Nicklecompte

It is genuinely incredible how many dumb lies and empty invocations of "wokeness" are allowed to stick around in the user reviews. Most of the people here simply haven't played it. I think the critical average is harsh-but-fair. It's not great! I said 7/10 since everything is pretty average for a Bethesda DLC: it's no Dragonborn or Fall Harbor, but it's comparable maybe to Nuka-World or Dawnguard. If you don't like Starfield you won't like this. I liked Starfield quite a bit, and I mostly liked this too. Good: - gave me an excuse to check out Starfield again: there have been good QoL updates and necessary bugfixes / proc gen improvements (still some problems) - a lot of good flavor/background text and dialogue - I still think Bethesda is (usually, not always) one of the better RPG studios at thoughtful moral ambiguity, rather than a diversity of good-bad moral options, and that's true here too. A lot of "what's the least bad option?" if you want to solve things positively. - *some* of the fights were good and tense; many enemies teleport around and sometimes that's quite spooky - the overworld is fun to explore and well-crafted - professional critics whining that Bethesda didn't explain away the Great Serpent is are babies: what do you think religion is? Mixed: - most of the fights were nothing to write home about; combat reminded me a lot of Broken Road from New Vegas in being a refreshing challenge but not a particularly interesting one - I liked the individual house quests, but they were poorly-motivated by the main quest - the city itself is pretty but not very convincing as a disaster zone, nor as a center of government - the cosmic sci-fi stuff is fine, I liked some of the cutscenes - the new weapons weren't anything to write home about, though it does add a bit of diversity to energy and melee weapons - a lot of the assets were pretty and we are definitely seeing them again in TES6. The visual design often felt Elder Scrolls. Bad: - it would have been nice to have new skills (e.g. a dual wielding tutor), new types of ship equipment, etc. Maybe there's stuff I missed. - there's some iffy voice acting in prominent roles - the cosmic *horror* stuff was just too goofy and low-budget to be scary :/ - I am a programmer and therefore gracious when it comes to bugs, but some of the dialogue triggers need to get fixed as a high priority - the asking price is too expensive ("why not just play Phantom Liberty?"), but I got it with the preorder so didn't pay for it. At $0 it is definitely worth playing! I suppose BGS kinda fell on the sword of inflation here...games aren't getting any cheaper.

This is the best game of the year, and my 2nd-favorite RPG behind Disco Elysium. The graphics, harsh RNG-based difficulty, and lack of memorable characters might be a turn-off for some. But the mechanics and world-building are simply incredible, and it is astonishing that a game so large is still just as fun as NetHack or Brogue. What an achievement.