The combat and ship customization (parts, not cosmetics) keep me coming back to ED over NMS. The core gameplay is somewhat samey with your options being combat, mining, trading, or exploration, but there is a bit more incentive. Players can now colonize their own systems, and powerplay is some complex bullshit that I occasionally participate in.
NMS is kind of a chill vibe, which I don’t mind, but I’m not creative enough to build ambitions bases so once I collected everything I was kinda burnt out. Also fuck fleet stuff.
There are occasional appearances of trans flags and a few characters who may or may not be LGBTQ, but the majority of the characters appear to be cisgender and heterosexual.
Imagine completely ignoring a canonically trans character to try to dunk on a game. Also softballing that “may or may not” when half of the romance options are homosexual.
I had to pause the game because I was laughing too hard to play when this happened.
Important to note that immediately after that cutscene, you massacre your way through dozens of luchadores while “you’re the best” by Joe Esposito plays.
Though to be fair, saints row was always a game that set the bar of ridiculousness very high, then one upped itself in the next game, and it was gonna be pretty tough after defusing a launched nuke while riding it, then smashing through the white house to land at the desk. Which is fine, by the way, because you’re already the president. And the matrix stuff but we don’t talk about that as much.
They filed a fuck load of patents. This is one of them.
Translation: mounts that can walk and fly. Which already exist in God knows how many games.