Well, guess it's a bit of both. On one hand I see a tick in the checkbox... Guess someone figured out by making a player spend more playtime in the game = game is worth the money. So that became a goal to be fulfilled and rather than giving us exciting quality quest, it then became a series of planet scanning and fetch quest. Well not all, some are not all bad... Just a few really bad ones that stick out. On the other hand, they have also invested loads of resources into building worlds that can be explored and they would like players to do so, but execution isnt perfect, so we end up doing quest after quest will low value low enjoyment and low reward...
Well, my first playthrough of the game was close to 60 hours without really doing any of the side quests that are called tasks. I also didn't do a lot of the local quests under Nexus, Voeld etc.
So even if you ignore the side quests it's got a good length especially compared to other rpg's these days.
They added more quests then to give you more to do if you want to. Sure, they are fairly standard quests but really, they can be ignored.
My bigger concern here is having all these quests but only being able to track one of them at a time. That's just annoying.
Agree about the generic feeling of filler explained by the op. To me it stretched on planets as well, making them all feel pretty similar, kill and reward, fetch and reward, scan 3 times this, destroy 3 times that etc. My first playthrough was very throrough because I was evaluating the game, trying to find things that would appease me, and I got a lot of deja vu instead. Might have lost 3h only by watching planets zooming in and out, for example. However, at the same time we think game design was bad, there will be other people who sort of enjoy that. For a company, it's easier going to what they got as the right thing, those that commute with their current design, unless the greatest majority screamed they messed up, that is.
Most Open World games are prone to be like that, I guess. Mad Max, for example, I remember going to very difficult and distant points on the map, kill mobs and the hell only to be rewarded with scraps. Rewarding in that game punished us a lot. Soon enough, you would be a bit bored by all the go here, kill that, scrap this, paint that system, because it all came to it as you were wasting your time with repetition.
But now that the game is done, hm, I'm mainly expecting them to fix the game crashing bugs; and the cosmetic stuff which seems to have an importante role to most of people. Then perhaps they will move over to the rest of the feedback? Who knows.
