I want to say that the Developer is being extremely pretentious or manipulative.
There are systems he put in that really don't make sense in the ultimate scheme of things: He's making the game complicated for complicated sake. Even Stalker mods does complications better than he does.
Things I don't understand:
Cyber mod for taste, smell and etc? Really? Why bother? Even each part of the reproductive system is needlessly complicated. Fertility rate, Cum retention etc. What for? Each of the systems need to be upgraded. EACH INDIVIDUAL SYSTEM. That doesn't even include wear and tear. Your augmented taste buds get damaged? WTF? WHY? You have to buy a cyber mod repair kit to repair each one. I think I lost count at 30?
Let's not even get started with the faction system that is superficially tacked on. Let's talk about stalker. If you do repeated missions for a factione eventually you get to a point, where the faction considers you a friend and will support you when you get into trouble.
Here in this game. Even when you max reputation with them they just rape you less? Extort you less? What the fuck is the point then. I might as well just shoot everyone.
I don't know where the game design is going and my latest experience with the game is that its hard because he wants to make it hard.
- Mods are result of him making this project his messy playground. He added most of them with survival mechanics in mind, and smth. like hunger, thirst, sleep are good, they make game more iteresting especially when you consider that this is pretty much a sandbox game. This mechanics work becouse they are working with other mechanics like pregnancy which makes game coherent and said pregnancy has some effect on your gameplay. Taste,smell and so on is something that he thought could be fun, realized that it is not great idea for ton of reasons, but was to lazy to remove them, so they sit there in some sort of limbo with cyberwear connected to them.
- As I said previously game such as that needs modular systems, and devo is too lazy or/and incompetent to manage such systems. There is no faction/reputaion system. You just have your basic human enemy, with different skins. All realted to rep. is hard coded. It's literaly smth like : "if enemy is agroo -> check rep -> check if weapon is lowered -> if rep <50 shoot/ >50 do not shoot" and it's just that. Factions are gimmick in a way that all human enemies are same faction "human AI". That's why sometimes you end up in situation where scavs and raiders are in the same place, and if you have good rep with scavs and bad with raiders you are really in shitty spot.... And different faction are not fighting each other and that could also be interesting.
-Yep, game is grindy, and it could be not such bad thing if other systems made this grind in any way interesting. Now it's just tedious.
Worst thing is, that things I've mentioned are so fucking easy and quick to fix. It could be done in few days. I'm really pissed about this project, couse it could be so much more, and could be improving with each update, but instead we are getting new DRM or useless map again and again.
