Except. . .they haven't evolved. Like at all. This isn't a vague and unfair criticism, it is right there in the game. Literally none of the stuff Bethesda is good at has evolved in any kind of meaningful way with SF. At worst, they have gone backwards in some areas. In my playthrough there was zero meaningful impact of my background or character I had built on the world around me; nothing reacted to my choices in the game. Contrast with BG3 where literal areas (and of course entire questlines) will shift around the decisions you've made both narratively and personally.
Speaking of player agency, companions in this are the worst they've ever been with most companions (really all of them) expecting the player to play a certain way. For a game that's all about "be whom you want to be" there sure does feel like a malus is being put on the player for doing so. This of course ignores that they are all incredibly boring (I dare you to suffer through Sam Coe and his Daughter the entire game like I did because Sam has some pretty good ship skills) and paper thin. They're all just tropes because that's all Emil and Co. know how to write. This extends to the narrative overall; Bethesda sure loves brown and green, but the one color they refuse to play with is "grey." Everything is so on the nose and sterile in this game - it's all exactly what you would expect with zero surprises (I challenge you to be surprised on the big narrative moments in this game; I'm dumb as rocks when it comes to twists but I saw this one coming a country mile away).
Or what about the actual gameplay? Take settlements, first introduced in FO4, then exploderated in FO76 and somehow, even with the modding community showing exactly what people want, reverts back to FO4, but in pre-alpha. How in the world did they botch such an easy "time waster" activity? Your game is literally about exploration and discovery but there's no incentive to build out mankind to do so? They could have gone all in on the outpost system, to give players a reason to bother with their empty, flat and boring procgen planets - but nope. There's literally no reason to engage with the outpost system whatsoever outside of your desire to create and build. Like I was completely ready to do so, even with the narrative shortcomings, until I saw just basic design missing from this system (you can't "draw" from all storage in your base, literally a feature that they had in FO4's base game; there's no way to favorite outposts, so the already cumbersome fast-traveling is made more so when hopping between outposts you are building out; you can't break down items into their "base" resource, so you'll have a dozen or so "Sealant" from various sources, instead of just the one; quick looting doesn't actually sort by name what they contain so if you're scrounging for one resource - you can't single target resources in this by the by, another feature that was there eight years ago - good luck doing it in an efficient manner, etc.) that would make any meaningful engagement with it a miserable experience - even if there was any real reason to use it, which there isn't.
This general sense of "well enough" applies to most every other game system in this from ship combat to crafting to. . .everything. Like, this isn't the worst game ever, but this need for game journos to not only play quarterback for SF during the pre-embargo, to now - where the game is trending down the "Mostly Positive" ramp on Steam - post-release with "gamers" finally getting their say, is so bizarre. It is just wild.
. . .the constant refrain from journos is the sameness of the AAA-gaming space, and along comes the exact same Bethesda game you've played before and hoped they'd improve upon and now this is the game that needs journos jumping on Twitter to explain why "awkshully, SF is exactly the grand space opera Bethesda was making it out to be."
