Some thoughts, and wishcasting I've had watching some lets play of the game.
First, a big problem with this game is the map is pretty boring. This is bad for an open world game, especially a space game like this where a lot has to be played from the map. Remember for Skyrim, a game where you could just see something in the distance or follow a path, you still had interesting maps suggestive of at least major places to go:
And I remember the physical map you could get with Morrowind, which really gets one's curiosity going.
Doesn't that map just peak your curiosity? You can look at any point there and go "wonder what's going on there?" Why are there mushroom buildings in Zafirbel? Why is something called Woverine hall next to something called Zafirbel? That's a bit incongruent naming, no?
A good map can really contribute to a good adventure. There's a reason the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings both have them.
So, places with a single, continuous world were still dependent on their maps for a lot of drawing people into the world. This would be especially critical for a non-continuous world where you are going to need to actually navigate via the map. Instead, the map seems to look like this:
Oh, I'm really interested in going to - Jaffa. Which looks like it might be two stars? Many of these seem unlabeled though, so maybe they're nothing? Alpha Centauri with a cursor over it is a spectral Class G2, but with how small the dots are there may be some slight color differences, but there's absolutely nothing eye catching. Sol just blends in, despite its supreme importance, or at least what should be a supreme importance. But no, something called "Narion" nearly overshadows it. Which is absurd. This also seems to be an invention of the game itself, which is also a bit ridiculous given the broader "realism" design they're going for: everyone knows Alpha Centauri is the closest star system if they care about space at all, so inserting a random sun that's closer is absurd. Not showing it as the triple sun system it is also breaks immersion if the goal was to be somewhat "realistic" and grounded, which is what they were going for.
So, even separate from the boring, uninteresting parts of the map, they break basic immersion rules, that apply just as much to science fiction as Historical: if you need to change something, change something that's not common knowledge, or at least wouldn't have been mentioned in the encyclopedia page of a topic. Invent the general in charge of the American Airborne during market Garden. Very few people off the top of their head will have heard of Maxwell D. Taylor. If someone is lazy and writes General Taylor Maxwell has ordered x, most people won't be taken out. If you say the operation was ordered by President Clinton, that will take people out, because the common man, at least the common man interested enough in WWII to be playing a WWII game, probably knows Clinton wasn't president.
That tangent aside from me just looking more at the map, the map tells you absolutely nothing useful, draws your eye's to nothing, and causes no questions. Its a terrible game map. The map of the whole place is increadably boring and uninteresting.
The really sad thing is, a more realistic map would have given a more interesting map: as example, this 10 parsec map of our actual local space:
The hydrogen cloud is even a real thing were in. One could easily for game purposes turn it into a visible thing in the sky, so at least something is visible and can be picked out in space. As you approach for example the edge of the map, say your out 41 Ara, you can have a large could beckoning closer into settled space.
But, just looking at this already 1) tells me so much more. You've got 60 names locations as the brightest ones, and color coding gives me an idea of where things are: out of roughly 300 star systems I believe 60 are large, signifgant, the rest mostly red dwarfs. This gives you though the important city-countryside for the roll playing which is so useful: if you want a quest or big ship upgrade you go to Sirius, from which you may be sent out to attack a small pirate base aground some nearly nameless red dwarf. I know where I need to focus, and where I don't.
And the map above is already suggests more interest and drive to exploration too. Say you start out on Earth. Now, My eye is immediately drawn to Sirius: it has an interesting name, and more importantly it is very visually distinct from Earth. If nothing else I'd be very curious how it is different. How is that A type different than the Sol G type?
If I can't jump directly, and need to make a couple side jumps, I see more interesting things that might be worth checking out: alpha Centauri is a triple system, which might be interesting itself (Starfield doesn't do anything interesting with the various stars as far as I can tell, unfortunately). But then off to the right is Ind, which seems to be a smaller than sol star, with 2 brown dwarfs? What does a brown dwarf look like? But if I'm already there, maybe instead of backtracking to Sirius, I can check out Fomalhaut, and get most of the experience of visiting a type A. And once up there, maybe I'll hop between the A types, if those may be civilizational hubs for some reason (lots of solar energy maybe? more heavy metals?) and bounce up to Vega, and from there jump out into the relatively empty North, where stars are fairly sparce and small, so probably little inhabited. But, exploring desolate wastes, and seeing how empty the empty spaces really are is part of the open world experience. And from that map, one can guess where the empty, lawless wastes are.
In summary, the Starfield map looks terrible in function, both for the player to actually use to tell them anything, and as a tool to pull in and drive the players actions. Any player who looks at the Morrowind Map will know immediately that they'll want to get to Vivec at some point, and probably sooner rather than later. Even if you paid no mind to the actual quest or read any other material in the world, the map alone provides half a dozen places you'd like to explore. Which will take you by other things that might peak your interest.
Starfield maps seem to completely fail to provide any of that utility, immersion, or guidance. Part I of complaining about how starfield is set up.
