Having followed this game since May 2020, having defended this game for around 1 and a half years (im sure some Friends can even say i defended this game far too much on Discord + Reddit) and spent over 1.5k combined hours (Steam + PS4), its become increasingly difficult to defend the game due to a variety of reasons.
Reason 1 - The constant release of Micro DLC. Yes its fine a game releases some micro DLC every once in a while, maybe like once every 6 months, but when its almost every update for a full year; it starts to become annoying as the very stuff put into the packs, especially the Bikes, Camos and Tactical Equipment, can easily be part of the base game instead of an overcharged price. I was lucky enough to receive keys for most DLCs last year, and even then most were just not worth the price they were asking for (The Tac Equipment being my prime example here, only 1 item was worth using out of the 5), but have paid for US pack 1, Soviet Weapons and European Weapons, all of which i now regret purchasing since it has fuelled the fire for more Micro DLC.
Reason 2 - Bugs that seem to either get marked as low priority or are flat out ignored take far too long to get fixed. Some of the best examples to this would the Homeward Bound Challenge which is getting fixed in Patch #26. This challenge has been broken since Feb last year, it was only working for 9 months compared to 1 year and 3 months it spent broken. This was commonly reported every single month since it got broken, and is now just getting fixed.
Reason 3 - The AI of the machines has decreased in quality severely. When i started playing, sure the machines were broken as a result of a bug but instead of trying to find a nice middle ground to where its part challenging and part fun, they went for the complete nerf to the AI to the point where they mostly get stuck in loops of walking in circles, refusing to fire some times and most of the time refusing to use their melee. All of this was not present when i started, they could have even made it a great difficulty with the right tweaking to the AI.
Reason 4 - Community requested Items getting locked behind DLC (Ties into Reason 1). For quite a lot of the Micro DLC that has been released over the past 2 years, there has been an increase in community items getting locked behind a paywall. A fantastic example is the Resistance Weapons Pack, the Bow and Flamethrower were they most requested weapons from the community which they decided on locking behind a paywall, and even then these weapons were still just not good as damage was too low and get immediately overshadowed by way better weapons like the EXP weapons and even most other 5c or 5* weapons.
Reason 5 - Far too many Control Points added. This would be a good addition had it been done way better such as just adding 1 to a few regions instead of the average of 6 in the regions. This is even despite community feedback after it was revealed Farmlands got 12 Control Points pretty much deleting a lot of machine spawns there, yet another 7 got added to the South Coast. I would love if this got revised and most Control Points got removed so that there is actually machine spawns in the Farmlands, Forest and South Coast Regions.
Reason 6 - The way Micro DLC has been handled for newer players. Rather than unlocking all the Micro DLC contents after a specific point in the game, newer players are just allowed to have them the moment they reach the very first Storage box making the game a quick breeze through on top of the already terrible AI.
Reason 7 - Multiplayer Progression. MP has to be the biggest selling point to many people for this game, yet they managed to screw it up royally. Back before June 2022’s update, everyone got XP at the same time for missions allowing for fair levelling up. However, post that update the game pretty much rolls a die into whether or not the clients in another world will get XP for the mission thus creating an uneven levelling system despite most people wanting to level up at the same time.
Reason 8 - Story went from making little to now zero sense. Before the same update that wrecked the MP progression system, the tutorial of the game taught you the basics as to be expected from every game. The story made some sense and still linked together all throughout. However the same update had reworked the tutorial which is fine since it taught some basics to crafting understandably. But the problem is, they also reworked the story to only this part and, to my knowledge, have zero intentions on reworking the rest so its leads to a second story going on, this doesnt even in include the Soviet story they decided to also write into this, which takes place after FNIX Rising which should be endgame content only. Instead a new player could be easily going through the second region and fighting machines they should not be allowed to see until after the end of base game at least, along with missions that will make absolutely no sense since, obviously, they havent done FNIX Rising where they pick up from.
Reason 9 - Machines going invisible for Hosts. Before May 2023 update, sometimes machines would go invisible for the host player or the client player. Post the update, there has been a massive increase in this issue for host players especially.
Reason 10 - Bluescreens and hard console resets. Post 2023 May update, there is now a sever case for some people where they will have a hard crash resulting in a Bluescreen on the PC itself or for console players, forcing you to force restart the entire console (This comes from users on the forums).
Reason 11 - Roadmap Situations (This one could get overlooked tbf). For all of 2022, rather than have a solid all year roadmap, they instead decided on the weird do one every few months instead (I understand updating it to include what was added in a patch, but not constantly changing it as at that point, dont make a roadmap) From Nov 2022 to April 2023, it was always stated to be being worked on and nearly completed as of April. Last dev stream it was mentioned that they would finally get to working on the roadmap after Patch #26 drops, this implies that it had not been worked on whatsoever, or at least to me it does with how it was stated. Then the dev letter drops the same day saying that its nearly completed so its impossible to actually tell if there was a roadmap ever worked on.
All in All, i would love to recommend this game as it was a great game to me and i had plenty of faith they could make this game a fantastic one for a while but ive just been witnessing its downfall instead and can no longer recommend it. So far ive only found it enjoyable to be playing older versions than the current version as a result of what has been going on with the game.
Copy pasted my Steam Review.
