Liking it less and less the more I play it. Everything feels like a step down from the state Dying Light is in now.
The revised weapon system is like playing Breath of the Wild again, mostly because they absolutely gutted the crafting system for the sequel. Far as I can tell you can't craft weapons at all, so you're completely at the mercy of whatever you happen to find (or get desperate enough to spend your very limited currency on). You can't even repair them once either, let alone multiple times like in the first game. Mods are gimped to hell too, since 1) most weapons don't even have mod slots, 2) the ones that do generally only have shaft and tip slots, and 3) only the grip slot is actually of much value, and so far I've only seen it on the DLC weapons (more on those in a second). It's possible 'artifact' tier weapons have a grip slot too, but I've never had one drop or seen one for sale. DLC weapons are supposed to scale with your level and be re-buyable every 90 minutes or so, but that doesn't actually seem to work for most people (definitely does not work for me on Series X). Even if it did work, having the only reliable source of good weapons be from preorder and deluxe edition DLC is fucking bullshit anyway. Oh, and the reason only having shaft/tip slots sucks is because those mods now only proc on crits and crits seem like the typical 5% or so base chance and so far I've seen no way to increase it. Waste of mats imo. Grip is great though. It's a flat +4 dmg increase, which increases to 8, 12, 16, etc. as you continue to upgrade it... making those DLC weapons which already scale with your level extremely powerful if you just place a cheap mod on them. Except, you know, that the stash->extras re-buy doesn't actually work.
They've completely flipped the day/night bias around. It's basically pointless to play the game during daytime now; you might as well just sleep til dusk every time the sun comes up. For some reason they thought it would be a good idea to fill every indoor area with volatiles all day long, but just have generic 'sleeping' zombies and virals in there at night which are completely trivial to avoid/stealth takedown. Infection is a problem, but if you hoard your shrooms and advance the story to the point where you can craft Immunity Boosters you should be able to clear out just about any of the indoor spots. The biggest risk is getting caught inside when dawn hits, because suddenly all the dumb zombies despawn and the place is crawling with volatiles. The only things worth doing during the day are windmills and clearing out convoys.
Progression feels super slow too. Despite playing all day yesterday I'm still only a little bit into rank 2 and parkour is frustrating because I still have so many things to unlock. And I don't like feeling like I *must* put all my inhibitors into stamina because windmills are designed so that you need X amount of stamina to be able to climb to the top.
Don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other on the choice system yet. I've been trying to stay on the fence to see how far you can push it before you have to make a permanent decision. Mostly because ACG was talking about how one faction will build a bunch of handy parkour assistance stuff if you give them control while the other places weaponry and stuff around the zone. I'm pretty sure I want the parkour stuff, but I'm not 100% on that, and also I don't know which group is which bonuses yet.
