Wide as an ocean - shallow as a puddle.
If you design your game to consist of cells within cells and on top of that, divide everything within with loading screens, it kills the flow of the gameplay and immersion pretty effectively. Towns and procedural sandboxes created upon landing on planets, should be at very least dynamic and seamless for the player to explore. It's tedious, that you have somewhat limited sandbox to play in any given time and yet, you still need loading screen for every single shop, office, hatch, alley, cave, ship and whatever there is.
This kind of game design is not a standard anymore, maybe it was 15 years ago when Fallout 3 came out, but not anymore. There's a lot of games, that do this pretty seamlessly or unnoticeably and let player just walk into places, without loading into a new instance every couple of minutes.
Let's say you wanna do a simple task, go sell your junk after a simple fetch quest and go talk to NPC on another planet, you have 15 loading screens coming.
"
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
Exit ship loading screen
Enter shop loading screen
Exit shop loading screen
Enter ship loading screen
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
Exit ship loading screen
Enter building loading screen
Talk to NPC!
Exit building loading screen
Enter ship loading screen
Exit planet loading screen
Enter orbit loading screen
Land planet loading screen
"
It's atrocious design.
All this is managed via relatively unintuitive and slow UI. By slow I mean that you need multiple key inputs to do anything and almost all inputs require HOLD instead of TAP. This combined with transition-animations makes UI feels sluggish. If I hit my map open while fighting, I need 3 inputs or one long hold to get back to shooting. If I open my inventory, I can't use hotkey to immediately open my quest log, first I have to close inventory, then open quest log.
Here's the biggest cons with short examples included:
-Terrible story.
This is subjective, but it's nothing but a series of fetch-quests. Go to planet X and pick up Y. Ending is the ultimate sci-fi cliche, just so you have a "story-related" reason to keep on grinding the game over and over again. Bland and forgettable characters, choices have no consequences.
-Engine, graphics and animations feels outdated.
Ugly dull NPC's, mediocre graphics, old mechanics, gunplay has no punch to it and melee is awful. Game just feels in general it's decade old, tasteless, odorless, without any grit or attitude. Quests are mostly just generic fetching.
-Bad, overcomplicated sluggish UI.
No colors, no icons and when picking up items there is no details. You just have to know is the item junk or not. You can't preview stats of an helmet before you pick it up and you have to go in your inventory to check it. It's minimalistic to the point where it becomes a burden.
-Bad AI.
At harder difficulties, enemies are nothing but a bullet sponges.
-Bugs.
Perk progress gets bugged, stealth is bugged, NPC's floating through the world, worst case breaking quest lines, input prompts go missing, ragdolls and items are flying in the air, enemies see and shoot you through walls, game says you're in combat when you're kilometres away disabling fast travel.
-Loading screens everywhere non-stop.
www.nexusmods.com
Ass of Can Whooping
bought it 10 times already.
