The visuals, WOW! the look of sparks coming off a ship you get close to as you hammer it with kinetics… the look of the clouds and explosions… i dont think you need to worry about the space battle visuals for a good while.
The reflections of the purple warp cone on the cockpit geometry bring it to life, it looks fantastic. Despite that, the inty cockpit could use some touching up. The flat metallic panels that are closest to bottom center view are well, flat, literally and aesthetically, but center-view is where you want some good detail. Some more geometry there would be nice. Planet surfaces could use some more geometry too (trees, rocks, etc)
The damage buzzing sound fx at around 70% hull sound too loud and too frequent. its more like a wasp in my ear than a sparking sound fx with the fast onset and volume.
combat gameplay stuff:
The hitbox update has made the biggest difference on gameplay this patch by far. Because the size of the target is so important to evasion, the change has increased the survivability of the inty, bomber and even corvette(against capital) significantly. Basically in an inty now i feel immortal and against players im feeling a lot of stalemating happening. Also, corvette and capital turrets are significantly less effective against everything smaller, allowing smaller ships to more reliably kite them down.
I mentioned awhile ago that when hitboxes were updated, the lack of weapon convergence would become a more obvious as a problem due to the weapon positioning on the inty. It definitely feels like it now, It has massively changed the importance of which direction you shoot at an interceptor from, basically the importance of “hunting the pancake” (hit the top or bottom) has increased threefold. Shooting from the side or front will often have your guns just fly past the ship above and below. I find myself aiming with my left or right gun instead of both at the same time, wishing i could have both of the kinetics on the same wing wing so i could get a singular weapon alignment. So the focus now is on third partying (shooting while they are distracted) or getting around people in a 1v1.
That can be a good focus to have, but the issue is that it feels a bit too much like kiting and gambling hits is the better strategy right now, as pushing the other player to get around them doesnt feel as viable. I think a number of tuning items could help here. For the convergence, converging the weapons based on predicted or current enemy range, or moving the inties guns center-line so they dont have to worry about convergence at all would help, i dont really think the crossing projectiles looks too silly as long as there is a reasonable minimum convergence range, it just makes sense. Another measure that might help shorten the now long inty v inty fights is increased angular acceleration to make target aquisition faster. Because now the inty and bomber are again stronger against caps due to the better evasion, it may be worth experimenting with reducing inty weapon projectile velocity to get fights closer to reduce the effect of the smaller hitboxes, but im not so sure this would have good effects all around. It might make escaping from a fight too much easier.
Despite feeling very strong in evasion inties are feeling somewhat sluggish in terms of how they move around other inties right now. Marginally shorter ranges/reduced projectile velocity might help with that but im not sure really.
misc:
One thing not on the “working on soon” list is the lack of space station subsystem targeting… people have no idea where to shoot or that they CAN shoot at each turret, segment, reactor etc just starting out. Also it can be tricky lining up shots while moving against stationary turrets and whatnot. It would be a big play ability boon to have targetting for this and make it way more obvious to new players what they should be doing against stations, and in the future the turrets and subsystems on capital ships.
I think credit rewards for killing mines, if you use a missile are still broken.
There’s also still the very confusing issue that in warp you can hold W and accelerate much slower than if you just let go. That one will seriously confuse new players as they hold w and get bored as they try to slowboat between planets.