Where to begin? For me it's not about the things shown for example in the Trailer vs. Reality youtube video or the poor server quality and connection issues etc. It's an early access and those, to be fair, were expected and surely will improve as time goes on.
My major issues are about the balance of the game. From the trailers i got the vibe that this game would be heavily balanced towards the RPG/exploration side (Divinity Original Sin, Pillars Of Eternity and so on, with open world exploration) and not the survival. Boy was i wrong. The survival side is so overwhelming that it makes the game not fun for me and what i've seen, many others. It's often best to just let yourself die and reset hunger/thirst/vitamins etc, than to really worry about them the way it's ment to at the moment. And these mechanics in place really take away the potential exploration side of the whole experience. You are so tied down to your base/ship/crate of stuff that you can't really go explore the islands cause of all the survival mechanics. And the material farming, oh boy the the material farming. You have to spend tens or maybe hundreds of hours just to farm so you can build a decent ship to kind of get started.
I just wish the would tone down these survival mechanics and focus on the quests, exploration and progression systems more. Maybe make the survival stuff be like a buff/debuff kind of thing. If you're for example hungry, you are weaker in battle and if you're full you gain some extra strenght or other buffs (or maybe just tone down on the starvation etc HEAVILY). Not so that you literally die in the middle of a huge island from hunger, cause you felt like exploring and now have to spawn on your bed million miles away and start farming food and materials for hours and hours just have even a slight chance of getting your stuff back from your dead body.
Just focus on the FUN. Fill the world with quests and cool loot to go after. Make us feel like bad ass pirates and not some weak castaways using their last breaths to barely survive.
Maybe the game is more of what i described, like couple hundred hours in, but for what it is like now i'm never gonna see that. It's just too much.
Here's to hoping for a better future! There sure is potential here
