I'm not even a TOW hater, but really? How is it worse?
The density of content is far less than in TOW, you're spending a lot more time moving through empty space (both in cities and on planets) before encountering something. Starfield's procgen planets mean that you're quite literally moving through nothingness, like walking aorund a map from Delta Force or the Daggerfall wilderness - no enemies, no nothing, except a smattering of resources for anyone interested in the settlement building minigame.
Most NPCs in Starfield are non-interactive, whereas in TOW you could engage a fair number of people in dialogue.
Quest quality (or lack thereof) feels about the same as in TOW, but you have far less dialogue checks for alternate solutions. Only [Persuade] really seems to come up in dialogue in Starfield, whereas TOW had like three speech skills plus checks for other non-combat skills. I'm also finding less quests in general - TOW could occasionally overwhelm you with quests if you walked into a new settlement, but in Starfield you've really got to go looking, and areas feel mostly very sparse.
Also, subjectively, the writing in TOW, though I personally found it pretty dull, at least had some character to it. There was an attempt to portray an interesting and unique world. Starfield meanwhile is a profoundly boring vision of the future, the setting doesn't really have any hook to it. I think even people enjoying the game overall are finding the setting and factions to be underwhelming. The visuals are also dull - TOW had the weird pulpy psychedelic stuff going on, while Starfield is just industrial, boringly "realistic", and samey.
