I’ve played for about 3-4 hours now and I mostly focused on the single player. And I like the game and I’m quite enjoying it but there are a few issues that I just can’t get over.
The first thing you need to fix are the performance issues. I can run crysis and crysis 2 almost maxed out. This is barely playable. I had to manually turn off shadows disable basically everything to get it to work semi decently. I can max out Battlefield BC2 and have a very nice 50-55 fps and it works well. This game barely works. I downloaded the newest hotfix they put out and it helped a little but the game still runs like ****.
Grenades are too weak. Yes yes I’ve read they are supposed to be like that so that you can then finish off the enemy, but this defeats the purpose of grenades. Grenades are an offensive weapon that you usually use when the enemy is behind cover or out of your line of fire. So the idea that the grenade will knock him down behind a corner and then you run up to him and shoot him is just stupid.
Some of the guns are way too weak. Emptying half a clip into an enemy at close range only for them to fall down and then using the other half just to finish him so he isn’t revived is just tedious. Headshots don’t really seem to do much more dmg than normal shots. All in all the smg’s feel criminally underpowered.
I’m not going to complain because of the AI simply because no game has ever had good bots and no game ever will, at least not until the computer overlords are enslaved and made to entertain us in video games.
The turrets, OMG the turrets. I just can’t figure these things out. I plant it and go like, oh yeah this is the perfect spot. And an enemy shows up and I’m like “Go getem boy, go getem” and the thing just sits there. Sometimes it shoots, sometimes it doesn’t and even when it does shoot it also doesn’t really kill anything. I think that in my three hours or so that I played and I mostly played engineer I killed only a handful of bots with the turret. And these were bots were talking about, they weren’t even people.
Fix the medic. Make it so that he has to come right next to the body and stab you with the syringe. It seems cheap to not even have to get to the fallen comrade to get him up. I only find this problematic since everyone takes so damn long to die cause the weapons are so weak. It’s almost impossible to kill a medic after he just threw a couple of those syringes to his allies who are off course getting back up and it’s just a pain to have to kill everyone again because of cheap revive mechanics.
The operative class seems underpowered. His only useful skill is the disquise thing he does and the hacking. Since the turrets are useless he isn’t really needed to counter them. The mines are easily avoided so again not much help there.
Change the UI in game. It is too much. The wheel that opens up when you go to a console or when you press MB3 is WAY TOO BIG and was clearly designed for someone sitting far away from a large screen aka a TV. It looks godawful on the pc version and just takes up the entire friggin screen. Just make it smaller. It’s a simple cosmetic change that will help out a lot.
The way you operate with the objectives just seems off to me. Getting there and just pressing F just seems so analog to me. I played both ET games and I liked the fact you had to select the tool and then press it. This wouldn’t really bother me so much if it wasn’t for the fact that many times I’ve come to my objective and pressed F and nothing happened, tried again and again and again until it finally actually does it. Again this problem would not exist if you had the tool out and just pressed mouse 1 to use it.
When you are repairing something or planting explosives, if you have the ability to move the camera you can, well, move the camera. But why did you bind the camera to the damn movement keys. WE HAVE A MOUSE.
Also it’s nice that I have all these guns to try out but you made one very strange design decision. You locked the clothes but not the guns. Most of the guns are available to the player at the beginning and the clothes and accessories are locked. THIS IS STUPID and let me explain why.
When I first started I thought, oh yeah now lets make my character someone awesome that I can really dig as being my avatar and then I’m like, this is it?, really? I have to unlock CLOTHES?!
And then I start up the weapon customizing screen and there’s all these different weapons each with some weird ass name and you just can’t decide which weapon to pick.
If you had done this in reverse it would have made it so that the player would get attached to their pimped out avatar right from the start and would slowly learn about the guns as he unlocked them. This way the player feels a bigger connection to their avatar and gains a better understanding of the games weapons gradually as he tries them all out. It also makes no sense in a narrative way. Since many of the customisable options are massive scars all over your face or lacerations on your arms, it seems silly to be rewarded for a job well done by slicing your face and stitching it back together again, if the player was physically the same from the start that would mean that it would could give a backstory of your avatar in the mind of the player.
Instead you throw mountains of guns at the player while sitting back and saying, “oh no girlfriend, you’re not getting these stylish pantaloons until you kill and maim about 200 people”. Then we’ll see. Apparently fashion is serious business on the ark.
You also need to make identifying teammates easier. Because of the heavily customised characters it’s hard to figure out sometimes who is on your team. I would guess that this problem is even worse in MP where people are going to be using characters that are even more customised than the bots which lets face it don’t really stand out from one another.
I think those are all my complaints.
All in all I still like the game or maybe I just want to like it so much that I convinced myself to like it. Oh well time will tell. Think I’ll finish another map with the bots and then try some online. Hope it’s not as laggy as some people are complaining about.