I just got the game this last week and am now now level 14, my overall rating would be 8/10.
------ Positive Feedback
- I love the aggressiveness of the AI and the fact that you never get to a point where you can just approach an engagement without thinking
- The AI is act like robots, which makes things like chain luring with radios possible. This adds a lot of approaches to the game.
- Sound / Music is amazing
- The flexibility to approach situations reminds me of playing the original Deus Ex, my favorite FPS of all time. In my steam review I said this is a thinking man’s FPS and I really like that its not just about being able to aim.
- I love that weapons have real recoil, damage drop off, etc.
- The Atmosphere and story telling are amazing, the more I play the more intrigued I am to learn more of the story
- you got the HK sights right, thank you!
- I love the attention to detail, the Volvos, highway side fighter jet bunkers, all those things from history are awesome!
This next parting I’m writing from the point of view of a player and a software engineer, so I’ve broken it down into what I assume is simple and complex. I’m not including obvious bugs the dev team knows about already.
------ Simple Suggestion:
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make the utitlity of flares and firecrackers better known to new players.
–Benefit: I deleted my save and created a new one after I understood what enemies flares work on, when they work, and when / how firecrackers work. My new gameplay experience was soooo much better, most of my early game frustrations went away, and my early games deaths were alot less.–Potential Implementation:
an audio recording in the salthamn bunker where a squad leader radios in “we have urgent combat intel. please relay to all units. we have found flares to be effective at distracting the enemies, but they don’t work on the big ones as well, we found that firecrackers seem to confuse the big ones for a few seconds, I am sending a soldier to collect more flares and firecrackers from the stores in salthamn”. You can then make a note that it appears the information wasn’t relayed to other units.
------ Complex Suggestion:
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add a priority inventory tab to the inventory screen and make it the default to show up when opening the inventory.
– Benefit: I almost never change items in combat, but pre-combat / setting traps can be tedious since I use a dedicated healing slot, flares slot, firecrackers slot, the 4th one I change things out on. Often setting a trap means means putting explosives down, then EMP batteries, then deploying a smoke, then deploying a radio / boom box. I’m ok with that taking multiple menu visits, because it takes time to do things. is that equiping each of those items is 6 actions, 2 key-presses, scroll searching, 4 clicks.–Potential Implementation:
The default inventory tab would be a grid like the old UI but only contain things that can be bound to a quick slot. clicking on an item then lets you press the key for the inventory slot you want it to be in, or click on the inventory slot like now. Sorting would be done automatically in order of weapons, then equipment. no Ammo / crafting / weapon mods woulds show up on this tab. To save development resources this sort order would not be playable settable.– Extras:
If you want a mockup of this UI design with a user flow, let me know and I’ll create it. I’m a cloud computing guy, but I’m part of the UI design discussions on software that is used in operations centers (think modern war rooms from the game). I’m very focuses on number of clicks and least amount of mouse travel when dealing with large datasets.
------ Not sure of complexity suggestion:
- add a 1x optical sight that has the same mouse speed as the normal iron sights.
– Benefit: this is more personal preference since you get better sight picture in CQB this way, without the slowdown a 2x gives you.
