Starfield makes space travel feel way too safe

polygon.com:

If I’ve learned anything from science fiction — and actual science — it’s that space travel is difficult. It requires vast political capital and financial heft to travel through space for even short distances, and exiting a ship to explore a planet means counting out oxygen tanks and accepting that even a small error could result in death. From Outer Wilds to Alien, the best sci-fi stories about space exploration emphasize those stakes — how even in societies where space exploration has become accessible and even normalized, it’s still extraordinarily dangerous.

Except in Starfield, where flying across the galaxy feels about as tricky as doing donuts on a tricycle in my parents’ driveway.

The most obvious illustration of this is Starfield’s emphasis on fast travel, which minimizes the very existence of your spaceship. You also can’t manually land on planets or satellites; instead, you press a button to dock (or, more accurately, you press a button to watch a cutscene of your ship docking, then you press a button to disembark). All of this makes the experience of traveling to mysterious galaxies and hostile planets feel less like riding in the rickety yet powerful Millennium Falcon and more like, say, using the transporter in Star Trek. But Star Trek stories focus on other ways that space travel can be exciting and risky. Starfield, not so much.

Take your spacesuit, for example. In Starfield, it’s equipped automatically. If you want to make it disappear while you’re at an oxygen-rich indoor spaceport, you can press a button in one of the menus to render it invisible. That’s what I’ve chosen to do, since my character fits in better with the game’s NPCs by wearing her space trucker flannel rather than a full helmet and suit