR games and Mass Effect series but they're a bit too different to compare to Starfield. Cyberpunk 2077 is somewhat similar to a Bethesda title from what I've heard but it doesn't take place in space, does have a lot of similar issues funnily enough.
