Ok, I'm probably a couple hours into Forspoken now (my copy arrived a day early from Best Buy...yeah, I pre-ordered. I wanted the Steelbook case. Deal with it.

). And honestly...while it's a little rough around the edges, I'm finding the early going promising. Obviously I need to get further before I can give a more fleshed out opinion, but I am not seeing anything to justify the massive hate boner for this game. And worst it just seems like an average, inoffensive open-world game. But it looks good (minus a few wrinkles here and there...wish they would have done something different with the way long hair is rendered because it looks pretty rough at times in performance mode), so far gameplay seems fun, and I'm actually kind of enjoying the characters and dialogue. If the constant banter between Frey and Cuff is the same as it was in the demo, I'll be turning that down, but I've actually found the scripted dialogue pretty amusing.
We'll see how it pans out, but considering that the consensus among most of the reviews seems to be that the game gets better as it progresses, I'm feeling pretty optimistic about this one.