What is going on with the gameplay?

[Sabatoc]

I'm at my wit's end with the current state of the game. All these bugs are piling up and is completely ruining the experience for me in an otherwise, unique and interesting game. Concept and it's style is awesome, but the gameplay is atrocious.

If we dismiss the progress-breaking bugs, such as random patrol squads spawning right ontop of you at the strangest of circumstances, instantly spotting you and magdumping you in mere seconds, or how animation-glitches leaves you crippled and unable to sprint or fire your weapon, another factor has added to the pile of frustration for me.

Stealth seems to be an illusion. Hiding serves no purpose, since A.I. just randomly decides "Oh, I'mma spot you now."

It doesn't seem to matter if the area is light or dark. It doesn't seem to matter that you're out of line of sight and stationary. One enemy, or a group of enemies can be blind as a bat and you can pull off the silliest of maneuvers, while the next encounter the enemies just spot you like hawks without you even being physically visible to them, making noise or being in a lit area. It's incredibly inconsistent.

This has resulted into me sometimes just ignoring stealth altogether, because all it does is screw me over when it logically shouldn't. It seems to be a matter of luck and RNG, sprinting around like a lunatic is the only consistent approach that seems to get you out of danger. (Which is ironic, since that should increase the risk of you getting yourself killed in the first place.)

Drones keep homing in on your position and clipping through the environment. Your hirelings are often a liability due to their A.I. being nigh-identical to the hostile forces you're trying to avoid. Hirelings don't grasp the concept of stealth, so they just end up fighting whatever happens to be nearby. You can't save them from their own stupidity. They ironically endanger the player more than what they support.

For a game where stealth, survival, crucial resource-gathering, resource-management and risky expeditions and combat, the gameplay has to be solid. As the situation is now, it's undercooked at best.

This game is early access, but it seriously needs more time in the oven. This isn't good.

[space]

In my experience what makes the enemies suddenly "spot you" has everything to do with if I'm moving around un-crouched. I don't agree with the light and dark not making a difference if there is dark areas on a few maps that I know if I can run to them when I've agro'd half the world and crouch and don't move they won't find me unless they bump into me.

The make or break in the circumstances I have found is to just not move around or if I have to move be crouched.

The drones and stuff I totally agree with there is lots of EA problems with drones.. the most annoying for me is when they ca't take damage and go through walls and chase you around like invincible little ghosts.

[Great Ape]

Hopefully, it's worked out in the final release.

[Mentally Unstable]

My theory is that it all stems from the very small spawning/despawning radius around the player. Probably due to technical limitations and the desire to make the battlefield look "busy" near the player.

The inconsistent spotting could be due to it. From what I have seen so far, it's often due to the sudden spawns near the player that the player is unaware of. For example, I have encountered plenty of times where the enemies in front of me were seemingly oblivious to my presence but they suddenly opened fire on me.......and when I turned around, I saw a whole bunch of enemies within a few steps of me which weren't there a few seconds ago. It seemed like the new enemies behind ended up "alerting" the enemies that were in front of me.

There were also a few times where the game seemed to lag and spawned in enemies late but as far as the game logic was concerned, they were already "present" within the game and I was getting shot at by seemingly invisible enemies while the rest of the enemies that were already present in the vicinity were alerted by it. It was only seconds later that the actual models of the soldiers loaded in.

Another odd one was when the enemy seemingly partially spawned within the wall when I was in some sort of pillbox/bunker at the trenches. I could see part of the soldier's body jutting out of the wall. But it seemed that the game logic treated it as if that solider had line of sight on me and it ended up alerting everyone else.

That's probably why it's better to just keep running as you pointed out. That way, the game doesn't have time to spawn things on top of us or right beside us.