Does that truly constitute a failed game?
As far as I’m concerned their biggest mistake was not having something to travel around in the planets on the start. Walking around to the interesting locations was annoying.
Then there’s a bunch of pointless systems like the colony system, and the whole space magic thing, but the rest is still a bog standard Bethesda game with 10000 different handcrafted unique locations for me to explore following a bunch of sort of interesting questlines.