Let it be known that there are elements of this game that sit with me positively. But in terms of an open world RPG, this is a game that shuns the actual role-playing aspect in so many ways in favor of gameplay, but the gameplay itself hurts much of the time to even deal with.
Bits of this game that feel like Zelda, then RDR2, then they take from Assassin's Creed, and it sort of just feels like a game you've played before at a certain point with mechanics that span as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle, if only because you have no real reason to engage in really any of them. What reason do I have to build up my camp, increasing relationships with shopkeepers to get contracts to my camp, upkeep relationships with any character at all, do side quests other than occasionally gameplay reasons? (or because the game will literally force you do progress in a certain way by locking you out of progression until you do a specific thing, but narratively it is never explained why)
Can I talk about the narrative? God awful. Camp gets attacked, find one billion of your comrades who survived, watch the game try to establish a personality for each one of them for the one cutscene they get any real time, and of course fails to follow up on really any narrative on any one character. I can't stress this enough, there is almost zero character writing, development, really anything in this game. You build a fantasy world full of tribes, nations, witches, bandits, political intrigue, and you fail to give it ANY interesting characters? To give it the one thing that makes the world move and feel alive and interesting, actual characters that have stakes and change dynamically? I don't care to upgrade a tech tree, I don't care about my camp and the Greymanes, I don't care to defend Hernand, or really have feelings about anything by the hundred hour mark because I really do not know these characters in any real sense of the word! They could all have blown up and I'd actually be relieved I didn't have to hear Yann again! This is antithetical to RPG design, even Starfield did this ♥♥♥♥ better and that was a load of ♥♥♥♥ because of the procedural generation and questionable writing already!
But fine, I'll go back to gameplay. This has been said before but Kliff controls like you're trying to maneuver a 2 ton tungsten cube through a laser maze at times. Many of the mechanics are obtuse and used to solve puzzles in ways that are only occasionally clever, other times downright annoying because they repeat and are made to go unlock gear (which I will ABSOLUTELY get to momentarily). Whoever thought that we need to repeat looking at paintings on mountains so we can spin wheels with the same paintings in the right orientation needs to be fired, that isn't fun that's just forcing me to leave the "dungeon" to go explore the vague location you threw it on the map, which would be fine if it was only once and the gear was any good, but it ISN'T! Wanna know something about the gear in this game? It all functions basically the same, with little difference between any of the armor and weapons outside of the augments they come with, which can also be switched out. Why do this? For what purpose, so people can have vanity? That gets rid of the whole purpose of searching for any of this ♥♥♥♥ in your game! Even Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom gave unique, non-interchangeable abilities to the armor you found, and famously people wanted better loot out of the latter! Why make the player have to choose how they approach a situation strategically though, right? Just find the armor you like, upgrade it to high hell, get the augments you need, then spam the attack button and sometimes force palm to win! But if all the gear is functionally the same, what is there to even work for and find? Lore? Maybe if you gave me a single character to even care about, but no! There's nothing I care to work towards! I don't want to catch 100 outlaws, do 200 quests to give Jim like two iron ore, there's hardly any interesting side quests at all! Once you hit postgame there's zero motivation to do anything because there's no reason to, not even for writing or honest exploration!
This game desperately needs a gameplay and story overhaul, but you might think well maybe mods can help. Stop right there, nope, they update the game every few days with some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that fixes a few bugs and occasionally adds more to or overhauls one mechanic of the game that people aren't even touching because of the previously mentioned issues with the game and it breaks all the mods every time. Imagine that development power was put into making an actually decently written quest with the setpieces that this game actually does do well!
If you want a proper open world RPG, I promise you this game and its fanbase are overselling it. It isn't the worst thing, but we cannot pretend like this is some kind of legendary game or whatever. This is no Skyrim, no RDR2, no Zelda. This is comparable to an Ubisoft game, like a modern Ubisoft game where they stuff a game full of fluff and forget to add the things that made the games they used to make special in the first place. Go get Baldur's Gate 3, or Elden Ring, or Expedition 33, or even idk ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Palworld because at least you can have dumb fun in that last one. I feel empty with this one.
And yeah side note this game absolutely plagiarized Tears of the Kingdom with the Abyss and it's somehow done the concept worse than the empty sky islands Zelda had. I can forgive Palworld because it took on Nintendo in an interesting way but this is genuinely like copying the exact idea and doing it worse. This is the Mr. Pibb of open world RPGs and it isn't even cheaper, utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
