I've been playing for 3 to 5 hours a day 5 days a week since release. I've had great moments, and truly disappointing ones.
I've read many professional reviews, lot's of them like the way the story is setup. I, myself, disliked it. The cutscenes were few and far between, and actually didn't do anything to push the story. Watching a guy ramble on about government power abuse for a cutscene really sucked. Help me connect the dots. They tried to humanize Jessica by making her a lesbian divorcee, then dehumanize her by making her hate all of humanity and a total *****, yet she is the one in charge of the cure? She's a walking paradox, and not to mention played by a very poor voice actor. The voice acting in general is really poor.
So, a fix for the voice acting that is already in the game, let me turn it off. Let me skip voice overs for hard and challenge modes. Let me turn off the pirate radio podcasts, I heard them all 1000 times. My biggest fear in the dark zone is not rogue players, but having to enter a safe room to get ammo/medkits and listen to another podcast.
The controls I have little to complain about, but I still have complaints. When I push a skill button, I understand there is animation process that needs to happen, so that delays the action, but there is a delay before the delay. Sometimes so bad, I hit the button a second time trying to get the animation to start, and I end up disabling whatever I just put down, but the game failed to show in a timely matter. The animation should immediately start playing on button press.
Dodging should cancel any skill animation in progress. There is so much grenade spam in the game, that I get caught in most grenades I get hit by due to stuck in animation. Super frustrating. Especially when your team mates are yelling at you to get out of the grenade, and you're trying, and you're yelling that you're trying. They all watch you die, and it looks to them like you did nothing to try and avoid the death. Let dodge break animation, and maybe reduce grenade usage by 90%. I don't mind dodging a grenade every once in a while, but when you can't shoot back at the enemy because you have to dodge 4 grenades back to back, it's a bit silly.
The stats on gear are hard to put together into any type of useful "set". I'm not talking set pieces that give enhanced talents. I'm talking, I want to be a tank, so I need stamina, electronics, threat, damage reduction. What the game gives you are stats that are unfit for any build.
This is what I'd like to see:
1. Two stats on each piece of gear. Firearms, Stamina, Electronics. One being a "major" and the other being a "minor". So, if you have 550 firearms on a piece, let the stamina be 275. This alone would help significantly with a ground work for builds. If I want to be a DPS, I'd want to major in Firearms, but take stamina for some survivability, maybe eletronics for damage boosting abilities.
2. Have the minor stats randomize, but within certain desirable traits for builds. If the firearms is a major trait, have crit and crit hit damage as high probability, maybe specific weapon damage modifiers appear with them. If it's an electronics build, have resource gain and skill haste show up more often.
3. On mod slots, remove Firearms, Stamina, and Electronics. Make those for performance mods only. Right now people are stacking only Firearms and stamina, and missing out on other stats. When you try to do the incursion legit, it makes it hard, cause everyone is squishy and their skills are extremely weak.
Most people's survivability is from exploits, which is really a bad design choice.
4. Remove skill performance enhancers from gear, making mods the only way to enhance them.
5. The reasoning behind 3 and 4. Whenever you get a new piece of gear, there is usually 3 to 4 stats that are not what you are looking for, and you can only re-roll one stat. Then go hunting again. This way, one a new piece of gear, it can still be useful, maybe not perfect, but useful. Right now, I'm looking at 99% of drops being utterly useless. I'm being shoehorned into the gear I have. I have a few set pieces, but use 182 gold pieces due to talents and skill performance enhancers. One piece gives me 9.5% pulse crit damage and 2.5% crit pulse chance. That's hard to give up, as it effects the entire group. The odds of me seeing a set piece with those stats are .0000001%.
6. The chest piece should have a guaranteed 2 mod slots, with the rest having 1 mod slot, with the chance of 1 additional mod slot on each piece. This would be for 163 and above gear.
7. Dark Zone stats. Right now the only thing I know about the dark zone specific stats is the base damage reduction is 62% minimum. I don't know if head shot damage is adjusted or crit % chance is lowered. The dark zone should drop loot that has dark zone specific features. Player crit reduction or maybe a talent to survive a headshot death once every 2 minutes. Right now it's you buff up your DPS to extremes and then use exploits to boost defenses. I would also like to see your damage reduced when using survivor link. 80% damage reduction with no downsides? I see people using this as groups, one person uses it, then another, then another. They get about 40seconds of 80% damage reduction. I would like to see a debuff applied that prevents you from receiving the same signature ability within a certain time, maybe a minute.
8. I would like to see elemental damage types moved to the weapon magazines. Instead of it being a talent or a specialized bullet, let it be something more consistent.
9. Put grenades on timers. You have drones, seeker mines, portable turrets, and many other stuff effected by emp. Yet, it's really inconvenient to select the emp, and then only be able to use it twice. Yet these devices are not limited to a certain number of uses by the A.I..
10. The shock turret does very little damage and stuns for way too little. I'd like to see the shock turret receive a lengthened stun, and the ability to destroy incoming grenades, maybe 1 grenade every 10 seconds. The flame turret needs a boost in defense, and shortened burn animations on targets. It does a lot of damage and stuns for the longest, but is usually destroyed before any enemy gets into range. The pulse turret has well balanced stats, though I don't know if the pulse does anything other than be a visual indicator.
11. Archetypes. If I'm a defender, it'd be nice to get a bonus to defense, but maybe a decrease to damage, yet an increased threat profile. Let your highest stat decided your role. If your electronics is your highest, you get a bonus to skills. If your stamina is high, maybe get a bonus to damage done with off hands.
12. There is no real "tanking" abilities. You have threat increasing loud vent brakes, but if you using the shield, you can only use your sidearms. Maybe if your archetype is stamina, you get to use the shield and main hand (to exclude LMGs and Marksman) weapons, or give a bonus to damage and threat with sidearms.
13. Move to weapon skins to vanity area.
14. Group random weapon talents into sub groups. Only DPS talents can appear with each other. Electronics with their talents. They can still be random within the subgroup, but not to cross over.
15. Need an exotic sidearm for shield builds.
16. In some games, you have to press a button to go bad/rogue. To prevent unintentional deaths. Add an emote that let's your intentions be known, and then let you go rogue. You can still be killed by rogues and kill rogues, but can't accidentally become rogues. Which usually is not an accident, but more of a "I'm going to jump into your skill/grenade/line of fire. People pushing you into the rogue status, then killing you.
17. This is really annoying, not being able to use doors while in combat. Half the time I'm not in combat. There will be an A.I. That is on my radar, but I never engaged him. The only people who should not be allowed to use doors are rogues. I was being trolled last night by a group of people shooting me. They would hit me once with their pistol to put me in combat, but I couldn't use the door. Then another would shoot me. I was perpetually in combat. I couldn't attack them back cause I only had 37 bullets for my SMG. Thanks Ubisoft for making a game so easy to be trolled in.
Well, that's my thoughts and ideas on the game. I find it fun on a basic level, but as far as teams go, it seems there are more lone wolves than team players. Seems everyone is a DPS, and nobody is a support. Make the support roles more rewarding and fun to play.
That's most games really. The players online usually show a sharp decrease a few weeks after it's release. Some people only want to play the single player. Others are disappointed and move on like you said, but that's really true with all games. The games not even been out 2 months, you can't say "too long, too far". It's only gotten one major update. Look how long it took blizzard to listen to it's fan base for Diablo 3.
They built this game to last a while. It's not an assassin creed game where they will just fix it in the sequel. They want to sell DLC and milk this one game as long as possible.
I also just needed to get that off my chest. As long as I said it in a place I hope they are watching, I am satisfied. I'd rather have said and they not listen, than to never have said and always wonder "what if I had?".