Played about 2 hours of the Alpha. Thoughts:
Look and Feel
Visually it's a pretty good looking game. It's not mind blowing, likely because it IS still cross gen, but there's a lot of nice texture work and lighting. It's really sharp too with not many AA issues.
I'm enjoying the way the guns feel quite a bit as well. It's like a combination of COD and Halo, with the slider closer to the Halo side of things. It's weighty and your guns have force behind them. Some really awesome pistol and shotguns in this.
Structure
It wasn't until recently that I fully grasped how the game was structured, but it's not really complicated. You have a hub you go back to, this is where you buy upgrades, weapons, armor, or craft items, or team up and compare loot. You then hop into your ship and pick a place to go. In the Alpha there's only "Old Russia" and in that zone there's 3 missions to choose from. It's here where you get what they're going for. The three missions int he Alpha are a story mission, a "strike" mission, and an "exploration" mission.
The Story mission is basically the main campaign that is require to progress through the game. These are usually the easier missions since they want you to continue. These can be done single player or coop. I don't know if you can stumble on online players in these. I didn't experience that myself. They drop you into a zone and there's a clear objective marker you have to reach and accomplish.
Strike missions are cooperative, repeatable, missions with one or more goals that will most definitely require multiple people to complete. This is where I saw the Diablo/Borderlands comparisons. Enemies are usually high level and take tons of damage and using all your skills and powers is gonna be needed to actually finish. I got to the end of one of these and quit out because it was too difficult.
Exploration missions basically drop you into the zone without any real goal. Spread out around the zone are little "beacons" that send you on random little missions. Basic stuff like "clear out the enemies in this area" or "go head and scan the area" or "go hear and kill this enemy" stuff like that. THESE seem to be the most repeatable since there didn't appear to be an end. In addition you can literally go anywhere in the zone and find stuff. What kind of stuff is out there remains to be seen but I was able to find at least two loot chests. Also you'll stumble on areas with extremely high level enemies. Literally within the first few seconds of dropping into the Alpha I went into this little shack with stairs down and stumbled into a bunch of enemies twice my level. I assume these missions are where you will tend to find random online people to play with.
And that's basically it for the Alpha. It doesn't seem like there are more missions because after I finished the Story mission, it didn't unlock any more. I think this is just a really basic test on the online infrastructure. I hope that the later Beta has some actual progression.
There's been some confusion over the "loot" aspect. I can say that you're not going to be seeing Borderlands 2 or Diablo 3 levels of loot. That's just not what they're going for. However there IS loot. Enemies DO drop armor and weapons and they ARE colored based on their rarity. During my time I collected a bunch of trash loot and some drops that required me to go back to the hub and "unencrypted" to see what kind of item it is. Just don't expect opening chests and seeing tons of items spilling out.
So to boil it down, here's what I liked and didn't like:
Likes:
-The way the guns feel when you shoot them
-The feel of the character movement
-The structure and how it seems to combine Borderlands/Diablo/Halo
-The way it handles playing online. During a strike mission it quickly matched me up with fellow players and we quickly were playing the mission
-Exploring zones seems like it can be a lot of fun, barring that they actually fill them with interesting things to fine and do.
Didn't like:
-So the game needs a little work in how it handles respawning enemies. As I was moving through the zone I would clear an area out, walk away fro a minute and come back to find the same enemies returned. It's weird since there are times and sections where you can literally SEE where the game is spawning enemies. There was one mission I picked up to kill a specific type of enemy and what I was doing was basically killing that enemy. Walking away a bit, and I could see the monster closet it was spawning out of and then killing it over and over. It was super silly. I understand WHY it's setup this way but I hope this can be tweaked a bit. It makes the game feel like an MMO. They just respawn way too quick is what I'm saying.
-The waypoint system needs to be changed IMO. You have to press the touchpad to bring it up and then it goes away after a few seconds. The problem is that the zones are really dense and complicated and it's bit unclear what I'm supposed to be doing so essentially I;m just pressing the button, going to the next waypoint, waiting for it to go away, then doing it again. Needs a little work.
Overall I definitely enjoyed what I played. A PC version would be EVEN BETTER but this version is serviceable. Totally looking forward to picking this up in September.
