The game paradoxically seems very technically polished but also very mid for me. The graphics look decent. Not amazing, but I'm not playing on a high end machine atm either so it might be better with better hardware. Character customization is pretty bad, almost laughably so. Its not super important in an extraction shooter, but even still it seems very flat and quite androgynous which I am not a fan of and leads me to believe it might be purposefully so in order to help sell Decks and cosmetics. Performance is very well optimized, even with my shitty computer (good one blew up, thanks Helldivers) it plays and runs smoothly and has no noticable lag or stuttering.
My complaint though is it feels rather uninspired. I enjoy sortieing with my friends, but solo I just... don't have the urge to. The desire to grind stuff and improve just isn't there. So far the weapons don't seem to have a unique flavor to them. Yeah, the single shot Ferro hits harder and has only 1 bullet, but aiming it and shooting it doesn't really feel all that unique from aiming and shooting a pistol. The automatics feel samey in aiming and shooting as well. Only real difference is reload times and ttk times. To me it just feels like they lack unique identities. I am not excited to unlock later ones beyond them being +1 gooder. This might change as I get deeper into the tech tree, but atm I'm just... not impressed. A friend described it as the guns feel like guns from "The Borderlands."
Gun mods also feel rather uninspired. Instead of stuff that changes the gun feel in a significant way, it just seems to be basic stat increases. There are no scopes and different aiming devices, no laser etc. Stat wise, they are important, improve damage application and recoil, but they just don't feel like they really do all that much gameplay wise other than improve ttk. Again, game is new and so better later game mods might be more significant, but atm meh.
Camera and audio frustrate me to no end. I enjoy a few extraction shooters and generally prefer more stealthy approaches. Starting with the camera, the forced 3rd person perspective makes hiding in a bush laughable. You can't creep up to the edge of the cover to peer out. Your camera is stuck behind you. You can be completely exposed having crept out of the bushes and yet still unable to see because your camera is stuck behind you trying to look through the foliage. This might not be an issue for a lot of people that are more run and gun, but having played a lot of these games solo being able to sneak around and avoid fights with bigger groups and keep on eye on them from concealment has been a skill that really made the genre enjoyable to me. Instead you have the 'corner peeking' of being at the edge of something and 'peering around' it exploiting camera rotation and angles. Just feels bad to me.
The positional audio seems bad. I have fucked with my settings quite a bit, messing around with my headset and testing my shit and it seems to not improve. Good positional audio is of big importance in these games. When you hear stuff you can get a general impression of the direction, but it seems like they 'muddy' the sound direction a bit. I believe this is on purpose, and it kind of seems like they try to do an 'echo' effect of sound distortion as it moves through buildings and terrain to let players have a general sense of where noise is coming from but not enough that they can pin down more specifics. They might be doing this on purpose to force more 'meeting engagements' and less pure ambushes. Which makes sense if you want the game to be more approachable for non sweats. I still find it frustrating.
Add to this a lot of 'false positives' the game tries to throw at you, with random environmental noises that are designed to mimic ARCs and the 'tumbleweeds' that magically ignore physics and roll through trees, fences etc without stopping or being hung up/diverted. Its very unnatural and pulls the eye.
Lastly is inventory management. The 'Recyclable' item tag feels like a newbie trap. So far I keep finding recyclable items being needed for base upgrades. This isn't that bad of a thing really and wikis and guides will quickly develop that give new players a clue on what's worthwhile and what isn't, but so far each new player that has joined us on discord throughout the day has ended up asking the same questions of 'Are recyclables trash items? Can I recycle them or will I need them later. Cause it says recyclable, but I can also recycle the 'material' items, and if I try to build stations it says I need the recyclable stuff, so should I just keep it all cause how do I know what really is trash recyclable and what isn't?" Again. Not a super big deal, you can farm the stuff up again, but it just feels very counter intuitive at the start and each new player we've had has ended up asking the very same questions. It had to have come up in the betas as well. Just wanted to add its even more counter intuitive, cause all the other items have tool tips saying, "Used to craft X items, recycles into Y items" etc. So recyclables not having 'Used to upgrade crafting bench' feels like a purposeful oversight.
All that said, the game has been fun with friends. We've clocked up quite a few hours and are poking at it and exploring. The big question I have is how much longevity the game will have in a month or two? Am I having fun in the game because the game is a lot of fun, or am I having fun in the game cause its just fun to play with my friends? As we ended the day today that question came up and we are leaning towards the latter cause once people log off no one really wants to play solo. Hopefully more content and stuff expands the game but looking at videos and reviews I don't know if that will be the case.
Running on a 7800/5080 and being force fed UE5 games lately, this thing takes immersion from a graphical level to a new level for me. Or really, I should say just brought it back to normal. 4k120 DLSS quality no frame gen everything max runs and looks fantastic. Lighting is great here too for a variety of reasons. The main one being going against your view point on sound and graphics.
Directional audio and the audio in general is some of the best I have heard since Wartapes in BF1. Been running a Nova Pro Wireless headset now that I have switched over to PC only gaming again and decided to mess around with Sonar. I watched a guy on Youtube explain some of the audio settings and set up my sonar profile and since then the headset itself has been flawless but with this game it is extraordinary. In game I can easily hear directions of where all audio cue's are coming from. The last game of the night was with Sludig and a pubbie that turned out to be a good enough guy. We went to Space Port with a free loadout so we didn't lose any of our good shit, and as we were traversing and looting and exploring the map, we came up to the extraction point. Sludig heard the alarms of the upcoming elevator so we knew a team was there either waiting to ambush someone an exit point or were going to head out I heard them a bit more faintly because I was further away keeping my eye on the gun shots echoing out by a close mountain area. I tagged an ARC Snitch (With very good automatic military voice recognition and identification of the target that played automatically for the party - so let's give them some credit here because that's cool). Now, I am not going to pin the exact location of these fuckers down with an audio queue of gun shots echoing off a mountain more than 1k yards away, however that same ARC I tagged, I saw a red targeted beam and then I knew pretty much the exact area where they were as that ARC attacked them, and with that, if they were also approaching that elevator. So we waited until they were done and left, I guarded the other side to make sure they didn't come in from that area down the slope, and we got out with our loots. I leave open mic for party and PTT for proximity chat (which works PERFECTLY based on distance of the other player talking as it gets louder and softer depending on distance, as it should).Object sounds and the mystery/atmosphere of the map is fucking sweet so I am not sure if you have a shit sound system or what - but Cinge and I were hearing hums of large machines that were destroyed but still humming with power. Little did we know when Sludig joined us you could climb on top of it, open it up, get the fuck out of the way because it explodes (and makes a shit town of noise unfortunately letting others know where you are) and go up and loot it once the explosions stop.
The emergent gameplay coming out of this game is bar none some of the best. Now I freely admit, this is my very first extraction shooter. But so far so good.
I agree on the mats and until Sludig told me different I was recycling the blue items that said they could be recycled for mats. I recycled an orange for seeds when I should have held onto it because I can upgrade my chicken. But you know what? I learned pretty fucking quick not to do that. I don't want my hand held. Learning the hard way is some of the fun.
All this doesn't work if it doesn't have fantastic audio placement and sound and the audio for me is fucking awesome.
If I have any complains at this point it is that it takes 5 cloth to make one bandage. But I can head in solo and go to some apartments and stock up on little shit like that easily in two runs. Can gather seeds and cloth just about anywhere. Between the chicken and automatic mats you get, and the vendor who takes 1 seed for cloth, plastic, metal, it isn't hard to do a stock run.
The other is they need to tune some of the upgrades. You need 8 fireball's along with some other things which aren't the easiest to get to move to level two with a crafting station. I think it is all a bit overtuned.
Of course all the guns are the same at this point. We are level fucking 8 at Max all being stupid and leveling up Stichers and Rattlers. That's going to be a hell of a bit different when we are leveraging epic/legendary named weapons at level 50. Google some of the unique guns out there. Also we have a lot of throwables. Stun ARC's and Raiders, fire bombs, poison clouds, you using any of those yet? They are pretty effective.
Environmental noises being false flags is bullshit. You just don't know where the hell or why the hell the noise happens. I heard clicking and wondered what the fuck it was, turns out I couldn't find an Arc Courier which is lootable and makes that noise and it was in the weeds. Or the large tank looking thing emitting a low hum and bass sound, only to find out 5 hours later you can climb the thing and loot it (Get out of the way it blows up and alerts the whole damn map) or a large pulsing sound that is actually coming from an ARC survey thing that is also lootable. And what leads you to understanding this?
Quests. Half the time I didn't know what the fuck I was hearing until around level 4-5, started getting quests that wanted me to go find these things. Why the hell is this thing on the ground to carry? Oh wait I can bring this to a delivery station and once delivered Death Stranding style I get loot.
I think the problem is people have been so pussified in the last 10 years they don't know how to play a game organically unless Asmongold comes over to their house and shoves a controller up their ass.
