TOW was decent enough, it just felt a little repetitive to me and after a while I started to feel like I was just going through the motions and didn't really care about the places I was visiting, the people I was meeting etc...
Starfield, for all the archaic design choices, the frustration, the stuff it does badly, it still has something special about it that drew me in and kept me engaged.
I don't know if I can even articulate what it was, I just know I enjoyed it immensely and was happy to explore its world and meet its characters and was never bored.
Plus, Starfield just feels like a more grounded and (somewhat) realistic approximation of what space exploration and development might look like - while TOW felt rooted in a more contrived fantasy world of clichés.
Which can be a good thing if done right, as evidenced (in my opinion) by Fallout 4.