they put crack in this game. the first 30 or so hours were magical, nothing but going from point a to point b and fighting generic fantasy enemies on the way but with some of the most solid gameplay and feel out of any AAA ARPG i think i've played in a while.

by the end though it felt like the amount of world to explore and quests to do ran out long before my hunger for more of this game did, culminating in me getting to the very end of the game (before the post-game) and going "wait, that's it??", and i ended up exploring every corner of the world map thinking i had missed something, and unfortunately ran out of energy to move on to the post-game.

i WILL eventually play it, though i might wait until more content is added or i gain the motivation to again.

the most finnish eurojank source adventure game i think i've ever played (positive). even if the puzzles feel like kind of a slog at times, and the battery drain mechanic is kind of just an annoyance (luckily, you can edit the configs to decrease the rate that it drains, or just turn it off completely), every environment has an endless amount of care put into it and the photography helps to incentivize you to explore every little crevice you can, find every document and easter egg.

i do wish it was made a bit more obvious at times which path leads you to the next area and which is optional, because there are multiple times where i'll walk into a hallway thinking it's more map only to be met with a level transition. still, i'll definitely replay this at some point, maybe check out the surprising wealth of fan-mods too. i like this game quite a bit, even through the tedium.

there is a very strange consensus around this game that it is THE best fallout game of all time, to some, even one of the best modern RPGs of all time, and for a while i just chocked it up to reddit circlejerking, especially when a lot of the conversation used to focus around how obsidian was "better at making a bethesda game than bethesda themselves!", and, well... if you've played the outer worlds, you can probably understand why i felt so skeptical about these sentiments.

however, i've been waiting for Starfield's creation kit 2 to release, and turn that game into a virtual playground, and in the mean time i've been craving some more bethesda-grade open world slop, and the last few times i tried doing another full playthrough of this game, i bounced off everytime, feeling like the exploration was lackluster and uninteresting compared to its peers. so i figured, "fuck it, why not give it another try?" and try i did. i played practically the entirety of the base game (including many quests i missed on my first playthroughs during my childhood) AND all of the DLCs. and you know what? i did decently enjoy it.

while i still think this game's fatal flaw lies in its lack of interesting exploration and locales, i do think the writing and improvements from fallout 3 is strong enough to let the game stand on its own two feet - MOSTLY. i think the main story is still more of the same barebones bethesda storytelling you get from a lot of their games, but the skill of the writers involved does season it enough to make it palatable.

FNV is also a game that very much seems to hold classic fallout and especially fallout 2 in deep reverence, with many aspects from black isles' cancelled fallout 3 (aka van buren) being included in this game, and while i can see the appeal, i'm also a bit biased, as someone who has never really played through those games, and i can really only see the complicated baggage that new vegas carries with it as a result.

anyways, before i make this review even more winding and directionless than it already kind of is, i do like this game a lot more than i used to. that being said, i still kinda think it's a bit overrated, when in reality, it just has the opposite flaws and strong points of most bethesda games in a lot of ways.