I feel exactly the same way. It’s like the story in both updates was written by separate teams. The first one laid great foundation and innovated a lot in comparison with stories from the past of the game, while the second team kind of took it and rushed to nail one point of trusting Peitha in our heads. No side stepping to elaborate, very poor presentation of another, unknown dimension, very loose attempt to make you somewhat empathize with it’s inhabitants. It felt very much like regress to the level of season one of the living story. Especially the steps where you enter separate instances for a dialogue with an NPC and then leave immediately. It was super short too, and pretending that there were three separate “chapters” is really embarrassing. Each one is like 5 minutes of actually something happening, and the rest of patting for time, like walking slowly to destinations etc… Not even filling a progress bar with completed events could mask the scarcity of story content, and it’s sad that they even considered it a valid technique to use. The only good thing is the work of voice actors, you can tell they care and are well directed. The rest looks like somebody took all the assets, got an order to take the story from point A to point B, and just winged it. I really hope it’s the suits decisions, and not the devs will.

I had my doubts about pre-ordering SOTO after EOD, but after initial update they were mostly gone. It had it’s own issues, like heavy asset reuse etc. but you could tell there were passionate devs working with what they got to create best thing they can. The second update made me decide to not pre-order and more expansions. I will consider buying after reading reviews, and after an xpac rolls out in its entirety.