I really, really want to like that side of the game. I love the idea of players pooling together their tiny, individual actions towards a greater shared goal and what it can bring in terms of RP and immersion. Having new content gated behind community participation is an awesome idea, and I totally get the idea of simulating a back and forth war between the players and the AI for the control of the Galaxy.
However, I can't help but feel mostly frustrated with how it's actually implemented, both in its presentation and in its actual mechanics.
On the presentation side, everything looks so half-hearted that it ends up feeling meaningless. Apart from the major order and a few flavor lines thrown together in a corner of the screen, there's nothing that make us feel like the galactic war has any consequence on the lore of the game. Every few days we gain or lose a planet, but it doesn't really feel like winning or losing: we just get our medals or we don't, and then it's mostly back to usual business. Even the consequences are not clearly shown: the apparition of bit gunship is a clear consequence of us not managing to capture To it, but I'm pretty sure the majority of the player base won't even notice it and just think "well, I guess the update brought us some new enemy types, cool!". I get minimalism, but I feel all of this would be so much better if we had small cutscenes to mark each important step, or even just a war room in the ship where we could read strategic reports or whatever, anything to give it more context.
On the gameplay side, the fact that the only available action the players can do to have an influence of the global war is to either launch "attack missions" on enemy planets or "defense missions" on a super earth planet feels very limited, especially since all missions are played very similarly. It just seems to devolve in a endless tug-of-war consisting of capturing a planet, then defending it over and over, with very few variations and very few reasons to care Gameplay-wise. How cool would it be if defense missions were actually about defending allied areas against an enemy invasion, with radically different objectives like supporting SEAF positions or defending strategic zones against waves of enemies?
To close up what is slowly starting to look like a wall of text, I just want to say that I don't mean to sound whiny and that I actually really enjoy the game as it is. It just feels like a wasted opportunity to have this truly awesome idea and then do almost nothing with it.
What are your thoughts on this?
Edit: Also, just wanted to point out I realize that budgets exist and the galactic war probably wasn't (and shouldn't have been) their top priority. Getting the core gameplay was and still is more important than the rest.
I feel like a lot of what you just wrote could pretty much be written to apply to people's feelings about almost all modern wars. I've seen similar stuff by veterans who have been deployed to Afghanistan. It's like, what the hell is the point in all of this? I always laugh after completing an epic mission that we barely passed and seeing the liberation percent go up something like 0.00000001%.
But yeah, I actually do enjoy the major orders and how they relate them to new content. Capturing planets to unlock exosuits was cool, and I feel like there will be more consequences to the termicide gas (or was that the Shriekers?).
Obviously having some cinematics would be awesome, but realistically I don't think that's doable with the number of major orders they have. Different mission types is cool, like what they did with the termicide, but again that's a pretty big lift when they're doing multiple major orders per week.
That's fair, I'm aware my expectations are probably way too high for a game of this scale and budget