If you want people to follow your game's intentions, you have to incentivize the correct things and you have to make those incentives fun. If not, your players are going to find any loophole they can and suddenly there's nothing but blood and kittens everywhere.

Actually having a cohesive plot certainly helps matters... I still have no fucking clue what the narrative thrust of Starfield actually is outside of MAH OWN SPACESHIP and NUMBERS GO UP

Yeah, doing things normally just sounds way too tedious

Oh and they just added a ground vehicle that has a turret AND DOESN'T USE AMMO. So the best, most efficient way to play Starfield is to drive across alien worlds leaving a trail of animal corpses and sorrow, while occasionally opening your scanner to improve your ecological science skills.