my biggest issue was the bullet sponging and totally unbalanced combat, youd either be a god that couldnt die or someone who has to land 50 headshots with a sniper rifle to kill someone
Personally I found the combat as fun and balanced as can be expected in a game where power scaling is not directly tied to progress. If you just fuck around doing side quests and farming loot for 20 hours, it’s going to feel super easy, and if you try to blitz the story and run early game stuff then enemies will feel like bullet sponges. That’s just a mechanic endemic to the open world rpg genre. My first playthrough I did side missions as I stumbled across them on my way through the story, and the combat felt pretty balanced. Second time I went much more methodically and ended up cruising through story missions like nobody’s business.