Baldur's Gate 3

That's like 75% of the work for BG3. There's absolutely some work implementing DnD mechanics into code and designing encounters, and obviously the assets for the world have to be created as well, but the vast majority of their time was spent on dialogue choices and designing the story in general.

It's a great game for it, but we're a good ways away from being able to do the same in an FPS/TPS with real time combat that isn't absolutely brutal. BG3 could be what it was in terms of interactions because it was a CRPG. But it had to be a CRPG to do it. ARPG isn't the term for what Starfield is, but games with reasonably rewarding action take too much work on that element to invest the time into every encounter that BG3 does. Balancing probabilities and maps for encounters for a CRPG isn't trivial, but it costs way less to do than building out all those mechanics and skill trees into real time physics.

They're different games with different goals.

The writing of BG3, both storyline and interpersonal for every NPC, is top tier.

In Starfield, it's like they put together a committee of pretentious artsy fartsy people who think that their Tumblr page makes them writers and a bunch of execs.

And anything that combination of creatively dead asswipes came up with was canon.

It's a combination of trying to hard to be clever with the most derivative shite story I've seen in a long ass time.

Starfield would be a better game without its main story.

If it was allowed to put all the focus on being someone in this games universe, it would be far better than any elements of the main story existing in the games universe.

Joining Constellation or not should also be an option.

And Constellation should've been more of a JRPG style guild with people focusing on various branches of enterprise in the game and giving missions for those. A questhub rather than this club. They all already have their own specialization.

But seriously, the main story is just all levels of meh.