Recent reviews by Recorder Player

Bought the constellation edition. Was very excited for this game and I gave it as much of a fair shot as possible. However, the more I played and learned about this game, the less I enjoyed it.

The writing is inconsistent, safe, and most of all, boring. Playing Cyberpunk after Starfield was really eye-opening.

The systems in this game (outposts, shipbuilding, weapons, etc) have a lot of potential but fall flat in practice. I was planning on building a large network of outposts to harvest all the resources I'd need, only to realize:

1. I'd need a ton of perks to even be able to do this, and XP earning in this game is SO SLOW, as well as being unable to justify spending perks on base building over much more essential skills
2. It is cheaper, easier, and faster to just buy resources from merchants
3. There is no way to recycle items. What happened to the recycling feature from fallout 4? Why can't I scrap misc items, especially when so much work has gone into placing them around the world? You're telling me the duct tape I've been collecting this WHOLE GAME can't be turned to adhesive???

Shipbuilding is one of the highlights of this game, but there is no way of customizing the interior. Your only option for verticality are horrendous ladders that are clunky and break the flow of movement. Also, loading screens.

The economy is a mess. Money gained from quests is pitiful compared to money made from selling looted weapons and armor. Ammo cannot be crafted and is absurdly expensive compared to other consumables (there's also a bajillion types of it.)
It's the same with XP - the amount XP earned from a long quest is the same as killing a few alien creatures, or a few seconds of bulk crafting.

The biggest sin of all with this game is the total lack of an open world - the one thing Bethesda games are actually good at. This game is simply fast travelling from one area to another, with no natural exploration. Planets are a mess. They are sluggish to explore, simultaneously both empty and full of copy-paste buildings that ruin the 'empty world' feeling that Bethesda keeps trying to tout, and overall offer very little of interest after you've played for a bit.

Bethesda games are well known for their boring main quests, but this one really takes the cake. It basically boils down to:
-Go rescue this person
-Go talk to this person
-Go collect this 'thing'
-Repeat

Seriously, I've never been more disillusioned with the writing of a main quest before. I had no motivation to continue it because it's just SO LAZY and hard to believe. "There's all these pieces of this thing randomly scattered across the system, go find them all!" The entire main quest is a treasure hunt, with the only motivation being 'oh but we're explorers! and these things make you see visions and stuff!' As flawed as Fallout 4s main quest is, at least it has a clear objective as to WHY you're going on this journey and has some variety in what you're doing.

Underneath all the mess there is a game here, but even with all the fixing and additions I can reasonably expect from Bethesda I still don't see this game coming close to any Elder Scrolls game. Maybe it will reach Fallout 4 level, but I have my doubts.

Go buy Balder's Gate or Cyberpunk 2077 instead.

I fear for Elder Scrolls 6.

if you really like skyrim, you'll f**king hate this game

Don't buy it, even on sale. Controls are clunky, boat and plane operation is boring and very 1-dimensional, and don't even think about using a manual shifter because it puts you at a massive disadvantage.

buy it

holy sh*t.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing