Have you guys seen the new interview on IGN (3rd video about the new DLC)?
The more I'm seeing of the expansion, the less I'm liking it. The way the devs speak sounds a bit dishonest in nature, corporate and like they're not getting the universe. They're acting like the game is fine, it's very popular and hasn't got a million and one problems. The IGN interviewer who doesn't know the game very well asked the dev if there is procedural generation in the map layout for the DLC. The dev instead of answering the question directly (implying no which is no surprise to anyone who knows the game) said in the vaguest of senses that there will be different pathways to get to an objective. Which I can deduce means you'll have two, like the very very very few instances where you had an optional room open up in a mission, I think that literally happens only twice, in the first and last campaign. Why can't they admit that the game is extremely linear which I'm certain won't change in this DLC?
Second, talking about how the AI is adapting to you in the sense in which enemies it sends, I won't be surprised at all if that's a blatant lie or misleading at least. As someone who has played a lot of this game, I can tell you that at least 70% of the encounters are scripted, and the differences come at a random binary, one of two options chosen at random, no matter how you play, to spice things up just a little bit. I'm getting some Gearbox flashback vibes with how they're reporting stuff.
Thirdly, why oh why did they have to say the Neo creatures here are Xenos infected by the goo? Why did they have to say that? Why couldn't it have been just the local fauna? This creates two problems. First, the aliens shouldn't be able to be infected by the goo, since they already are a result of it. But if you do infect them, why do you go backwards in design? The Neo design is a path forward from human/animal to Alien. Neo's are a step forward, an in between stage. The pathogen in the movies shows creatures gaining Alien traits mostly. So it should make the Alien even more Giger like. Instead they create fleshy generic pale monsters with pointy Neo heads sometimes? I laughed when they talked how the new designs are great and that the artists did a great job, how this is what you get when you mix Giger with the Pathogen. When they started talking about the hive from Pathogen xenos, it sounded like bad fan fiction. The designs go from decent (the most neo like creature) to horrible, simple and ugly (talking about the stalker, the other stalker like creature and the Gorilla Neo). Let's comment the arm clubs, wtf? They look so bad, so simple, design wise and functionally as well. And it has no tail! How did an Alien turn into that? It's tail fell off? Who is this for? If they wanted to go for a gorilla brute, they could've chosen to go full kenner and do a true Gorilla Alien. Kenner aliens would be more popular then prequel stuff. But if they went for pleasing the prequel people, how? People liked the intelligence of the Neos, the elegance, and alien like characteristics, they don't look at it as a generic monster which Cold Iron made here. And why do the "normal" Neo's have the lower mandibles of the PREDATOR?
Second problem, why depict these abominations as Bigger, Better, Stronger aliens than the orighinal? Are they really going The Predator rout? They're doing the same thing A:R tried with the newborn. A fleshy, ugly, worse looking alien is supposed to rip apart the original beast? That's a really lazy way of trying to hype up your new uglier enemies.
And lastly, I'm getting tired of how much this game is trying to fight my suspension of disbelief. I know this is a game, but the Arcady modern illogical video game RPG format is getting to be a bit too much for me. This is the first time we have abilities that are on a timer. Not a fixed amount of arsenal, but stupid world braking timers. And abilities that don't fit the franchise. Overclock makes no real world sense, healing fields in the alien franchise literally make me roll my eyes, huge or infinite ammo on small turrets, holographic teleporting stuff everywhere, your technician turret gets destroyed, so get's beamed to your back after a while like this is Star Track... The 3d replicators seem a bit too magic like, being able to print out the whole gun and ammunition (complex metals, explosive ammo printed in 2202)? Come on, it doesn't feel like the Alien universe really. So when they do this with the pathogen, it grinds me even more.
The gameplay can be fun with friends, but I don't feel like I'm playing an Alien game anymore... On a positive note, I have been able to find games easier on extreme difficulty recently, don't know why.