Yeah, I played a decent amount and quit when I realized the first boss isn’t the lead-in to the story. I’ll come back when there’s more to it (especially since the Game Pass version is out of date).

Yes, but you’ll be able to experience the emptiness in new and more boring ways!

cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view

Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.

and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.

by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design

And upgrades locked behind levels, plus not having all parts at all shipyards (or even all parts of one brand at their main location).

where 90% of them are procedurally generated with nearly identical enemies

It’s worse than that. The POIs are recycled almost exactly. They’re made in a way where they could have been procedural, but instead we get the same dozen-ish of them repeated with the same things in the same place.

I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.

Vader has already been done semi-AI (the underlying voice was still human, but transformed to sound like 1980s James Earl Jones).

Thr devs certainly think there’s replayablity since they try to force it on you.

The outpost mechanic is completely and utterly pointless

I’d say it’s worse than pointless. The only reason I can see to use it (outside of XP farming) is to make the grind for research/crafting easier, but it even fails at that since you can buy/loot any resources you need for less than it takes to set up the outposts. It can’t even make one of the other half-baked systems less of a pain to deal with.

I think we need some Australium instead. GabeOS will put neurotoxin in the next Steam Deck.

I don’t have the free time anymore to start over if I want to play the DLC this year.

IIRC that part is fixed now, but there’s another limitation that prevents script extenders from working.

The scale is definitely too big. I’m pretty sure most of the systems are pretty much there just to fill in the star map. I’d rather have a setting where maybe interstellar FTL requires a sublight trip first so only the nearest few stars to Sol are accessible. Really I just want Everspace 2 where I can hop out of my ship occasionally and deal with fewer annoying “puzzles”.

I want to find ships in distress, pirate outposts among asteroid fields, scuttled ships I can scavenge, etc. In other words, space should be a mechanic, not just a setting.

The problem is that they let people skip the space parts arbitrarily often (sometimes planets make me stop to get scanned, sometimes I can go from ground to ground). All of those are encounters that happen, but if you fast travel you won’t see them. I have warped in and seen each of those, with ships in distress even landing near me to ask for help when I’m on the ground. Although the only actual pirate outpost in space AFAIK is the Crimson Fleet base and Everspace 2 does everything in space way better.

There’s both too much and too little stuff on planets. The random outposts it spawns are kind of boring but it’s annoying when I want to put down an outpost and the game has randomly put someone else on the best spot. But when I want to get to them, there’s a long walk for pretty much nothing.