I'm curious, you mentioned the hostage scenario at Akila. Does talking down the Shaw gang give you a peaceful method of obtain the artifact near the end of that quest? I try not to save scum so when that whole ordeal went south I had to gun my way through everyone outside of the cavern, then of course only after half her people were dead did Shaw bother striking up a conversation. Not trying to be an ass here, I'm genuinely curious as to whether or not that would've actually changed with prior gameplay.

I tried a few side quests and none of them were at all compelling, though I'll admit I didn't bother going too deep with most of the factions. I don't know, each one I tried consisted of walking back and forth and listening to people talk about trees being too loud or some shit I couldn't care about. Maybe if I'd gone to Space Tokyo or signed up with the space pirates that would've been different. But following the main storyline and tooling around the first few planets was repetitive and just more Bethesda-style gun in, then take the shortcut out after getting the thing. I gave up on the game after around 20 hours of not enjoying the experience.

If you're liking the game then good for you but my experience was that none of the choices I made actually mattered and the world Bethesda built was bland and cliche. And the game mechanics themselves were nothing ground breaking at all, except maybe ship building but that took way too much effort to grok. I tried to like the game but couldn't.