With 12.5 hours of playtime I think it's fair to give some impressions. Might be a bit of a rant because I have a lot of feelings right now.
The more I play this the more its fundamentally flawed structure becomes apparent. It is both overwhelming and deeply unsatisfying. There are just so many mindbogglingly weird or straight up bad design decisions there's a chance this game will go down the MGSV route of incredible potential completely squandered by baffling design.
This game is the anti-immersive sim.
Some things that are just insane to me:
- There is no exploration. No adventure, no sense of wonder. You go in a menu, you press a button and you fast travel via a loading screen. Flying around in space is unrewarding and useless. You don't descend on a planet, you cannot fly around on a planet. Or otherwise move around on a planet. The tile based procedurally generated areas are terrible. I landed on the moon facing Earth because I wanted to see the sights and it just rendered some random area. Earth wasn't even in view. There was a mission where I had to save a dude from a crashed ship. I was on another planet in another system, I went into the menu, selected his location, clicked to go there, I got a loading screen and it literally spawned me right next to the guy with my ship 500 meters away. No travel cinematic, no landing sequence, it instantly warped me to a completely different system next to the objective. Just dreadfully bland design.
- The game knows there is no exploration or adventure because it tries to remove travel every way it can. You can fast-travel 500 meters from your ship and be in a completely different system one loading screen later. There's no feeling of being a part of the universe, everything feels extremely videogame-y. You can literally fast-travel to the front door of the Lodge from another system.
- New Atlantis' techno utopia seems impressive at first but after the initial "ooh" and "aah" wears off it is an incredibly badly designed area. It is immense, cumbersome to navigate (no map, lmao. How do you have this huge hub area and no map), has zero redeeming qualities other than nice vistas and on a meta level has terrible technical performance with framerates going from 50 to 20.
- The dialogue system is terrible and feels like I'm playing Skyrim, only not in a good way. The way the camera is positioned, the hard cuts to people talking, the bizarre way companions look straight at you even when talking to someone else. It's a system from two generations ago with almost zero improvements. When you're in space and another ship hails you, it zooms in on the ship as if the ship is talking, lmao. Would it really kill you to add a screen to the cockpit where you see someone else talking to you? This game was in development for like 8 years, for fucks sake. Where's the immersion? I just don't understand how this happens.
- Literally every mission is a fetch quest. You go somewhere, flip a switch or shoot the place up, get some info or talk to someone to get a new location, rinse and repeat. Aggressively mediocre game design.
- The way it dunks sidequests on you is hilarious. Literally every quest in New Atlantis is some random asshole walking up to me saying "hey man I heard this lady from the bar say some dumb shit but I don't care, you know how it is" and then you get a prompt to go talk to the lady. I mean, what? I just landed on this planet, I don't know any of you. What the fuck are you talking about? Every time it's "random npc conveniently says something about a situation completely unrelated to you or anything that's happening" -> "go check out this situation". Again, archaic design.
The "NASA-punk" aesthetics are amazing. The style of the game is incredibly well done. It feels futuristic yet contemporary. The music is good but forgettable. The voice acting is solid, albeit a bit over the top at times. Combat is decent.
There are a lot of mechanics in place that give an illusion of depth, but there really isn't any. You fast-travel from location to location, one destination to another. The travel in between is completely removed.
It feels like I'm playing a game that should've been released 8 years ago. This doesn't feel good, man. Imagine playing Skyrim and your only option was to fast travel from objective to objective. If you remove the journey, how much of the game is actually left, truly?
www.windowscentral.com
the whole shabang.
