[Raynian]

The HUD went from being minimalistic, but clean and easy to determine necessary information...to being a cluttered mess that's difficult to understand. Text scrolls onto your screen rather than just quickly popping up, the font is ugly compared to what it was before, the minimap zooming around constantly is distracting, it's impossible to distinguish friend from foe on the minimap (they both look the same and blink red when under attack), it's impossible to see how much health someone has now (you just get a rough indication), non-comms are barraged with information that they don't need to really know, since it's the comm's job to keep them in the loop, etc. This isn't even stuff that you can say "get used to it" about - it's just, in my opinion, completely worse than before in every way. Yeah, things like moving around health bar locations on the HUD I can get used to, but why would you make the health bar take up twice as much space as before when it was small, clean, and easy to quickly read before?

Gameplay is feeling incredibly stale. "Unhinging" alien lifeforms from hive count was an awful idea. To counter that, they had to severely nerf what the upper-tier lifeforms can do to compensate until they get upgrades. The new alien comm system sucks, much in the same reason that SC2's general macro principles suck. Rather than the simplistic, but concrete, values of build time, health, and utility (such as in SC1), they add shit in like Catalyze which is a boring "macro sink" that also conveniently fucks balance nine ways to Sunday. Also, they pretty much nerfed every single alien lifeform and buffed the fuck out of marines, so just about every game that's not horribly stacked ends in a marine victory once they get arcs. Oh, and there's lots of stupid bullshit they keep adding as well. Cloak? When has cloak ever been a fun game mechanic? At least in FF, you balance it out with slower movement speed, but point is - it's boring to play against, boring to play with, and slows down gameplay immensely. Silence? Ugh. Now marines can't rely on their hearing at all - fucking stupid.

Upgrades like carapace and the now-removed frenzy might be "stronger" in some respects, but they don't change the core interactions -- Marine hears or sees an alien, shoots it until it dies or he dies, the end. With cloak, you can't even walk out of base without your comm scanning for you or you risk dying because cloak is bullshit. Audio cues have always been immensely important in any FPS, but especially NS - having the ability to silence an alien's movements and attacks is, again, fucking retarded.

They're trying to "diversify" the gameplay too much, but in reality all they're doing is killing the reasons why it was fun in the first place -- a game that rewarded mechanic and tactical prowess.