I guess by your use of the word 'trudged' that you don't rate Horizon Zero Dawn too highly? It's coming to PC sometime in the future and I was optimistic about it. I enjoyed my time with The Outer Worlds. Good catch with Vicar Max, I hadn't made that link. I think that the companion characters are some of the strongest bits of the game. I especially enjoyed how they interact with each other. But yeah, as you say, the story plods in the middle. Then it's like: psyche! You're actually halfway through the final act. Wait, who exactly is the antagonist? Oh well, here's the final mission. I was also disappointed by how little weight it felt like your decisions had. There's the one big decision you make on the first planet which feels impactful. And there's a cool potential interaction with a companion too during the decision. But after that, nothing felt that important. In a funny twist of fate, the writer for Outer Wilds has now been hired by the creators of The Outer Worlds. Potentially to work on the sequel. Also, if you have a spare 15 minutes, there's a good video of the devs of The Outer Worlds reacting to a 12 minute speed run of their game. Obvious spoiler warning if you haven't completed it yet.
I actually really enjoyed HZD. Bought the disc like two years ago but never got around to it; when the expansion cost $10 less than the full monty basic-game-plus-expansion-plus-swag package, I bought the swag so Aloi stares out at me whenever i turn on the Playstation. The combat is imaginative; your loadout and your selections and your strategy and your sequencing all matters. It's a fairly rich story world with engaging mysteries. I think my basic problem is with how stupid Guerilla makes their AI. I can accept it if you have a rogue machine that forgets I'm there five minutes after I launch an exploding armor piercing arrow at its head because okay, machine AI evolves stupidly. But the fact that your human adversaries timeout even quicker is weird; it's like stealth-killing a kennel full of amnesiac golden retrievers. It's obviously a design choice to tilt combat towards lots of intense combos and other dumb shit but it also means that if you're primarily a sniper many of the quests become sort of an elaborate golf game. Which hey, I guess I need right now. I'll watch that speedrun later. I'm in the middle of salvaging the hope right now because I tend to play every side quest. For a few days it was annoying because I realized I was basically walking around waiting for people to ask me to do favors but also, shit, I could stand to do some good in the (virtual) world right now. My main beef? Right now? Is it's damn hard to find an interesting video game that isn't also somewhere post-apocalyptic where you're fighting corrupt madmen. It makes me wish there was more to do in No Man's Sky.