Feeling conflicted
So let me preface this by saying I've been playing since 2020, I've gifted so many friends this game and played it between 2020-2022 religiously with friends. I love this game and its premise, I love the concept and the gameplay loop was one of the most unique ive experienced
Coming back to the game after the Starting-area rework, UI rework, all the additional ghosts and locations, and now the character customisation update... I feel like its gotten..worse? Just after the big rework on the lobby and equipment store I stopped playing.
The new lobby/starting area is alright but the newer UI for buying equipment and loadouts feels SUPER cluttered and over-complicated when it really doesnt need to be, hell I don't even feel as if it needed as much of a rework as it got. The menu's have an excessive amount of buttons and options and its exceptionally confusing to new or even returning players imo, and I wonder if others feel the same about it
The new locations and location reworks are stellar, I love them, the farmhouses look so so good. My major problem is, with how much money the studio seemingly makes, why are they still using unity-asset store ghost models and animations? I know theyre iconic but when you put one of the OG models in one of the newer locations it looks really funny - this leads me onto my next related gripe, the player models.....I....
I have no clue how they got past QA. They look stylistically inconsistent with the rest of the game, the animations are TERRIBLE and currently the interaction between the player-models and world feels like garbage, what is up with the weird grippy hand when u go to interact w stuff? Why is switching equipment so slow? Why do we have 3 seconds of sprint time? Why are the rigs/bones for the characters seemingly broken? Why does it feel like im walking in quick sand? Why is the bare-bones character-customisation even out right now when the most you can change is haircolor and EXHORBITANTLY expensive clothes. I almost DON'T believe this got QA tested, and if it did then the QA team was not listened to.
I loved this game, and I still WANT to love it, but it feels like the previous charming jank got replaced with inexcusable bugs and 30 more ghost-types that are all basically identical to the original 10 or so. I can't bring myself to excuse any of it with "indie studio" anymore bc theyre making MONEY and its going somewhere, just not back into the game
I want to keep playing because maybe alot of this is down to "you just arent used to it" but man....it sucks.