Personal Blog post/Game Review/Post Follow up:
Got to play for a few more hours and I had a lot of fun.
Everything changed when I started queueing with randos in a discord. Not the best players in the world, but people who were interested in working together and progressing the game. We had games were we would die in the first few minutes and games where we would wipe team after team before completing our objective or looting a high value supply crate or pve boss monster. My impressions are this:
The TTK is incredibly quick because they start you off with the worst shields possible, A single sniper round to the dome downs any enemy runner. The game ends up feeling more like CoD than Halo. Once you get Shields the TTK significantly improves and it starts to feel like a casual FPS. The medic shell 'triage' might be a mandatory team mate. His ability to res and heal team members from practically any where is far too valuable not to have. The Destroyer shell feels useless, I've been maining it, but I have a feeling that with enough progression and unlocks this thing might actually be OP. So not all shells are made equal. We started playing with double triage, the enemy just could not pressure us enough and would end up losing every fight. We started hunting other teams down rather than loot the map. The extracts are very troll, very exposed, it's like the devs want you to camp these and abuse people trying to extract.
The Guns feel good, any gun can kill any thing. Ammo scarcity is still a problem depending on what your trying to do, i typically bring in 300ish rounds of ammunition and some times that's just not enough. For this reason the free kits you can grab feel terrible, but I'm thankful that when I'm playing with idiots or randos I can just grab some shit kit from off the rack free of charge.
Meds can be scarce, but not as bad as ammo. I'm tired of buying this shit. It's expensive. I wish Shields would recharge on their own when fully depleted, they do have some recharge ability, but I was hoping it would be like Halo. I think if this changed it would open the game up to more people. That said I like the healing system. The game predicts what you need the most so you just need to mash a single heal button when needed.
@Professor Donger mentioned that shields and back packs aren't available at the start and it is fucking stupid. You have to have these to play this game and they are gate kept for reasons beyond me.
I dont think looting anything on the map is worth it... I made like 9k off a purple key card 'marked room' for a lack of a better term, a pack of meds cost me 1.2k to put this into perspective. We got the most loot from killing enemy players and accomplishing tasks as they were given to us. This might be retarded, but I seriously think youre better off just doing tasks, killing runners who get in your way, and ignoring anything pve.
The tasks your given pretty much amount to "go to X place and do Y thing" which often means you and your team are going to bumble around a POI before alerting nearby runner teams of your position, where you will have to duke it out. If youre lucky you'll stumble into another team as they are fighting bots. No matter what, you and your two friends are going to be on an easter egg hunt looking for the mcguffin that you need.
So far some of the story has been told mid raid, which is bad. It's hard to listen to exposition dump and plot while an enemy team is getting a fix on your position or maybe a drop ship full of bots just landed ontop of you and your team mates are sorting it out.
The vendors when you reach enough rep with them will also hook you up with free equipment and of course will sell you equipment better than anything you could find laying around in game. Maybe there is some super high value shit to be found on the map, but so far I havent seen it. I've done many supply drops, boss fights, and marked rooms. None of it seems particularly good for the amount of trouble and effort you have to go through to secure it. I think youre just better off chasing after gun shots and POI/extracts.