I'm currently 60+ hours in and just four missions into the main quest so far. Of the big faction questlines, I only started one (basically just did the tutorial mission there).
The game is just so ridiculously massive, it's insane. Playing Skyrim was similar, but back then, when you stumbled on some side content it was usually a simple affair of half an hour or so. With Starfield you usually end up with hours of additional stuff to do.
Latest thing I did was checking up on some sensor contact when I entered a star system I hadn't visited before. It was a medium-sized pirate ship attacking a huge naval cargo cruiser. What followed was an epic battle first to take down the pirate ship in my slightly upgraded starter ship. When I only deal with one enemy ship I usually try to take out their shields, then disable their engines with my EM-beam weapons and then board them. This ship had three decks and quite a few pirates, so it was a close-combat slugfest with shotguns and my UC naval cutlass (put some points into melee) until I reached the bridge. They also had some contraband cargo on board that I had to sell at a port where they don't mind dealing with illegal things like harvested organs.
Unfortunately, I couldn't take the ship for myself because I haven't reached the piloting skill for flying class B ships yet. So I took everyhing I could carry, undocked and blew it up with a few additional missiles.
Then I noticed this huge cruiser was still there, its engines also disabled. First I thought they were going to ask me for ship parts to repair it (you often get asked for them by other ships, so I tend to carry a bunch) but I couldn't hail the ship, I only could dock with it. When I entered it, alarms were blaring, the gravity generators were malfunctioning (switching the gravity off and on every 20 seconds or so), everything was full of floating, frozen bodies from the crew and on top of that, the pirate boarding party was still onboard trying to work their way into the sealed cargo hold. So it was another pitched battle, sometimes in zero-G taking the pirates out and reading the crew's logs (environmental storytelling that reminded me a lot of System Shock). With on-and-off zero-G environment, the ship contained a number of environmental puzzles like machinery you could only work your way through with the gravity off or long elevator shafts you could float up but had to be quick about it before the gravity started again. The cargo hold had a bunch of sealed containers with unique weapons, a ton of credits and a single case of high-prized liquor that now sits in my inventory marked as an essential quest item.
So there's another freaking quest behind that and I don't even know yet where that might lead.
oder weil ich zwielichtige Geldeintreiber jobs für die GAL Bank annehme .. aber hey, ich bin halt ein Schurke 
