Early game Observations & frustrations....

The Cluster Map is way too cumbersome and depopulated to merit the long flight/loading time. Give me a simple, snappy star map back. Adding to the misery here is that those 'huge' mineral deposits Suvi calls out are usually very underwhelming #s wise. Ditto the vehicle mining on planet surface.

Speaking of space exploration. Where are the uncharted missions? I've only just gotten to the Moshae, but none of the side missions have happened in uncharted space. No derelict ships or stations to investigate yet. No isolated mining installations. Hopefully these open up after I hit a certain story point. Very underwhelmed by stuff like scan 7 corpses, place 6 beacons, etc. It's nice to break up the action, but it's important to break up the levels you're looking at too. Maybe every game doesn't have to be quite this open world-y.

The Horizontal compass. Absolute junk. I don't even know what more to add to this. I find myself opening up the map often because the compass is so useless / so littered with icons. Give me a little control here on what appears at least. Differentiate the waypoint beacon from the quest beacon a little more visibly.

Choices in dialog seem very limited. Missing the chance to shape Ryder in the same way we could color Shepard's behaviors. Despite sticking to professional / logical dialog options Scott seems to want to stick to making dumb quips all the time. Take a hint, BioWare. If a player is picking those types of dialog options repeatedly he probably doesn't share your sense of humor.

Speaking of the auto dialog stuff. Does anyone ever shut up? Will they please stop stepping over each others' lines? SAM is probably the worst offender here. The few times party banter does kick on in the Nomad, SAM comes along to ruin it to let me know about one of those useless mining nodes. Shut up, SAM.

Guns feel a little underpowered. In terms of sound and damage. Sometimes it feels like you're really plinking away at some of the spongier enemies and it gets to just being a game of keep away while you hop from ammo box to ammo box. The combat encounters that are meant to be special are more often just a dull slog to get through (Architect fights in particular are awful).

Speaking of the weapons. Customization is really kind of weak. Not sure why this aspect was so oversold, but the pathways to crafting a weapon that feels really unique seem really limited. I only have the one vintage heatsink augment, why would I waste it on a weapon until I hit lvl 30? Instead all I have access to are a bunch of boring +2% this or the other thing. There aren't ways to mod alternate ROF, swap out scope types (iron sight indra for example), or other types of things you'd want to do with guns. Added to this, the aesthetic to the new alien guns are less pleasing than a baboon's red ass. 

pretty sure you get to screw with the power options of your squad, my main complaint is you cant pick their weapon....

Quicksave... I stopped counting how often I hit F5 only to remind myself that there is none.

Also - however fun the Nomad is sometimes - aside from the one throwaway line in the beginning of Eos, there is no further explanation why we can't use a shuttle. I mean: The storms are gone now, what gives!?

That slow planet flying mechanic triggers me so much, it wastes so much time.

And yea, enemies are bullet spongy as all heck (your baseline normal mook on normal has about 1000 hitpoints, in contrast most ARs/SMGs do about 40 damage per bullet, it's just silly), even hardcore on ME3 wasn't this tedious.

The main thing that I'm interested in, and the only thing that's kept me playing this far is what happened to the other arks? Like, if you took your whole extended family to an amusement park and then three second cousins disappeared, you'd help find them right? Not be worried about "Ohhhh, look at the shiny!" And even that's wearing thin, at this point.

Just let the serial killer have them, let's go home to the Milky Way.

the main thing so far like 15-18hrs in is the stupid driving everywhere...........you spend more time in the Nomad then anything else in this game...

Wait seriously? Did you even play ME 2 or 3? The shuttle did the same if that is your breaking point you must have very strict standards.

But it could. The shuttle could jump into ftl and did several times.

Bingo.

We don't actually see shuttles entering FTL. It's likely that they do have at least a limited FTL capability, but any shuttle interstellar travel we see can be assigned to the relay network.

Small, damaged ship with compromised person on board shouldn't out run the Tempest