This is so deeply whatever. Bethesda has managed to find a way to tell a story about the beauty of discovery and space while making the actual exploration of space so deeply boring and tedious all at once, what an achievement.
Space traversal is a loading screen and fast travel nightmare, the environments manage to be completely empty and yet somehow so cluttered it's hard to move around, necessitating the need for a detective vision, which is... certainly a thing in the game you can use, no matter how completely useless it is otherwise. The menus are unbelievably cursed as well, a maze of layered clunk that make inventory management a pain, which is unfortunate because doing inventory management is about 50% of my playtime. Also why is there crafting? What's even the point?
The writing is bland and the characters were mostly boring and flat, with kinda whatever voice acting. I liked Sarah a good amount, and Barrett was okay, but otherwise the characters could've just been signposts for quests and I would've gotten the same experience. My real issue is that there's no RPG in the RPG. You go through the whole process of deciding a backstory and all it amounts to is a single dialogue prompt every few hundred conversations and a minuscule % bonus to skills that didn't even feel useful or apparent (e.g. having high persuasion didn't make persuading people easier, it just meant that the system that randomly decided if I won or not sometimes didn't matter at all). Dialogue is just clicking 'yes' or 'yes (but ooh aren't I a scamp!)', because saying no doesn't actually lead anywhere interesting. Sidequests are going to a place and fighting some dudes, which you think would be different for the main quests, but it's not.
I know that some people are going to say that this is all the Bethesda charm, and that the gameplay stuff will be fixed with mods. But if it wasn't for gamepass I'd be spending $100 on this, and even if it wasn't, why should I have to wait for other people to fix the game for the devs? Skip this unless you can't imagine a world without 'Fallout 4 but with even less personality somehow'.
Space traversal is a loading screen and fast travel nightmare, the environments manage to be completely empty and yet somehow so cluttered it's hard to move around, necessitating the need for a detective vision, which is... certainly a thing in the game you can use, no matter how completely useless it is otherwise. The menus are unbelievably cursed as well, a maze of layered clunk that make inventory management a pain, which is unfortunate because doing inventory management is about 50% of my playtime. Also why is there crafting? What's even the point?
The writing is bland and the characters were mostly boring and flat, with kinda whatever voice acting. I liked Sarah a good amount, and Barrett was okay, but otherwise the characters could've just been signposts for quests and I would've gotten the same experience. My real issue is that there's no RPG in the RPG. You go through the whole process of deciding a backstory and all it amounts to is a single dialogue prompt every few hundred conversations and a minuscule % bonus to skills that didn't even feel useful or apparent (e.g. having high persuasion didn't make persuading people easier, it just meant that the system that randomly decided if I won or not sometimes didn't matter at all). Dialogue is just clicking 'yes' or 'yes (but ooh aren't I a scamp!)', because saying no doesn't actually lead anywhere interesting. Sidequests are going to a place and fighting some dudes, which you think would be different for the main quests, but it's not.
I know that some people are going to say that this is all the Bethesda charm, and that the gameplay stuff will be fixed with mods. But if it wasn't for gamepass I'd be spending $100 on this, and even if it wasn't, why should I have to wait for other people to fix the game for the devs? Skip this unless you can't imagine a world without 'Fallout 4 but with even less personality somehow'.