The spoiler warning is just a formality since I’m sure everyone knows about temples and what they hold within.
My particular issue with temples is that they’re just so simple and repetitive. They feel incomplete or as if they just peppered them in during late stages because they needed a way to explain powers. If you ask me they could have taken two routes.
ROUTE A:
They could have taken the Skyrim route. in Skyrim you’d head to a dungeon or cavern, fight some bandits, drugars, and the occasional dragon priest until you hit the end and- “Oh look. A shrine that holds a word of power!”
They could have had temples with winding paths and waves of starborn trying to stop me and then in the center I’d do the puzzle and get the power.
ROUTE B:
They could have just had the already implemented random encounters with landing starborn but add waves like they did in the ground pounder mission and a heavy boss enemy that, when killed, his essence is the one that contains the power.
Idk to me they could have been great, but they ended up “meh.”
I kinda like I don’t have to fight. But it definitely could have been more of a moment.
I’m with you that I don’t have an issue with them not being a big fight. That would slow down an already slow process if you try to get them all before moving to another NG+. I think one thing that would have helped is having Vlad give more than one at a time. Going back and forth constantly when that is all you’re doing before moving on makes it feel tedious for sure. Though probably less so for me than many gamers.
I wouldn’t even just binge doing those if we took something with us on each Unity jump. At least credits if nothing else. I’d mix in more stuff, but right now that feels like a waste until I finally get to a point where I just want to play through it all and no longer go through the unity.
I’m still only on my first run, but I swear I’ve found temples by just randomly scanning planets. That’s actually been my main motivation for just jumping from system to system.
There are some in the systems that the artifact missions take you on, so they will pop up as objectives when you enter the system or land on a planet. Or probably when I scan planets. Not sure which. I always just consider them happy little accidents. But always nice when that happens because on my current run I found three like that, which made it a bit quicker than running back to Vlad for those.