Story: Purchased EA 08/2021. Had access to Olympus forest and some arctic area. It had wolves, deer, rabbits, and bears (maybe chamois?). A hunt came out for the Wooly.
Played for a couple dozen hours total, testing things, providing feedback, reporting bugs. Unfixed aliasing bands on shadows were so nauseating I had to quit slightly prematurely, but the primary complaint in my feedback was simple and critical: animals are r-tarded.
What is a game? A game is a system of rules that defines a challenge where success or progress is determined by navigating constraints towards a goal. If there is no meaningful challenge- no opposition or constraint- then it is not a game, but merely a toy.
What makes Icarus a game? The rules an challenges should be familiar; basic survival systems management of Health, O2, and Hunger. Mild pre-planning for resource management for your path/destination. And aggressive enemies.
Aggressive enemies. This might be the only real "challenge" in the game as the others mentioned are satisfied with very, very little effort. There are two types of fauna in this game; ones that do damage and ones that run or walk in random directions for ~80ft. The ones that do damage, aside from (some) bosses, have one program: look at player, approach to attack distance, initiate attack program. The only deviation from this script I've seen is if the entity seems to be taking too long closing the distance and also seems to be not moving very far itself, so it'll try to move laterally briefly (trying to un-stuck itself from maybe a rock), but its core programming is still always going to be 'walk in an incredibly straight line from here to there'.
This just means they didn't have someone (or someone competent) to do pathfinding (classically called "AI" back in my day, before the advent of LLMs, but that's just me showing my age). OK so they have virtually no intelligence (pun intended). Does that mean they're not a challenge?
Yes and no, and neither answer is good. No, they're not a challenge, because you can either just "cheese" them or overpower them. Let's look at Polar Bears since everything before this has trivial health and damage. Got a rifle? Cool, crouch and one-shot them. Don't? Cool, just get them to walk into a fun rock formation that keeps them stuck in the still fantastically linear path towards you and slash their nostril with your knife a few times until they turn into pre-epoxy.
So here's the crux of the conversation: What happens if you aren't prepared enough for this former option of cheesing, and you are stuck confronting? The world is kind of set up to allow these scenarios to occur; a weather event can hit, just when you pop out of a cave that gave you cave lung, and you didn't clear your peripheral enough to see that polar bear nearby, and how he's "hunting" you straightforwardly. Can you "skill" your way out of it?
Brown bears I figured out pretty much instantly; just sidestep towards/past them a bit. They get locked into an attack animation of where you were, and you just clear past their attack sweep. Kiss their teeth with your knife as they approach, and press W&D on the keyboard to Spike Spiegel them. Never take a hit.
But then Polar Bears? Again, assuming you can't cheese, what is your recourse? Well considering that so many of the fauna in Icarus share the same skeletons, animations, attitude programming, I thought these would be the same as the brown Bears.
But no. They are magicians. They attack backwards.
And this is the screenshot in the post. That is reliably reproducible. In fact, it's pretty hard to avoid if you let these little buggers close to you. i'm standing 5 whole leaps behind it watching it attack a ghost, and it's as if its big ol' butt ripped a bloody nuclear one and blasted me 5 feet further away, opposite the direction we can see it is attacking (that blood cloud is mine btw, not his). This is a cheap solution to a r-tarded problem. If you want to venture here, it's not "be prepared". It's "be prepared to cheese." Lame.
So anyway to wrap up this rant and get closure to the opening title, these are the same complaints I had in 2021. These and a few more. And not a single one had any meaningful progress. (NOTE: I am under no delusion that I am required to be heard and accommodated for, and admittedly there were a LOT of people flooding the scene at that time). So it makes me sad. I see this game as a core concept skeleton that showed incredible potential, and ultimately was left as a core concept skeleton with some added makeup and clothing (clothing DLC costs extra btw) instead of actually fleshing it out and making it alive
