I feel like the main quest was really uneven, tempo-wise. You get some slow build up quests, finding individual mcguffins, things get moving a bit faster as you learn more about what's going on, things move faster still as dramatic things happen... and then you spend a few real world hours warping to a planet, wandering around until you find a location, doing a minigame, getting a power, and then repeating 10 more times. And then you have the climactic mission. It feels like the process of getting the powers was really poorly planned out when it came to integrating the cool powers with the story. People are always a bit "gee whiz, that power was cool", but the story doesn't really engage with your growing powers in any sort of serious way, since by the time you get them you're narratively one foot out the door.
The powers are cool, but the intrusion of "magic" into the hard sci-fi future is never really addressed in any sort of satisfying way, at least not in anything I've encountered so far.
That said, I'm enjoying NG+ and I feel a sense of real alignment with my character. I'm not speedrunning the abandoned cryolab while my character is just being weirdly prescient about everything; we're blazing through it together because we both remember having been there before.
Spoilers for playthrough 3?
I got to a starting point where you go through the motions of going to the lodge and ran into a clone of myself! That was such a weird experience haha I didn't think that would happen. It didn't save or anything and I kinda wish it did but I wish they had more experiences like this.
I feel like the main quest was really uneven, tempo-wise. You get some slow build up quests, finding individual mcguffins, things get moving a bit faster as you learn more about what's going on, things move faster still as dramatic things happen... and then you spend a few real world hours warping to a planet, wandering around until you find a location, doing a minigame, getting a power, and then repeating 10 more times. And then you have the climactic mission. It feels like the process of getting the powers was really poorly planned out when it came to integrating the cool powers with the story. People are always a bit "gee whiz, that power was cool", but the story doesn't really engage with your growing powers in any sort of serious way, since by the time you get them you're narratively one foot out the door.
The powers are cool, but the intrusion of "magic" into the hard sci-fi future is never really addressed in any sort of satisfying way, at least not in anything I've encountered so far.
That said, I'm enjoying NG+ and I feel a sense of real alignment with my character. I'm not speedrunning the abandoned cryolab while my character is just being weirdly prescient about everything; we're blazing through it together because we both remember having been there before.
Spoilers for playthrough 3?
I got to a starting point where you go through the motions of going to the lodge and ran into a clone of myself! That was such a weird experience haha I didn't think that would happen. It didn't save or anything and I kinda wish it did but I wish they had more experiences like this.