I would almost bump it up a grade if it had explorable ocean worlds like Kamino.
You might think you want the Bethesda take on deep ocean planetary exploration but you don't, it'd not be any more fun than farting around on the surface of any other planet, with the same couple of points of interest strewn around in the same box, over and over and over again. It's almost habitual for Codexers to shit on something without any sort of context or perspective so I thought I might rise above that by examining this with reference to what does exit and not some ideal that is only in my mind. My thesis is that regardless of the many design and gameplay flaws of Bethesda they're missing even more than that, a being-there-ness, and I don't see why you would want the space or aquatic planetary setting without it.
Perhaps the three strongest examples of that which leap out when considering games that have attempted any such thing of late would be No Man's Sky, Outer Wilds and Subnautica. None of the rest can really compare to the freeform but entirely meaningful exploration in Outer Wilds, with the constant tornadoes and storms ravaging the surface so strongly that the tiny islands shoot up into the higher atmosphere, or the possible journey into the planet's core aided by an alien jellyfish, or the secret in the one calm place of the world. The place is not just heard and seen, and what a great presentation it is, but also felt through the gameplay, being at the mercy of the elements as the player is. Mechanical gameplay importance and aesthetic merged totally.
Subnautica is more or less Minecraft with better graphics set on a single plateau on an ocean, far less interesting to look at and less going on, there are the additional survival mechanics, of requiring air and only being able to drive underwater vehicles at certain pressures, but it is enough to have some appeal to the fantasy of exploring a deep sea, giving the player some feel for the vulnerability of such a proposal.
No Man's Sky has similar problems as Starfield in that you'll come to learn the patterns of procedural generation and so have less reason to explore, but far less so, and features vibrant underwater worlds just as lush and dense as the surface of planets. There was an update dedicated only to the deep sea released, but even before that the game didn't make much of a distinction between what lay above and beneath the waves, so you might find sunken ruins and the like as you would find on land, as well as aquatic life that was generated just like the flying animals and land creatures. When people talk about video games they often do so autistically as if they were spreadsheets, whereas some of the best qualities of NMS lies in creating a truly procedural ambient soundscape, with dynamic weather effects that have impact on the gameplay. It might be shallow but it nails the atmosphere.
Perhaps it's unfair to compare it to these games since they are supposedly in other genres, but even the Codex favorite piñata Bioware used to get it right in many ways. They're rightfully shat on for making terrible "RPGs" but what they did do correctly was atmosphere even if it had little mechanical impact. In KOTOR you had Manaan, a Kamino fanfic planet, and you did get to descent into the depths. Despite being depicted in a souped up Neverwinter Nights engine for consoles the surface had a pleasant sense of place, with a light cloudy sky and the ocean stretching endlessly towards the horizon in the skybox.
Bioware could get away with it because they were in the bussiness of making focused and cinematic action adventures with light RPG elements and players didn't expect to be able to go anywhere and do anything. It's enough to set the mood, give you a sense of where you are, but not more than that. It was the
Star Trek matte painting, which might not seem like much but it makes a difference. Bioware would return to an ocean planet in one of their final DLCs for Mass Effect 3, Leviathan, and once again despite their failure to provide an RPG or even good action gameplay someone at the office did understand at least some of the appeal of the fantasy of visiting other worlds. Like George Lucas' Kamino the surface is stormy and rainy, and eldritch horrors lurk in the calmer deeps.
With Bethesda you would get none of this, you wouldn't get the bespoke exploration of Outer Wilds and the mysteries or adventures of that game, on a mechanical level Bethesda makes poor looter shooters, so if you visited an alien aquatic world there would need to be lootable humans there, there would be the same clutter and architecture as in the rest of the galaxy, due to how they put together content, and since this is a space game of a scope too large to make things by hand it would feature
radiant content. But it's also not a simulationist game, you wouldn't have to worry about air supplies, and certainly not leviathans of the depths, Bethesda is not Pirhana Bytes that would give you a taste of late game challenge if you ventured in the wrong direction, not that there is a right or wrong direciton since this is procedurally generated. You're never going to be on a raft in a planetary wide simulated ocean, at the mercy of the elements, or diving into the marine trenches.
At the same time you're also going to be missing the craftsmanship of a well put together tiny set, of a great skybox, and all the small details you'd see in a more cinematic game. Basically I'm saying that inherently, by being made by Betheda, with their content pipelines and design process, it's inevitable that you'd get something boring and generic and it wouldn't
feel as if you just landed on a waterworld, it would be more of the same. Mechanically, aesthetically, superficially, in any way that counts you might as well be looting sporks being worth 2 credits in a lunar base.
