That's part of what confuses me.
I've been loosely following this game since their original pitch. At some point I even wrote it off as something that was "Never going to work".
Hell, I even actively disliked some of my past hand-ons with the game because it was honestly a disaster on a technical level. Even my new (back then) PC could barely get a handful of fps out of it and nothing was working yet.
Fast forward this Autumn, I finally tried it once again (I thnk the Digital Foundry video was probably what convinced me, plus a couple of friends playing it) and I was incredibly surprised about how much it improved. To the point that I jumped in for the first time and bought a basic package with a Mustang Alpha.
The game still has some evident limitations in the variety of its computer generated content but even in this primitive form is already impressive and when everything works (which is admittedly a bit of a lottery) it already feels incredible and unlike any other thing I've played before.
This video I crossed yesterday basically summarizes my own impressions:
Yet somehow exactly now that that the game is actually assuming a decent shape and you can start to see some of the major goals in sight, a lot of people are becoming increasingly dismissive of it instead of giving it a fair chance.
It's not just the mockery about it "being in development for far too long", either.
There's an ongoing avalanche of baseless assumptions like "Everyone who's enjoying this must be a whale who smoked hundred of dollars in it" or "You are playing it? Let me tell you without any first-hand experience of how the game works why it will be a pay to win even if I don't have a clue of what I'm talking about".
This is a great video. It's a really fair analysis of the current state of the game, and hard to disagree with him on most points. Especially when he says they get their priorities a bit messed up (FOIP as a ground-breaking social system, but grouping mechanics to play with friends are so archaic).
Hopefully the entire UI/UX is due a complete overhaul though. I've always hated the "hold F to enter interaction mode" thing with a passion.
It's so awful. I'm not sure why they're trying to reinvent the wheel on this one when object and NPC interaction has been pretty much standardised to a fine sheen in video games these days. Holding F while hovering over an object/NPC provides a floating list of options in a giant hideous font, and you then have to "look" at the list option you want to select, which frequently means looking away from the object the list is attached to in order to reach it, which makes the entire list disappear before you can select your action. And weird things like trying to choose where to place a box you're carrying, but your character is bizarrely holding the box up
in front of their face so you can't see anything. And even with smaller items like a mug, if you want to put it down you can't just press a button you have to hold F, look down to your mug, waggle your head to the "place" list option when it pops up and hope it's close enough to the mug not to vanish,
then release F, waggle your head to the place you want to put it, then press F again. Uuuugggghhhh! Makes you wonder if they hired Bioware's UI team and set them the challenge of designing something even more awful than they usually do =P
Their interactive terminals are
amazing though (requesting ships brought to docking bays, shopping terminals etc) so I have faith that someone on the team will eventually take this "hold F" system out back and put it out of its misery. In which case we'll return to only using it to pay respects.