Yeah, I played a decent amount and quit when I realized the first boss isn’t the lead-in to the story. I’ll come back when there’s more to it (especially since the Game Pass version is out of date).

mistaking Baltics for Balkans twice

No, they mistook it for Balkans once. The other time they mistook it for “Balkins”.

Yes, but you’ll be able to experience the emptiness in new and more boring ways!

cutscenes of a ship taking off rather than an interactive first person view

Docking is more egregious. It’s not even hiding a loading screen, it’s just wasting our time so things like the CF/SysDef back and forth take longer.

and the same dull and lifeless NPC “AI” (I use that term very generously given recent advances) as we saw in older Bethesda titles.

It’s worse IMO, NPCs don’t seem to have schedules anymore. Which is kind of okay, my least favorite thing in Skyrim was shops being closed because there’s no “fast travel and arrive in the morning” option, but they feel a lot less alive when they stand in one place forever.

by locking many parts behind two different skills, Piloting and Starship Design

And upgrades locked behind levels, plus not having all parts at all shipyards (or even all parts of one brand at their main location).

No

They can test both at once. They’re probably much more confident this attempt will get into orbit, too.

where 90% of them are procedurally generated with nearly identical enemies

It’s worse than that. The POIs are recycled almost exactly. They’re made in a way where they could have been procedural, but instead we get the same dozen-ish of them repeated with the same things in the same place.

I really regret thinking the extra time to polish would result in a game where we don’t need modders to make things decent. The mod tools aren’t even out and people have rebalanced multiple systems to be way better than Bethesda came up with.

Wikipedia cites this book: https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/174106