You all got downvoted for not playing since version 1.5, actually - the only complaint here that stuck is vehicle fuckery. "duplicate npcs" just tells me you are stopping to examine characters you literally can't interact with and looking for excuses to bandwagon dunking on a game that was released 6 months early.

I wouldn't call even the final product the same as what they marketed, but if you bought the game and just refused to ever look back that's on you and your expectation management. It was better than acceptable (fun even) all the way from before Edgerunners, mod support was really well done and allowed for users to "fix" things in ways the game has vanilla now (vehicle combat was a mod with far more features than just vehicle combat and most of it is present in the game now, like enhanced NCPD ai).

The only extremely off thing now is AI driving. If you drive anywhere you're bound to wind up with a multiple car pile-up due to just one aggravated AI driver. This is how I know the extended whining is uninformed - anyone complaining heavily about the game that has played recently will know about this, or complain specifically about some of the quests namedropping the expansion.

It's like seeing chatGPT write a negative review, the information is entirely hearsay, and out of date to boot.