Recent reviews by ChaseDuck

Pretty much D&D the game, they stayed surprisingly faithful to D&D gameplay despite being a video game. Open world with tons of options, the choices you make actually change the story a ton down the line, the NPCs and dialogue are super well made and immersive, and it's 10x more fun with friends. It's a long game too, it'll probably take 100 hours to do your first playthrough if you try to do everything.

7 / 10

It's pretty good. It's not amazing, but it's also not as bad as most of the negative reviews say it is. Compared to other open world space games though, it's definitely the best one out there.

To summarize, the writing / roleplaying aspects could benefit from a complete redo from people with more passion and the game needs more randomly placed (but still handcrafted) locations and encounters to explore. The open world stuff is pretty good though, like the non-roleplaying parts of quests, ship building, exploration, and skill leveling.

If you want to enjoy the game the most, take it slowly and engage with all of the side mechanics like ship building, crafting, exploration, etc. I think most of the bad reviews come from people who only focused on completing the quests and rushed through the game, which is the worst way to play it IMO. One negative review I saw said that they did all 10 playthroughs of the main quest and it said they hated it, but they only had 29 hours in the game which is insane (my FIRST playthrough of the main quest took like 30 hours at a casual pace).

The biggest upside by far IMO is the ship building. It's super addictive and it's really meaningful because you spend a lot of time in your ship.

Another upside is that the entire world / setting feels really well built. I noticed tons of attention that was poured into the scientific accuracy of the game in all sorts of ways from astronomy (environments of all the planets and star systems are super realistic) to engineering (all of the space ship parts seem to have been made by someone who knows a lot about aerospace engineering in real life).

Doing non-roleplaying stuff (ie anything besides talking to people) is fun most of the time. At worst it's a little boring, at best it's a little exciting, but most of the time it's just good. Some examples of stuff you might do for quests are fighting (or stealthing) your way through a dungeon, having a space dogfight with someone to disable their ship and capture them, or going out to explore part of a planet to look for something.

Some smaller upsides are that most of the mechanics feel really nice (gunplay, movement, ship combat, UI usage, etc.) which is a surprise for a Bethesda game, the research / crafting system feels good to me, the skill leveling is a little fun, and the ship combat is pretty good. I don't think it's realistically how space combat might actually be like in the future, but it FEELS realistic and it's fun.

One aspect that's okay but has a lot of room for improvement is the exploration. It's really fun for a little while. Most of the random encounters in space are pretty entertaining and immersive and some of the POIs are interesting to explore. However, once you start to see repeats of randomly generated events and locations it gets harder to enjoy exploration since you don't feel like you're finding anything new anymore. It took me a little over 100 hours to do all of the main questlines at a casual pace in my first playthrough but it felt like there was only about 50 hours of random encounters and POIs to see along the way. I've been seeing people say that a lot of the game is randomly generated, which is true about the terrain, but the actual POIs and encounters ARE handcrafted, they're just placed randomly on planets and happen randomly. It's a good idea, but the main problem with them is that there just aren't enough. The game's exploration would feel good for a lot longer if it didn't run out of new random things to experience halfway through my first playthrough. One part of exploration in this game that never gets old though is just roaming / driving around on planets. The terrain is beautiful and feels realistic which makes it pretty fun to just drive a buggy around in space while taking it in.

The biggest downsides are the roleplaying aspects. None of the characters are very interesting or memorable, some of the quest plots aren't very interesting or well delivered, and almost all of the dialogue / writing is corny. The game's writing is the worst part by far and feels like it was lazily done by people who don't really care about their job and are kinda out of touch with the world. It just feels so boring and intensely status quo which is weird for a game that's supposed to take place 300 years in the future. The non-roleplaying parts of most quests are okay, (like the stuff you actually go out and do), but the parts where you have to talk to other people are really bad and unenjoyable compared to other recent AAA RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 or Cyberpunk 2077.

Another downside is that if you're ever not in the mood to take things slowly and just want to get stuff done and focus on quests, the main gameplay loop just kinda boils down to fast travelling, staring at loading screens, and talking to people. It's a boring loop, and I know for a fact that it would have been very doable to not have any loading screens at all when grav jumping or entering / exiting a building. It's something other games with similar scopes and smaller development resources have done before. Just getting rid of loading screens would make quest-focused gameplay loops much more tolerable since it wouldn't take as long and be as boring to get to where you need to go.

Another flaw is that the game does not run well at all. I have one of the best gaming PCs you could possibly build as of writing this review, and with no mods and high settings (not ultra), the game only gives okay-ish framerates. If I had a more cost efficient PC, I would not have had a good time playing this game. There are optimization mods that I've found, but they don't improve the performance as much as I'd wish.

Something else that bothers me is that the cities don't feel that functionally well made. They all look amazing, but they don't feel very alive since the only thing you ever see NPCs do besides one-time scripted events is just walk, there aren't very many things that encourage exploration in cities, and to me they honestly feel kinda small. New Atlantis is the biggest one, but I only think that's because it's mostly wide open walking space. None of the cities even have enough shops / places you can go to make it feel "city sized". I know size size is a little bit of an unfair thing to criticize about though since humanity is supposed to be really spread out and no longer in the billions population-wise in this setting, plus they all clearly took a long time to make on top of the fact that the rest of the game is really big. That doesn't change the fact that they still feel a little disappointingly small though.

Some smaller downsides are that base building doesn't really have enough purpose in the game to spend a lot of time on it and all of the events in the game feel isolated from each other (like if you do one thing for a quest, nobody will ever bring it up again after you finish that quest outside of passing dialogue lines relating to the biggest events from main questlines).

To resummarize, roleplaying parts bad, open world parts good.

I heard the game was pretty crappy when it first came out, but it seems like the devs really pulled through and made it a great game. It's still a bit buggy and there are still a few features I wish they'd add, but overall it's a really fun and mesmerizing game. It's worth putting at least 100 hours into.

it's ok

Great game to play with friends.