Spent a few hours exploring space (in my ship, not traveling to planets from the menu). Don't be misled by people saying there's nothing to do.
I've seen a bunch of people on both this subreddit and others talk about how space is pointless and that you never need to go to your ship. I just intentionally spent the better part of two hours using my ship to explore various systems to see what I could find just randomly exploring system to system, planet to planet. I would jump to new systems aimlessly and then jump around planets in those systems, exactly the way I would explore, say, a new area in Sky
You know what I found out? The people who are saying that there's nothing to do in space (gasp) haven't done any space exploration!
I made it a point to NOT land on planets unless something I encountered organically in my ship directed me there.
Bumped into a bunch of random encounters and activities. Got hailed by half a dozen ships, picked up a few side quests, learned of nearby systems to explore, got pointed to specific planets to land on with particular points of interest, did a bunch of space combat with several factions (mostly Spacers!). I rescued civilian ships, captured pirate ships. I came across other factions battling each other and joined in to help one side, and then hailed the survivors. I walked into an ambush, I encountered a distress beacon that led me to a remote planet. I picked up contraband without realising it and found out the hard way that it doesn't fly in any civilized space.
This was in only two hours of intentionally doing space content checking out a handful of star systems. Two hours. This is, of course, not counting the myriad of quests that every hub in the game constantly throw at you to try to encourage you to go explore space in your ship.
A very common criticism I have seen of Starfield is that because of the way fast travel works, you can basically ignore your ship. I have seen the asinine complaint that the game "has no exploration" repeated many times. That is only as true as you want it to be. You can do that if you choose to play the game that way. You can jump from quest to quest using the fast travel system, never exploring. Or you could get in your ship and go exploring and encounter a bunch of stuff to do. You'll be pulled in eight directions just like you are in every other Bethesda game.
The idea that you can't explore space because of the fast travel system is straight-up wrong. The idea that there is nothing to discover is straight-up wrong. The number of people who seem to want to actively mislead people about the game is really, really obnoxious. If you don't like the game, fair enough! But there's no need to make things up.
This game clearly has a structure like FTL. You're jumping from point to point to see what you can find. And yes -- given that it is a large universe, sometimes what you find is a lifeless ice ball with some random procedural content on it! But despite what some people are saying, that's not all you'll find. There's plenty to do out there. All kinds of random activities and characters that are temping you to go to other places.
The galaxy map is the proverbial forest in Skyrim. You have tons of stuff all around you that you can completely miss if you just jump from quest to quest. If you don't like this style of exploration, I totally get it (as it's definitely a big shift from on-foot exploration). But to say the game has no exploration is factually wrong.
And for people saying that you have to use the fast travel to skip space altogether: Also wrong. You can jump right from planet to planet (which is silly IMO) or you can use your ship to jump around either through the menu or just by pointing at jump points on your scanner. You can also jump into orbit around planets rather than directly to points of interest on the planets themselves by pressing X instead of A (set jump target instead of land). If you have contraband on you, you MUST do that.
TLDR: If you choose to ignore a large part of the game's content by only fast traveling from quest objective to quest objective and never engaging with spaceflight or any kind of random exploration, don't be surprised if you miss the opportunities for the game to organically introduce you to content in the areas that you are specifically choosing to ignore.
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