I've been playing for eight hours or so. Not nearly enough to explore all the game's systems, but enough to get a decent feel for the game I think. And it's a Bethesda game all right, through and through. People who expected Elite Dangerous with hardcore RPG elements will be sorely disappointed.
Story and quests has that cookie cutter Bethesda feel to them. Lot's of tropes and idealism, black or white characterizations etc, nothing really edgy or controversial. But it does what it does really well though, which is provide players with a canvas to paint their own story on. I think about these games as complex video game versions of the "choose your own adventure"-books. You're not gonna get fine literature out of it but the story will be
your story.
Characters are a little stiff, especially unnamed ones, but a lot of them are still interesting or endearing. Voice acting ranges from mediocre to fantastic. Some of the main characters are almost BG3 level. Leakers said you could only talk to a few characters but this isn't true at all, you can talk to all characters but only a minority will have proper dialogue trees. This is completely in line with previous Bethesda titles.
When it comes to the planets and stuff the procedural generation might be lacking, but the planet tiles it generates are absolutely stunning imo. They truly look like believable alien places, especially compared to the cartoony worlds of No Man's Sky's. It'll be interesting to see to what extent assets get reused, but so far I've seen good variety in environments. Exploration of planets is fairly simplistic but a lot of fun. I don't want to tunnel through half the planet like in NMS.
The game has a whole bunch of smaller problems though, luckily it's mostly stuff that could be fixed through mods and patches:
- No HDR on PC
- No FOV slider (honestly guys...)
- No brightness settings
- No body when you look down
- No proper map when navigating cities (huge pain in the ass)
- Can't command companions(?)
- No real space travel. Planets are physical objects that move properly through space but it's just used as a backdrop at the moment. Give us supercruise or something!