Odyssey a year later

Over the last year I've been playing Odyssey. Mostly playing as an exobiologist, because I figured I'd get lost and wander the galaxy as Odyssey shit up the game and it slowly died. A year after that goofy launch I'm really actually trying it now, for the first time really when it comes to the main loops. Here's a few things I've noticed.

Odyssey itself is such a robust environment for a game. Does that make sense? The things I see, the things I do. They're just amazing that I can do these things in a game. There's some really bizarre design choices and some of them I kinda love.

I'm farming these settlements for Opinion Polls. I love the signs around this tourist settlement, advertising all the things I'd want, there's some real good art there. I like how I can sneak around and even though the AI is real dumb I appreciate that it does respond with some well voice acted lines.

As goofy as all that was I can at any time hop in a space ship and it's got an amazingly well modeled physics system and cruise off or I can land and return to sort of a Fallout 4-ish looter shooter where I'm walking around an interacting with things on a personal scale. Fallout 4 didn't have vehicles at all. Cyberpunk had vehicles but they didn't have very good physics and NPC's stopped existing the moment you looked away from them. Items in Cyberpunk didn't often had reduced detail models such as a generic bag used in all vending machines. Does that mean… this is better than those big games?

Odyssey has physical vehicles, npcs tracked at all times, tons of items in settlements where everything has a unique model, and npcs exist and wander around. When I threw a grenade and it hit parts of the wall in a power plant those parts took damage and started releasing fire and steam. I think that's where I was like goddamn why is this so detailed, why is this better than other open world games. I thought Odyssey was shit, but there is some real genius behind some of the systems.

Hold up, you're about to reply and tell me why Odyssey is such shit. Look, I'm not saying it's anything near perfect or even good. The gunplay is shit if you've come from a fps, but try to see it more like an open world game trying to pretend do do gunplay like Fallout. Exobiology eats a whole lot of ass full stop. The grind and launching from settlements to reload them over and over being the only way to do anything with engineers is 199% stupid. Also I don't know about your performance, without getting technical I have a real high end system that doesn't eff around with fps, I got all the frames I could ever want, and even that used to get tanked before they optimized a bit. I understand if you didn't spend stupid amounts money on your PC, nobody should have to, and if you were on a console I still think you got effed. There are some pretty big issues still. I just think, maybe, underneath all that, there is a pretty amazing game with some pretty wild tech working for it.