The best way to play is to shut it off and just imagine exploring other planets. Seriously, this game fails to be entertaining even when it’s buggy as fuck. It’s just so goddamn boring.

You know what’s fun? Going through three loading screens to watch the same animation of a ship touching down on a planet for the zillionth time, to then get out and start sprinting/bunny hopping to a quest marker, do the thing, get back on the ship, fast travel to hub world, sell your shit, and lather rinse repeat. Or how about pointing your radar gun at the same alien rhinoceros eight times, and repeat that process five times to fill a different fucking checklist? You like campground management? How many campgrounds do you want to manage? 8? 16? up to 24? With another three loading screens between each one? Pick up the resources! What are they good for? Building more bases, of course! And mods, but only after you’ve dumped precious perk points into those skills. Speaking of - I sure hope you like doing chores, because you get slapped with a “Do this 50 times” task before you can put another point in. Oh joy!

Bethesda games always had a reputation for being boring, buggy clutter looters, but up until now there was still satisfaction in exploring and finding bespoke setpieces - one example that sticks out in my mind to this day, in FO4, the office in that first town that you can unlock to see a skeleton strangling another. It tells a story that you don’t get on the 990 procgen planets, and it’s shockingly scarce in the other 10 handcrafted ones that also suffer the issue of everything being cookie-cutter and too damn far apart. When I play this game, I don’t feel the love and care that other Bethesda games have. It feels empty and soulless, and it wastes so much of your fucking time to deliver that soullessness. I look at it and all I can think is “They spent eight years on this?”