I know a lot of people hate this kind of feature, but there are significant reasons why I think it would make Starfield better.
If I'm not wearing one and I leave my ship, I start taking damage if the planet is dangerous. The only way around that is to be in 3rd person while in the ship (aside from the workaround below). There isn't any indication anywhere as to whether or not you are in a spacesuit, besides your menu and 3rd person view. There is no way to know while maintaining immersion.
Bethesda's workaround is to auto-hide spacesuits and helmets in atmo. This sucks, because I personally like tailoring the look of my character to the environment. But more importantly, I want to know that I am wearing a pressure suit if I'm out in a dangerous environment. I don't want it to feel like I'm a freecam wandering around -- I want to feel like I'm slogging along in a freaking spacesuit.
What's really strange is: if you put on the broken Constellation helmet, you can see the tape piece from the inside. It has an overlay! Sadly this works for no other helmet. Did they just abandon making the textures?
A similar annoyance with a related system: the quick menu does not unequip items. This would make it super easy to change between a spacesuit and regular outfit and not deal with more menus.
I figure there will be a mod at least for helmet overlays eventually, but damn is it frustrating that they definitely thought about it and only implemented it for a piece of masking tape.
I couldn't stand having a helmet overlay always there when wearing a helmet. That said... I get the appeal, and completely agree that this seems like a great idea as a setting that can be toggled.
You could just have elements around the sides of the screen, like a glass fadeout, to show the helmet is on. There didn't need to be an entire screen change.
Yeah -- even just a little blur on the edges that's reminiscent of glass would be an improvement. For that matter, an icon on the HUD would still be an improvement. Something that doesn't require going into 3rd person.