Todd Howard agrees that it was a bit of a pain to get right, as he said in a recent interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “[Space combat] was way harder than we thought … We see a lot of space games where you’re gonna have like, derelict ships or other things to fly around, just to get a sense of motion, so the smallest thing like ‘what does the dust in space look like?’ so you feel like you’re moving and it’s not too much, not too little.”
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For Bethesda, the snags started happening when it came to designing enemy AI: “It’s very easy … to make the enemies really really smart, forever we were just jousting [with them]. It turns out you have to make the AI really stupid. You have to have them fly, then they need to turn, basically like ‘hey player, why don’t you just shoot me for a while?’ … [once we’d] settled on our pace, and how the enemies are gonna move, that’s where it came together.”
I… agree. It’s the same thing as with FPSes, it is very easy to make a bot with perfect reflexes and aim. But that is what I mean - if they don’t have the resources, talent or approval to make an engaging space shooter game then they shouldn’t have bothered with this 0.1 version in the first place. What they released with is something that I’d expect to see in an early alpha build of a space game, before it went through months of playtesting and tweaking.
I’m not arguing it’s impossible in general, just that starfield would be better off doing it in a different way since they can’t pull it off with this approach.