Bad design? Please explain.
I think I can answer at least a part of this one.
You can make reference to a longer post I made a few weeks back where I praised what I initially found appealing about the opening hours of gameplay. Shortly after the ten hour mark, a lot of these aspects break down very quickly and the illusion is shattered.
Character development is front-loaded into those first few hours because of how rapidly you level up. Then once you get to level 11 or so, XP slows to an absolute crawl, and if I'm not mistaken, level 15 is essentially the soft level cap of the game. It's not satisfying, and further illustrates how little impact your character development choices make in the long run. But even with that it becomes apparent that most of the skills you can choose do little in the way of actually effecting gameplay. The most impactful skills I found were Scammer, Computers, and Mechanics. But when it comes right down to it, any loot you find or "alternate path" you discover as a result of having these skills are fairly meaningless, as it's extremely rare that you find a piece of equipment that is different from what you've already got, or a path you couldn't reach very easily without such skills. For example, I've played the game for about 30+ hours now and have only changed my armor and weapons about twice, and even then it almost feels like cheating because of how overpowered I feel. I have stopped searching for equipment until the game starts to offer a challenge again, which it hasn't unfortunately. If vital content is gated behind a skill check, you can usually bypass it using one of the tools that places you at a high enough level to bypass it.
Which brings us to the combat, which could actually be good if combat skills had any real impact in the long run, if enemy AI wasn't completely retarded, if melee wasn't broken as shit, if the player didn't feel absolutely overpowered for 75% of the game, and if the gunplay didn't half the time result in almost literal pop-a-mole gameplay (again, because of the terrible enemy AI where they duck, pop up, take a shot, then essentially wait for you to pop off yours). Sure, every so often you meet an opponent where you have to use a couple of the grenades you've got waiting in your inventory to get past, but even then it's a cake-walk as long as you're not an idiot about it. Even this would all be fine if most combat quests didn't boil down to linear "levels" with sometimes a few superficial alternate routes.
Quests are probably the most interesting aspect of gameplay, which is unfortunate because they really are mainly just either fetch quests, escort quests, or "kill x quest." Like I said in my prior post, what makes them fun is when they have the potential to go horribly wrong and you have to live with the consequences. Again, unfortunately these consequences rarely end up being anything beyond you missing out on some money that you don't actually need because the game's economy is completely fucked.
What we're left with when you remove the initial satisfaction of the above elements that eventually degrade into nothingness is an excellent setting, interesting characters, passable writing (because yeah, about halfway through the game the translation drops in quality A LOT), amazing atmosphere, and superb art direction.
I've still got love for the game as I'm sure you do too, but you can't look at the game design and say it was well-done or even passable after the first 10-12 hours. It falls apart like the majority of the rest of the game does. The game isn't just an Alpha in a technical sense, but in almost all gameplay as well. This game is just not finished and it saddens me to feel inclined to believe it never will be.
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