Having finally finished the game, I think I actually hate this game. A lot of people have talked about how it gets good 10+ hours in, but my journey was far more complicated than that.
It took me about 40 hours of playing it before I became "comfortable" with the game. During that time I approached the game sorta the way it was handed to me. It showed me outposts, I played around with outposts. It took me to a new city, I looked around and followed whatever fell into my lap. It took me to a spaceport, I played around with the ship building. I was inching my way through every system of the game, trying to find what I enjoyed the most, and none of it stuck.
So I finally decided to just not engage with the distractions anymore and focus on exploring the cities and doing the quests. And for the next 40-ish hours or so the game was ok. My plan was to explore every city, doing all the side-quests and save the faction and main quests for the big end. The cities look amazing and exploring them was cool, but once you wrap your head around them (thanks to the terrible map) they sure are small. Most of the sidequests aren't anything to write home about, but they're fine, with a few exceptions being pretty good.
Then I started doing the faction quests, and this is where the game took a nose-dive for me. I started off with the Freestar quest-line, and it was alright to begin with, however the ending is so dumb. It was the moment where I started to actively dislike the game. Next up was UC and it was kind of redeeming my experience. This is easily the best structured narrative in the game while also being fairly compelling, and honestly I think if this was the main story of the game the game would've been FAR better. My only criticism of it is that there is a "correct" choice at the end, although that goes for all of the faction quests.
Then came Ryujin, and oh god... The first half of this chain is annoyingly boring. At one point I was thinking to myself "this is the game version of the start of Office Space". And I get it, it's supposed to recreate the corporate experience, but it still just sucks. Thankfully the second half picks up, however the second half also leans heavily into stealth gameplay, which is... not very functional. You can still complete the goals by cheesing the system (because Bethesda) but from a narrative perspective it becomes pretty ridiculous.
At this point I had planned to do most of the main quests and then go do the pirate stuff before finishing, but I was so done with the game I decided to ditch the pirate stuff and wrap things up. I had already gotten to the point of meeting the "villains", so it was basically only the final act left. However this still didn't fail to disappoint. I have never been a fan of the Space Odyssey/Interstellar "infinite and beyond" take on space sci-fi, and this game takes a confident stride into that territory. There's also a moment that's so dumb I was literally face-palming.
I dunno, maybe I'm being too harsh, but for the first 40 hours if I were to give the game a subjective review I would've given it a 2/10. The game is obviously more of a 7-8/10 from an objective/technical standpoint, and there was definitely parts of my experience where I enjoyed it more. But then the rapid decline in enjoyment I had finishing up the game really soured the whole experience.
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