Well, after two nights and an afternoons worth of play (20 hours in, maybe 12 hours of active gameplay, not just looking at the environment or literally falling asleep one time) , I feel like the lower scores are justified.
It's a huge flat pancake without the syrup.
All the basics we've known Bethesda rpgs for are there, but it's lacking the magic touch of cohesive intricately built worlds of elder scrolls and fallout. What it gained in breadth, lost in depth.
The first ai bug I noticed was my robot casually walking up onto a table and basically getting stuck there until I changed zones. The latest one was like an enemy lagging out in multi-player games. He just stood there, breathing, in idle pose, his hand clutching a gun that wasn't there, as he was already dead and I looted everything off of his body. Ragdolls flying off into the distance is par for the course, I don't even notice those.
So, the ai is lacking as usual, which wouldn't be an issue if 90% of the game so far wasn't just about fighting off human pirates.
The spaceflight would be okay, because if you want to be immersed, you can do most of the transition selections (warp to planet, dock, etc..) from the cockpit. The game doesn't tell you but if you switch to F scan mode, you can see destinations and handle things with target selection E. It's actually a nice surprise that I don't have to navigate the god awful menu all the time just for a trip. But. I still do. Because once you have been somewhere you can basically teleport from planet to planet, right from the surface, wherever you are. No space flight necessary.
This begs the question, why even is there space flight in the game. The combat is boring at best, zero skill, all in the stats and numbers,point n click boom...
The rest of the time is spent going from A to B with nothing happening, and it doesn't even look good enough for today's standards. Yes some of the ships and space stations look neat but the planets are clearly just rather mid-res 2D sprites, you can't get any closer to them either.
The ship designer, at this early stage at least, feels very restrictive with minimal parts selection and exorbitant costs. I'm not happy with that, at least for now, but this might change in the future if there is access to much much more parts and credits.
Planet surfaces vary, which is fun and all, but they feel the same somehow. The deserts of "redacted" feel the same as the moan water rich green hub city.
Probably because everything is filtered to green and yellow all the goddamn time, even with the best Reshade setup you can tell there is something wrong with the picture, because you are only modifying on top of the filter, not removing it at the source.
What I like is that the environmental world building is still present. Even in the tutorial mission in the lab, you can find a lot of things on the walls and thrown around the place that tell you the story of what went down there, without resorting to having to read 27 pages of written exposition.
Guns feel and sound like wet farts, pistols deal 20times the damage of assault rifles. It's silly but kinda in line with what I'm used to from cyberpunk and fallout. I don't really like it but I can live with it, and I'm sure the modders will fix this fast.
Most importantly, quests are still okay. Haven't found anything amazing yet, mostly bland scan, fetch or kill quests, but I'm hoping for the usual rare gems that Bethesda rpgs are known for. The main story quest is as generic as it can get, but again, that's just how Bethesda rpgs are. I'm okay with that as long as the world is compelling enough.
And here's the problem with this game. The world. It's vast and empty. As I said before in this thread, we've seen this done a couple of times before, basically endless play space, with nothing in it. It never ended well for anyone.
Bethesda games rely on a compact world where if you take two steps you bump into something new, something interesting, a quest, a cave, a random encounter... You don't have that here. You can't have that here. It's impossible. With the rest of the game being the usual Bethesda fair of let's be honest, everything done in a rather mediocre fashion, I don't think this new IP has a chance of sticking around like TES or Fallout does.
So far it's a 7/10 for me. It's a fallout4 mod, in space. I like fallout4, and I will put a 100 hours into this easily, but they can do better.
edit: freakin hell, I just looked at this for a sec and found like 12897 typos. WTH is my autocucumber up to??