I think people are misremembering skyrim/fallout.
The dungenons in those games amounted to the same few templates as well.
Starfield actually has more variance in what you will see on the different planets compared to what you might see walking through the fallout wasteland.
The thing that’s different is your motivation to do the exploring. If you aren’t deep into ship building or base building, then there’s really no need to do a lot of exploring.
All of the extra planets are just window dressing to make the universe feel large and believable.
I stop by unique planets just for the spectacle, but I’m not the type of person to mess around with crafting/base building systems too much, so i probably won’t do a lot of random exploring. But that’s fine as there’s more than enough game here for me to do the things i like to do.
The one thing that is missing is “the journey” and i think that’s what people are saying when they complain about the menus.
In Skyrim and Fallout when you got a mission to an unexplored part of the map, the journey to get there was a mission in itself. In starcraft that journey has largely been replaced by menus.
But i think that’s just the nature of the setting. Humans have jet packs and can basically teleport. There’s really no need for anyone to spend hours traveling across land to anywhere. In a hypothetical world where humans have spread across the universe, lots of it would be empty space not even worth discovering. Contrast that to a fantasy or post apocalyptic setting and people walking around and discovering stuff makes lots of sense.
I’m having a good time with it so far. Classic bethesda branching path adhd fukkery to get lost in.