Starfield
I think the main character of Fallout 4 should've been Preston Garvey. He almost immediately became a joke because there's always already another settlement that needs your help, but he couldn't have bothered you about it if you were him. He has an actual history and stake in the world and, more specifically, reasons to care about establishing communities and networks in the wasteland--it's his job as much as it's anyone's. That he almost singlehandedly saves his organization from total destruction and then hands the reins over to a clueless time-traveler is one of the more extreme examples of the Bethesda defiance of all reason for the sake of making you feel important.
This also would've required the settlement stuff to be anything more than an afterthought. Maybe fewer potential settlements, each with its own character, populated by NPCs with literally anything going on. Settlements with their own faction story arcs.
So my hope was that, since outposts were clearly on the Starfield roadmap earlier on, building outposts would in some way feel more like building communities. In fact the opposite is true. It feels like buying upgrades in an idle game, and the people there are buffs to raw material production numbers. That they're people at all is mostly incidental.
As far as I'm concerned, almost nobody makes an open world like Bethesda. In contrast to the Ubisoft collectathon model, there are spaces and landmarks in these games that feel like they weren't made for you to conquer, maybe due in part to BGS's fondness for human-curated procgen. As hard as Skyrim leans into being a dungeon crawler theme park, there are still all those abandoned shacks in the wilderness, still the big empty stretches of landscape west of Whiterun. I guess some people don't like the empty planets in Starfield, but why would you even play it if not for that?
The illusion of place never quite extends to the NPCs, though, and this is the ball these games have been dropping for a decade plus. They could, in a much more substantial way, be games about people, populated by characters who exist for reasons other than to make you feel strong.
There's usually enough going on that you can imagine how this would work. Town-building that anyone in the world cared about, for example. Often there are some nice sidequests involving NPCs of no real importance, who don't have much to offer you other than insight into how people in this world get by, and to be fair Starfield has some of my favorite examples of these thus far. But it misses as many opportunities as its predecessors. It devotes a lot of words to religion but has very little to say about it, owing in large part to its Christian-centric myopia. The major faction questlines all making you different kinds of cop is too big of an issue to get into here, but suffice to say that's the breadth of imagination the game is working with as far as how people organize themselves. We were also supposed to care about the political situation in Skyrim, but it hardly affects anyone in ways you can engage with. The civil war stuff is underbaked at best, and a city changing hands never results in anything remotely approaching the world states of Kenshi; two to three government officials are replaced by different people and that's basically it. I mean I get that nobody will ever make the RPG I really want, in which the NPC faction leaders are playing a 4X game against each other while you dick around in dungeons or whatever, but still. Give me anything.
Most of my ideas about why these games keep getting bigger but not really any more interesting are pure speculation. But one thing we can be reasonably sure is a problem for Bethesda is the Xbox, and this predates the Microsoft acquisition by about two decades. They'd probably object to the idea that this resulted in a compromised creative vision, but they've said outright that Oblivion was an attempt to appeal to a broader audience on console after Morrowind unexpectedly proved that such a thing was possible. Making [thing] for people who don't like [thing] is maybe sometimes a winning strategy if your main concern is sales numbers, but I'm struggling to think of an example of this resulting in work that feels particularly thoughtful, and I wonder whether Bethesda games' weird focus on slaying thousands of indistinguishable bandits is a result of some imagined idea that Halo or CoD players need a steady supply of heads to explode. The way Starfield populates planets with landmarks is fun, but that so many of these landmarks feature another thirteen guys to shoot becomes very old very fast, and it usually feels like an interruption to or distraction from exploring rather than a reward for doing so.
Much more interesting to me is finding a little village on an otherwise barren planet, a ship landing pad surrounded by two or three shelters sealed against an environment that isn't actively hostile so much as it has nothing much to do with human beings, and listening to the villagers talk about how they like it there or don't. This isn't something that happens very often.