I had a similar experience playing it a few months ago—I bought it on steam so it had all the patches, but I got stuck on this one mission where it would refuse to spawn the entrance to the next part of the quest. I spent a few hours googling trying to figure out what was going on, and then I gave up. It’s such a beautiful game, and has a lot of potential, but it is definitely not as stable as any other major AAA game I’ve played in the last 10 years. I would also get random crashes if I enabled raytracing (despite having an RTX card).
Is this in the Imperial Mall quest in Pacifica? Have to hack into a van or something, then talk to some Netwatch guy? A quest trigger bugged there for me as well last week, there was a door that should be open that wasn't, had to reload an earlier autosave and replay for it to trigger properly.
Other than that one large bug, the game has been great, little bit of jank but no worse than say, Skyrim without the community bug patch. I only purchased it in the last steam sale so missed all the rough stuff.
I think it might have been that? It was in one of the first missions. I agree though on your other points--my experience playing the game up until that point was quite good, hence why I spent hours trying to get past the issue.
It is empty in a lot of ways, but filled with detail that many other games don't have in others. I particularly dislike how ridiculous the driving physics are, but the character customization and vast variety of different upgrades and mods is pretty cool.
