I had a blast playing the open beta this weekend. It feels much improved over closed beta in many ways. I'm really looking forward to launch!

Below I have listed categorized feedback which I collected over 20 or so hours of playing the open beta. I played on PC using mouse and keyboard controls.


Player animations

- The new faster "stop moving" animation is great when standing, but the game still uses the old slow "stop moving" animation when crouching. The character takes two more steps after you completely let go of the controls. It feels awkward when you're used to the responsiveness of the new animation when moving while standing upright.

- The character sticks to cover a little too easily most of the time, feeling almost like it's a magnet that sucks you in if you get anywhere close. This makes it really difficult to maneuver quickly and precisely when trying to stay hidden as enemies approach you. Decreasing the snap-to-cover range would be nice, but making cover happen via a button press (like most other shooters these days) would be even better.

- When behind cover, going into aim mode (looking down the scope) will often just aim into the wall instead of your character popping their head up and aiming over the wall. Sometimes it will pop you up and let you aim over the wall, but most of the time it just zooms you in on the wall instead. Sure, you can just toggle off crouch, but then you're far more exposed than if you could just peak your head and arms up to shoot.

- Having a reload interrupted in the last 30% of the animation should not force the entire reload animation to be started over from scratch; this is neither fun nor realistic. If I have ejected the magazine and popped in a new one and get interrupted before I can pull back the slide, I shouldn't have to dump the entire magazine and replace it with yet another new one when trying to finish my reload.

- When climbing onto or off of a ladder, there is a big delay where you cannot interact with the game at all. This feels awkward considering that this game requires you to move quickly and smoothly to avoid detection or avoid being shot. The climbing-onto-ladder animation would benefit from being sped up a lot just like how the other animations were sped up since closed beta. Furthermore, if I press the button to climb onto a ladder and then press and hold the "slide down" key, it should slide down as soon as possible. Currently, you have to wait until you can actually move on the ladder, THEN press the "slide down" key; pressing it any earlier does not work, even if you continue to hold it down well past the point where you have regained control over your character. I should be able to run towards a ladder, tap the interact key and then hold the slide down key and it should all work smoothly. The way it currently works is very slow and clunky, making you want to avoid ladders whenever possible.

- When carrying a body, tapping sprint just releases the body with barely any animation or wait time whatsoever. It looks awkward and feels buggy in practice. When you are carrying a body and press the "Drop" key, it puts you through this long animation where you cannot move which feels quite awkward; why would anyone want to drop a body this way if they could just tap sprint and have the body instantly drop? My suggestion is to make it so that pressing sprint while carrying a body doesn't drop it, but instead makes you move faster at the cost of stamina (which is what we are all expecting to happen when we first try to do it), and if you want to drop the body you have to make the specific decision to press the "drop body" key. And the animation for dropping the body should be a little faster.

- The animation of picking up a body is too slow; it should be sped up and you should be able to start moving when you reach the part of the animation where the character reaches down to pull out his/her pistol. I'm no special ops solider, but even I can walk while pulling something out of my pocket.

- Throwing bodies that you are carrying does not work well at all. They only move several feet in front of you and they will not pass over even very short walls and objects. The entire point of throwing a body (as opposed to just dropping it) is to send it over a fence or wall or into a hole or off a cliff. However, it currently is impossible to do any of those things in most situations. When throwing a carried body, it needs to not clip into things that are your character's waist height or lower, and it should be thrown further.


Enemies/AI

- Enemies know where you are at all times when they have red indicators. This mechanic feels very outdated and "game-y". It's a huge immersion breaker. If you are able to break line of sight with enemies with a red indicator, this should turn their indicators to orange and force the enemies to search for you, with only your last-known position knowledge. However, what actually happens in practice is that they know EXACTLY where you are no matter where you go, even when they couldn't possibly know because nobody can see you. I've had the nearest enemy be hundreds of feet away and I drop down into a lower area out of sight, run a long distance making several turns, yet they still know exactly where I am. Feels bad, man.

- In many cases, enemies with orange indicators will just hunker down and wait for you instead of searching you out like the professionals they (supposedly) are. The AI just sitting around hiding makes the game way too easy because you can just go and take them out one by one with minimal effort or risk. They just hide behind a wall or doorway and don't even peek out or look around. Alerted enemies should be actively searching you out like the professionals they are. Furthermore, when they are in this alerted state but don't know where you are, they still shout things like, "I see the enemy!" when they actually have no idea where you are. This is clearly a bug and not some silly child's ploy to fake out their opponent; we KNOW they didn't actually see us because A) there is no way they physically could have, and B) they didn't change to the red indicator and start moving around or shooting. These lines of dialogue should be reserved for when the player is actually seen.

- Behemoth drones know where you are even when they have orange indicators. They behave like they are searching for you, but they clearly know exactly where you are because they keep painting your exact location with mortars, even if you have moved a very long distance since they last saw you. If they are aware of your location, their indicator should be red; if they are alerted but don't know your location, their indicator should be orange and they shouldn't know where you are and should search. Firing off salvos isn't searching, especially not when they are always dead on even though they shouldn't know where you are.

- Behemoth drones accelerate WAY too quickly for their size. That rate of acceleration from a full stop would require a literal explosion of energy, based on the laws of physics. The behemoth's movement acceleration should be tuned down to a much more realistic amount. Or give those things massive rocket boosters that let off huge explosive bursts when they accelerate from a standstill.


UI

- Regardless of what key you bind to "Deploy Bivouac" it seems to display the "Interact" key on-screen instead. This is specific to the pop-up interaction display in the 3D game world.

- When you dismantle a weapon or piece of gear, the game shows you the results in a pop-up window and tells you to press the spacebar to close the pop-up. However, spacebar is also the "equip" function, so it will then equip the next item in the list at the same time that you close the pop-up. There should be a slight delay (maybe 0.5 seconds) before you can equip anything after closing the results pop-up.

- There are random times where equipping new gear changes your appearance even though you have the appearance override option turned on. Toggling appearance override off and back on does NOT fix this; you need to go into the appearance menu and re-select the individual items you want. This bug seems to occur mostly when the new piece of gear you just equipped is an appearance type that you hadn't previously unlocked.

- Many HUD elements don't pop up dynamically when they should. Stamina is a great example because the stamina bar hardly ever shows up. Nearly every time I sprint or slide down a hill, the stamina bar doesn't show up until I am completely out of stamina and it turns red. I have no way to check if I need to drink water because I can never see my stamina bar; I am forced to equip the canteen and try drinking to know whether or not I need water. The stamina bar should show up any time stamina is not 100%.

- Some HUD items are the opposite; they pop up and never seem to go away even though they are set to dynamic. "Weapon items Display" is one such example. Once it displays on the screen, it stays forever until you manually hide it. After you hide it, when you aim or shoot it pops back up and never goes away. It doesn't disappear even if you haven't aimed or fired or been anywhere near enemies for a very long time. When set to dynamic, this HUD element should only be showing while you are aiming a weapon, reloading, and for a moment after pressing the "Interface Manual Display" key. The rest of the time it should be hidden.

- The HUD element "HUD Markers – Locations" does not have size or background options like all the other HUD icons do.

- The squad ping option is limited to 149m away from your character. This is far too restrictive. If there needs to be a limit, 500m would be much more reasonable. In the HUD settings, you can even see a picture example of a squad ping that is 752m away! (Highlight "HUD Markers – Communications" to see it.)


Controls

- There are many key bindings that cannot be changed. For example, when viewing the map, movement is locked to WASD instead of using whatever keys you set to move your character. W and S are locked to navigating up and down lists (e.g. conversation options, intel selection) instead of using whatever you bound for forward and backward on-foot movement. F is locked to Fast Travel on the map screen. E and C are locked to changing tabs in the menu screen. All of the keys to interact with weapons and gear in the menu are locked to specific keys. When in Erehwon, F is locked to "Check Player Info" (this is REALLY frustrating when using ESDF for movement). To use the Breach Torch you have to press F, regardless of what you have set as "Use item" (all other consumables seem to properly change to the key you set as "Use item").

- It would be a huge quality-of-life improvement to remove the binoculars from the item wheel and give them their own dedicated key, like how it worked in Wildlands. Thematically, binoculars don't really belong in the list of ingestible consumables anyhow.

- Even with "Helicopter mouse steering" toggled off, moving the mouse left and right still changes the helicopter's heading. There is a significant delay built into this, so on helicopters where the pilot can fire a mounted weapon it is extremely difficult to aim due to the sluggish response yet high speed of crosshair movement. The best solution would be to add separate keybinds for rotating the helicopter (I believe Wildlands worked this way) and have the aim key (default RMB) to change mouse movement from moving the camera to moving the aiming reticle instead (just like on foot). And if doing this, please set the aim sensitivity to match the on-foot gun aiming sensitivity.

- The "auto move" and "auto throttle" keys do not do anything when the related accessibility options are turned off. There are a few issues with this. First, these options don't belong in accessibility as these are standard functions that many games have. These options should be in the controls section. Second, they should not be off by default because they have dedicated keybinds active by default. The best solution would simply be to remove the toggle options and have no key bound to them by default. No key bound = feature turned off. This is much more intuitive to the player. It is far too confusing in its current implementation. People without accessibility issues will typically not be browsing through the accessibility menu and thus would not see that these options exist and need to be turned on. Normally they will just see the options in the keybind menu and wonder why they don't work.

- It would be really nice to have the option to bind a key to exit vehicles. Currently, you exit your vehicle by pressing whatever key you have set to "Interact". It would be nice to have the option to change it to something separate so that we could bind the Interact key to a different function while in a vehicle.

- The character breaks into an uncontrolled slide (and lets out some pretty wussy sounds of panic) for even vary shallow declines (e.g. 30 degrees). This is quite unrealistic. I can move fairly quickly down a 45-degree hill in real life without too much risk or effort and I'm not nearly as fit as a Ghost should be. Furthermore, when they start sliding they go through stamina like crazy. Didn't you guys ever used to slide down hills as a kid? If you lean back and only focus on keeping yourself straight, you can just let the slide happen and move down very long stretches very quickly and with minimal effort. The super-fit Ghosts should not get tired from doing this because I didn't get tired doing this as an average kid. Stamina should only be used when trying to fight against the slide (i.e. trying to stop sliding or change direction), and it should still last much longer than it currently does. When it comes to moving down hills in this game, I feel like I am controlling a 70-year-old. These specially-trained agents should be much more adept in this area.

- The keybinds to switch muzzle/trigger/scope say that they only work while aiming, but in practice they work even when not aiming if the key is not bound to any other function. This can cause accidental changes to weapon characteristics when the player wasn't expecting it. My suggestion is to enforce the "while aiming" aspect so that these functions do not operate when you are not actively aiming, even if no other function is bound to these keys.

- When standing on a dock facing a driveable boat, it pops up a prompt to press the interact key to get in. However, the character just steps off the dock and flops into the water and stops moving. You have to release the interact key and move around until you get another prompt to get into the boat, then press it again. When on dry land, pressing the interact key when the prompt comes up should make your character automatically jump/swim to the boat and get in.


Miscellaneous

- Moonlight is WAY too bright! It looks like the sun is still up when the moonlight is the only source of light. It's actually darker when you are near buildings and there are lights on at night; if you shut off the power, the lights go out but the moonlight gets cranked to 11 and it suddenly looks like daytime. Night time should be super dark and force us to use night vision or thermal vision. As things currently are, there seems to be no real use for night vision in this game at all.

- There is no indication of an incoming grenade/mortar when scoped. The red telegraph is very clear the rest of the time, but when scoped you have no way to know so you just die with no warning. The entire scope view should be overlayed in red when standing in a telegraph.

- The game doesn't always remember your location when you log out. I can log out in one location, then come back later and it logs me back in at a completely different location. Not sure if this is a bug or due to unannounced server rollbacks.