Well, according to the internet the last 87.5 hours I spent playing this were literal torture, unenjoyable to the max, and just outright outrageously horrible.
Somehow, it doesn't feel like it.
Mind you, I did mod the game to make it into something palpable.
Yes it's watered down.
Yes the writing is on the level of "I'm 12 and this is deep, now where's my achievement bingbong noise". Much lower quality than ever before. Nothing can deny that.
But, if you stay with the main story, all the decisions they took with simplifying certain aspects will start to make some sense. Not the writing, but the general rhythm of it all.
It's no masterpiece, it's not the next coming of "insert deity/saint of choice". But neither was Skyrim or Fo3 or 4. Rose tinted goggles and all that...
It's kind of a mediocre game, I still hold my rating of 6.5 out of 10 and I think it's fair.
As is usual with these games, mods are not only a suggestion, but basically a neccessity.
The grapshics are xbox360 levels of horrible without a LUT mod. NaturaLUTS seems to do a good job of bringing back the black levels and injecting some color as well instead of the uniform vomit filter.
Looting better weapons, and combat in general, would feel meaningless without a mod that disables NPCs' leveled extra HP gains. Enemies are so spongy because they gain HP with leveling and they get an additional multiplier of health added, ranging from 5 to 20 per level. This makes them comically tough. By removing this extra gain, combat is more enjoyable, fast paced, modern. Headshots finally matter. But it also trivializes some encounters where you would have tried to stay out of combat otherwise.
The UI is freakin horrible. No one can convince me otherwise. I get the main screen's round design for consoles, but the inventory feels like it was made for a 640x480 monitor, the HUD is atrocious (the stealth meter looks like it was a total afterthought and looks like a debug element). StarUI fixed the inventory on day one basically, the mod that disables transitions and makes every UI interactions more snappy is also a must have imo, it's much more user friendly now, and I'm sure the rest will get modded soon.
Lockpicking is annoying. Not just because you have to think for a little bit and it gets repetitive real fast and you can't be bothered to think ahead... Because it's buggy. On several occasions I was shown spaces where there were non, or were seemingly no spaces while with auto-solve it turns out there was one.
The AI is as dumb as ever, but one huge improvement is that even when they got stuck running back and forth because the pathfinding bugged out, the quest marker and the quest still moved along. Feels like they have encountered these problems and worked around it with some extra checks instead of solving em outright. Also it's quiet refreshing to see that they atleast tried to solve pathfinding issues by making the NPC walk back to a reset point and try again, usually solving the problem.
What they haven't solved is how infuriating it can get, when your companion wants to talk to you, in the middle of a firefight, and you just really wanted to give them a better weapon or take some extra grenades you got stored on em. Instead you have to suffer through minutes of childishly bad irrelevant dialogue, exit and re-enter interaction with your companion, and if you are lucky, you can finally access their inventory.
Knowing where the story leads, investing any effort into building outposts feels absolutely unneccessary. Even without the context, I just couldn't find a reason to try building one. I have easily earned and spent around 800k credits just on building ships, without using outposts, without using any exploits.
Unless you count waiting 2 days for the vendor cash reset an exploit. This is something that I still don't understand why Bethesda keeps doing especially in this game. Why limit their cash so low when prices are inflated so high that unless something's worth a 1000 credits sale price, it's not even worth keeping around. There's no economy to balance, you will have to find a chair and wait a couple of minutes as 2days tick by and that's it. It's a totally unnecessary inconvenience. Haven't found a mod that fixes this yet, but once it's out it's basically a must have. I guess technically if you cheat your way under the map and find their stashes (yes, every vendor still has a box nearby under the map that contains their full inventory including credits) you could get too rich too fast. But then again, you can already add as much money as you want via console. So I just can't see a reason why keep doing this limitation on enjoyment.
SO yeah, there are some improvements over previous games, there are some elements that are unarguably sup par, and the rest... the rest just works lol
I wonder if I make it far enough into NG+ for their ways of doing things to make sense, before Phantom Liberty is out.
Edit:
As you can see from the above pic, only a small amount of players have gotten close to completing the game (all those shiny achievements are main story quests past the mid point), and even less "completed" the main story. I guess they found better things to do in game or just dropped out.
What you can't see, is that only 8.3% of the players completed the, lets call it the "mid point revelation" quest. Without having that reveal, that context to wtf is this all about, it's not really fair to judge the games design decisions.
This still doesn't change the fact the writing for almost every quest I've done so far was dogshit, so what this revelation, or call it plot twist if you have to, grants you is absolutely wasted.
But I enjoyed the journey to this point, and might do it again.
