1. Pathfinding is a mess, my god it's so bad, how is it so bad? Character will regularly get stuck on scenery, wandering in circles, go the wrong way, etc. It's just bad. Certain areas of the game feel like they are just never worth going to ever because the pathfinding is so awful. I feel like the locations you can build your base are really limited because not only does it have to be in a "good pathfinding" area, but it has to be relatively centrally located - leviathan coast for example is a great base location, except it's so far away from everything interesting and you have to try and pathfind through floodlands or whatever and it's just..... no. Unless you want to sit in the base forever doing nothing it's not worth building there because it's too tedious to leave.
2. The endless, constant loading, why? The game looks uh... let's say several generations old, how can the loading times be so awful? This is probably engine related so nothing can be done but it's still a huge drag and grinds my patience constantly while I'm playing. The swamp in particular is awful, even if the pathfinding was good (it's not) I'd never go there because the loading is hell.
3. Unblockable AoE attacks ruin combat, seriously, it's so inexcusably dumb. I attacked a HN city and my little army got wrecked so I dragged off the downed people. I noticed during the fight people were taking a lot of damage from enemies they were not even fighting, so I tried an experiment and sent my guys in 1 at a time. Actually it worked massively better - my main fighter was able to 1v5 a bunch of guards and take almost no damage at all, he could even kill the elite paladin guys 1v1 though they did some damage to him. When he finally went down, I send the next guy in and had my ninja medic sneak in and drag the injured guy out of the fight to rest. It worked so good it honestly felt like an exploit.
4. Imagine my... "surprise" when I spent hours grinding up weaponsmithing, scoured a bunch of ruins for precious AI cores, and then couldn't find the option to research edge 2 production. So I finally google it to see if it's a bug, and it turns out despite the character sheet saying I can craft edge 3, there's no research for 2 or 3. And then on top of that, player-crafted edge 1 weapons are actually straight up worse than NPC edge 1 weapons. So I went through this whole grind and wasted a bunch of AI cores for literally nothing because you can just buy edge 3 weapons for actually pretty affordable prices.
5. Athletics is too broken, what were they thinking? Even after a few hours it's obvious how broken it is. Once you hit ~50 athletics skill you're faster than 99% of the enemies in the game which means you're always safe and there's no risk from anything (unless pathfinding breaks). Even the few enemies who are faster than you can't actually hit you because of the slow, slow attack animations - realistically they probably have to be 5mph or more faster to even have a chance of hitting you, and at very high speeds (30mph maybe?) I think it's just impossible, they have to get so far ahead of you to attack correctly it just breaks and they can never hit you no matter what. This is particularly bad because unlike stealth/assassination (which is also overpowered) you can't choose not to use athletics or turn it off. You just get faster and faster the longer you play, and eventually you either are forced to choose between exploiting it, or just standing there and letting the enemy kill you.
6. Enemies in cities respawn too fast, wtf. After I figured out the game used the
law of conservation of ninjutsu I killed almost all the guards in the city, including the shop guards and the priest guys who run out to attack you despite having no armor and sticks for weapons. And then I stumbled into the throne room and there were like 30 high paladins which I didn't think I could beat so I ran away (lol 50+ athletics = free getaway). I came back the next day, not even 24 in-game hours later and every single guard etc was respawned, it was like I'd never attacked at all.
7. Speaking of respawning, why can't I kill enemies who are downed? I googled it and the answer was "if you could do it, the enemy could do it" and my answer is "ok, so what's the problem?". The game is WAY TOO FORGIVING already, if I screw up and my whole squad goes down despite being able to run faster than usain bolt while carrying a man on their shoulder, and the enemy does not want to jail/enslave me they *should* kill me. And anyway, it's not true - cannibals, some animals, and a certain late-game enemy I won't spoil because they are so !!fun!! *do* execute your guys. This is honestly what makes me so salty about the enemies respawning so fast, I had to sit there and camp them and wait for them to get back up over and over until they finally died, and it was for nothing because the next day they just had new guys magically spawn from nothing to replace them.