After years of hearing about this game's apparent underdog story and how much had been "fixed," I tried my first ever playthrough of it last weekend and it's really not that good. Some of the worst texture loads of any AAA game I've ever played, characters T-posing in animations, and characters talking without their months moving are all things I noticed within the first 120 minutes. Honest question for anyone who likes this game, what is the appeal?
I gave it another chance after Phantom Liberty and enjoyed it quite a bit; over a ~50 hour playthrough, I haven't seen more than a couple instances of the issues you're citing, so that's probably a contributing factor.
It's not perfect by any stretch and I'd have a hard time recommending it at full price, but the gameplay is fun, and the character power progression feels nice... you go from being very weak in the early game to being fairly super-powered by mid-late game, which I always enjoy.
The main storyline in the base game is not particularly good, but the side content / optional quests are really where it shines. The side content is far better than the main quest, and I had a good time with the DLC; the storyline there was much more compelling than the base game.
I think the biggest issue with the game from a story perspective is that they have all this fun side content but the main story creates such a sense of urgency that you feel compelled to advance it whenever it's available to advance, which is most of the time. The main plot point of "You have weeks to live unless you sort this out" doesn't really leave much room for "...but feel free to take your time and enjoy the game", even if it is just fake urgency (you can take as long as you want in reality, but the game constantly badgers you to get back to the main story.)
What system are you playing on? I completed it (twice) on the steam deck, so the additional problems of the Linux/proton layer and it played awesomely. I have maybe 1 or 2 glitches throughout the entire game. I suspect you've got an additional issue set or incompatibility.
Steam, purchased and installed Friday night. Running a RTX 3090, Ryzen 9, 32gb of RAM, and playing the game off a Samsung SSD. If there's any fan hacks to make this game good, please share, but it's been one of the worst AAA gaming experiences for me of the past several years.
That's definitely odd. Nothing in there jumps out to me as problematic. Have you had any issues with any other games? The consensus is generally that most/all the major bugs have been squashed. It might be a sign that something underlying is causing difficulties. My guess would be your graphics drivers, or GFX card memory corruption issues. Do the problems get better or worse as you play? If they get worse, it might be a thermal related problem.
I have noticed the game can be a bit brittle on issues. The few I had required a full restart of the game to fix. Reloading saves etc didn't seem to help.
I can definitely see how you would dislike it, if it's being buggy. It's one of those games where it would easily break the immersion that makes it work.