Game still plays similar. Enemies spawn too close to you, know exactly where you are through any kind of sight blockers, still have crazy good aim with any kind of weapon from any distance (if a group of them start shooting any sniper you have is useless) and when you finally get back to base repair costs are crazy.
Repair costs are fine as long as you repair at friendly mechanics, and at the late stages of the game they don't even matter either. If I sold my artifact hoard plus other shit I don't really need in my stash I would have way over 1 million coupons. There is a route with 8 anomaly fields starting from the Cement Factory that you can hit every couple of in-game days.
In retrospect I wasted way too much time hauling low value loot back to traders.
I only have one friendly (green) base and it is too far away to always go back to it.
Are you one of those people who doesn't realize that guides offer fast travel?
And yes, repair prices are not crazy if you only use money for that but I also upgrade gear I use and in combination with that they are crazy. I still have about 5 new weapons in my stash that I still could not afford to repair to full and upgrade so I can then try out in a field.
Now I am in STD Malachite base (no idea what is name of this faction, is it Duty? ), they give me some side quests, after I do them and return I spent way more in repairs and wasted money than in whatever I sold and got through quests. Now I've even got into habbit of just running away from spawning enemies or loading a previous save if it is close enough, since game has zero leveling mechanics and it is all about gear side quests are pointless unless they give you something more than expensive repair costs.
It also makes general exporation unfun as most of the time I lose more than I gain (it was fun at start as you had nothing and anything you found was a cool upgrade).
Best you can get from random exploration in midgame are upgrade blueprints or weapon attachments (or best armor so far that I found in building next to Malachite base which was lucky but this is first time I ran into something as good as this since early game when everything new was cool).
At this point I am ready to just follow the main quest only and ignore the rest of the pointless content.
Almost every weapon you see here is fully upgraded, not counting a few base ones that I sold, the suits just have pre-installed upgrades. I also had 2 or 3 suits that cost 200K+ to fully upgrade that I've been using before and sold.
Funny how I never did cringe shit like reloading my game because I ran into enemies, I explored pretty much everywhere, and am still 400K in the green despite the claims that repairs cost more than the loot you find is worth. And this is after upgrading a second Diamond exo for the last quest just in case, without selling half of the shit in my stash that is serving no purpose.
But don't worry, the devs put tons of free shit at the end to make sure that even the worst game journalist would be able to finish the game while skipping 95% of it.
