QoL/Difficulty

[Feldspar]

First of all, I really do like the game and gave it a thumbs up. You did good work with what appears to be an indie dev budget.

QoL
#1 the 'checkpoint' Saving scheme you chose barely works for this type of game. Reason being, the soldiers are not expendable, not even close with two kinds of required healing plus leveling, plus the multiple 'doomsday' events. The point here is that players are investing a lot of time into missions (hours) and the non-disposable soldiers, which will get killed over and over and over again because we will keep reloading over and over to save them... frankly, the checkpoint system is a waste of our time and failure to recognize how the game will practically be played.
#2 the unit chatter on mission is ... well its so over the top obnoxious that I cant be objective in how I describe this. It sucks. Specifically, the catalog of the VA recorded chatter is way too small, its obnoxiously frequent and repetitive, not provoked or used a appropriate times, and sometimes laughably poorly timed like 'we better get moving' while the unit is in fact currently routed and moving. Honestly, just remove all unit chatter completely. You didnt accomplish what you were going for here and it ended up highly annoying, unrealistic, and immersion breaking.
Difficulty
No, this isnt a whine about a game being hard. Its a reasonable complaint about the WAY it is made hard.
#1 while Undetected, enemy units seem to hone-in on where you are located regardless. There are patrols yes, but patrols patrol a scripted pattern. I cant count how many times a 'random' spawn essentially moves to directly intersect my path while I'm Undetected. Its more than suspicious.
#2 its inscrutable what triggers a Hunt and what doesnt. Maybe I missed it in the Codex but when I have killed one bug after another without triggering it, and another time I kill a lone patrol and suddenly the whole nest is coming after my ass, there feels like no logic behind it.
#3 its almost impossible to get OUT of the Hunt. I appreciate the tension and horror of the experience, but there needs to be a gameplay practical way out of it or this just stops being a fun game at all. I pretty much quit and reload when I trigger a Hunter after about 20 hours into the game because its just not worth wasting my time trying to evade the inevitable mass onslaught and soldier death. I highly recommend that if the player's team displaces to another location and avoids being seen, that it reduces the Hunt bar faster. MUCH, MUCH faster...

Thats about it. In summary the 2 major detractors are the Unit Chatter and the absurdity of how easily Hunt is triggered and how hard it is to escape.

[Deepeye]

Since it's a public post I will allow myself to quickly comment as well, man.

QoL
1. Autosave function is implemented well (key objectives are saved slightly prior to triggering them, which is a nice option to give you a chance to prepare better if you fail) and especially one-save version is great at strengthening the atmosphere of tension.

2. Don't think it's that bad, honestly. Played through the game fully one time and started several other playthroughs and it seems fine for me. Again a preference point.

Diff
1. It seems that enemies are scripted to harass you. Same as alien AI in Isolation did. Not all levels and phases are perfect as often enemies come out as a conveyor. That part is slightly silly.

2. If enemies see you or you fail to kill them before they do. Apparently some places are scripted, yet I do not recall having issue with it at all. From my experience the logic worked.

3. Hunt is punishing only if you can't effectively counter act it. Reprimand is a great option. Avoiding it well obviously is a great choice, which can't always be done (or very hard to do so) as it's intended for mission to spike the difficulty / tension. There could be more options besides welding the door in safe-room or reprimand and fight / flight to stop the hunt. But you cannot go against the core mechanic of the game really. It's based on it, imho.

Overall it feels like you do not enjoy the mechanics that much, they irritate you more than satisfy. To everyone their own. +some can adapt to something they wouldn't have thought to have liked, it's really tense sometimes but that is the idea of how the game should make you feel.

Otherwise there could be more custom options where people who like to play it completely differently can do it - manual saves, no doom clock, spawn amount correction, etc.

Think devs do listen and if they will have resources to actually implement more additional functions, they will. But I wouldn't hold my breath for some over the top requests.

Would rather see polish and bug fixes on existent content + work on expanding the game world, than putting resources into some super specific requests. Though that depends on the amount of such people in playerbase. Sometimes people just need to adapt better and issue is solved.

[Nomad]

My problem with hunts is that once it ends, aliens often come out of their lairs so quickly, you can't just keep going, but you're forced to start another hunt. You can say what you want, but it's not a good mechanic, or at least it's not well balanced. Game is difficult, but not necessarily 'smart' difficult.
Rule of thumb in designing difficulty is how player can overcome it. Look at Dark Souls, is it difficult? Yes. But can you learn it and, while following game's rules, can you beat it and can it be come easy for you? Yes.
In Aliens hunt ends and I try to move through the mine shaft, for example and I can't go, because aliens spawn so fast again, that I can't move through them, without triggering hunt. Plus they have eyes in their a*ses, so sneaking is also not really an option. And with all of that 'sneaking', at least in the beginning, is setting up a turret, hoping it will kill an alien before it moves behind it and destroys it, then picking up the turret and running to the next section of the map, PRAYING aliens this time won't spawn so fast and you won't have to do two hunts back to back.

So in my opinion, while the concept for this game is very cool, the execution is... not so much.

That brings me to my biggest complaint - can you skip the f*cking dialogues? xD
I'm an RPG guy, so it's not that I'm bothered by them, but first, I can read them faster than actors will say them and second, if I restart the section a few times I get so bored by listening to same scene over and over and over again. Literally 99% of the games lets you skip dialogues, so...
I haven't played since the new patch, so maybe they finally added the option.

[Игорь Багажник]

I came here to say about checkpoint system, but saw see your post and agree with that you texted about it - saving system is strange looking for that type of game. If you playing Darkest Dungeoun (not 2nd one), for expample, you have forced "iron man" gameplay full time and it is feels reasonable to make permadeath and no option to load something. But in Aliens it feels strange that load option exists, cause it force you to load after some failure, not to endure and overcome.

About checkpoints, it's ok for me in a big picture, but THEY SETED UP SUPER ANNOYINGLY!

For example, the end of 02 mission:

you have to enter storage full of sleeping aliens. And some fails are unavoidable (or bugs that ruin run for you). But every time when I load the game it force me to watch unskippable cutscene over and over again! And stealth hints too. Its not satisfying at all.

But that's not all: when I collected that details, which are mission target, I get achievement for 02 mission completion. And then when I go back, one of my marines get stucked at textures. "Well, no problem" - I thought - "just reload after picking up mission object." I click Load and what I see??? ---- there is NO CHECKPOINT when you picked up the gears. Well, now I have achievment for mission completion, but still not end it, thats silly and frustrating.

But I like the game actually, hope you developers guys will fix some small issues like this.

[mobucks]

Couldn't agree more about the chatter. I turned it off completely. The chatter barks when in yellow or red stress make sense, but during no stress these Marines talk a lot of crap when we all know they will be in a catatonic state of horror after just one minute of fighting the Aliens.

As for getting out of the hunt, you really need to bug out to an entirely different area of the map, undetected, to reliably create a safehouse and rest. Just barely getting away and welding a safehouse door almost never works. The aliens seem to only check every room in the area you were last seen. So probably every room you can see on your motion tracker. Just pop a motion tracker and while the aliens are checking it out, get some major distance from where you were last spotted and make a saferoom and that will stop the hunt.

Triggering a hunt still seems like a crapshoot. Silent sniper is obviously the safest way, but if it's just one xeno and no others nearby to hear it, spend all your points on grenades or shotgun blasts and if you can kill it instantly, the hunt wont trigger. I'm not sure if this is unfair but it is annoying. We do have the clear advantage of the motion trackers, mines, the APC, and turrets which subvert/kill without triggering a hunt.

As for auto-saves, I turned them off. They seem to bug the game if you re-load them.