Sorry, best we can do is split the game into DLCs and several editions to extort more money out of people, all while outsourcing the game to nearly every other game company in the world and expect you to whip out $1,000+ for a GPU that may or may not run the game at 60 GPS at 1080p without fake resolutions and frames; also please buy premium and support our small indie studio.

Jokes aside, loving the game, just feeling pissy over the predatory ways the gaming industry has embraced in the last several years.

Yeah I was just in "The Rock" and the ranger I needed to talk to was in bed. I woke his ass up just like in Skyrim and Oblivion lol. "Hey wake up, I finished that thing, gimme my money!"

Yes there are. The game is once again a consecutive series of fetch quests. It's always "go/get/kill X" and comeback to quest giver. You also spend most of your time fast travelling back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back again. Almost every decision is also "choose a side" New Vegas Style, which is not bad perse but the fucking quests though are just a chore of repetition. Enemies are dumb as rocks and soo easy to kill at every level they're just more or less bulletspongy.

Timing and events also don't matter. Completing faction quests do absolutely nothing except for loot. Nobody acts differently, the enemies stay the same the world just keeps trucking as it was. Everything is just constanstly stagnating, waiting for the player to complete the necessary main quests. That sucks, that sucked in Fallout, that sucked in Skyrim yet here we are 2023 new ip, crazy new competition in RPGS but they didn't work on that. The world still feels fake and dead, even moreso now that we experienced very good rpgs in that regard in recent years. edit: There's also too much black and white good guys/bad guys characters and factions, it's incredibly boring.

AI is also abysmally bad. My companions make a habit of standing in doors (not just companions btw), running in front of my sights or grenades, go leeroy jenkins on the first enemy they see while I'm sneaking, etc, etc... If I didn't need the inventory space, I would never recuit any of them.

I'll end with the only good thing for me and it was ship building. Great new implementation in both design and interaction with the player. It's also super rewarding to hunt for ships or highjack them when they land or by spending the points and maxing the skills to build massive destroyers. Great addition to a space faring RPG. Unfortunately Bethesda can't do UI's so both ship building and outpost building are such a pain to navigate and don't allow basic control features (basically unchanged from f4 in that reason).

So yeah game not real good. Looks flashy and all but ultimately it's just the same old skyrim klunker under the hood and it shows. They seriously overlooked how RPGs have come forward. Writing is also completely overshadowed by the chore that is the main gameplay loop. Anyway your mileage may vary. But I felt like the complain of OP could easily be attributed to a lazy studio that didn't do much more than slap a paint job on an old beater. Skyrim is still more fun.