I'm really on the fence with this one. This game at most is a 6-7/10 if you play the 'Good' side aka side with the Good aligned factions. It's a 4-5/10 if you side with being a Pirate or the 'Bad' faction. I put these in quotes since this game falls constantly on the Morally Gray side of storytelling a lot.

Onto the actual experience/review;
- I started as a Space Scoundrel as I wanted to be a pirate exploring the Stars and looting everything
- Only touched Constellation to progress enough to have the basics. Wasn't really interested in the 'find the magic Maguffin' storytelling.
- Crimson Fleet seems interesting and is -the- pirate faction, you cannot join Va'runn or Ecliptic from what I've seen but maybe you can.
- Join Crimson Fleet, station is cool, get the Piracy Missions to do what I wanted to do.

Here's the big problem:
- Bounties. They are astronomically ridiculous. If you kill 1 person it's 15K credits. This is even more ridiculous when you kill all the witnesses to said crime and you -STILL- have the bounty. Apparently all the Law enforcement gained telepathy somehow. Trying to clear these bounties is a nightmare.
- Jail. If you decide you don't want to pay your 300K bounty even though noone actually lived to see you do it then you can go to jail. Jail deletes all of your XP for that lvl and some more with some XP debt. This is a complete and utter waste of time for 0 reason. Yes, I understand Oblivion and Morrowind had this system but lvling skills in those games is relatively easy. In Starfield it takes a long ass time. This isn't fun, this is just annoying.
- Piracy is really fun in this game since you can demand/board. Taking over ships is really fun...But utterly ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ pointless unless you really want to keep the ship itself. You have to register every ship you steal...Even in the Key aka the Pirate Port. This means 90% of the money you would make for stealing the ship is completely gone. There is literally 0 point in taking/stealing ships in this.

Ok. Enough about my experience as a pirate. Let's get into some Pros/Cons, because like I said originally there are some actual things in this game that are really well done.

Pros;
- Starship Building System is really well designed and fun to play around with if you got the money.
- Outposts are just really from Fallout 4/76 but honestly they work here as they are meant to just generate resources and be a small safe haven on a planet. I like that you can make a lot of them as it encourages exploring useful/cool locations to make one.
- Crew Management system is easy to use and not complicated. A+
- Ship Combat. It's not as good as say Elite Dangerous but honestly it's really well done for what it is and fun.
- A good amount of the quests are actually well designed and can be fun to play out.
- The Persuasion system is actually Ok. It's not perfect but it works.
- The game lets you mod/customise most aspects of your gear which makes it helpful if you're going a specific playstyle.
- Ship interiors are awesome. Love them and the fact that you can walk around them with your crew inside.

Cons;
- Skill System | It's honestly a mixed bag. I like the layout and the idea but levelling is very tedious in this unless you are spamming missions, on top of having to wait until you complete challenges to get to the next tier. This also doesn't help that some core mechanics are behind these skills.
- Ironically for their main selling point being exploration it's very tedious. Running around for 25 minutes to find a cave that has 5 resources and 4 dead animals is not what I would consider fun. The POIs are cool initially but are recycled quite a bit. Scanning is really boring and annoying unless you have the upgrades to make it faster.
- Bounty System needs a huge rework.
- Encumbrance is absolutely ridiculous. You pick up 5 things and are encumbered, especially since resources take up a huge amount of Mass. This isn't fun it's just annoying.
- Food items and Gastronomy are entirely useless. While the buffs are not, they only last for at most 10 minutes. This makes carrying all the resources for it annoying and utterly pointless in the end (especially since they weigh a ton too).
- Inventory management can be kind of a nightmare at times, mainly due to the resources just taking up so much space in cargo.
- They put a lot of effort and time into making tons of Miscellaneous items around in the world that don't do anything other than have sell value. This is perfectly fine but again due to the weight restrictions being so ridiculous picking up like 6 items will encumber you. So it becomes pointless to pick them up and you promptly ignore them.
- The only romancable companions are in Constellation. Thus, if you don't do anything with Constellation or are bad/a pirate no love for you. Why?

- There are also still a -lot- of bugs but it's a Bethesda game so...Kind of expected. Not really a con here just more something to note.