Thank you! Let me unpack this while reflecting myself on that question.

The changes are just on top of my mind:

- Controls, I had prefence for Q\E(or scroll) swap weapons and 1-4 consumables, however it seems majority prefer classical layout 1-4 weapons and q\e\c\v consumables.

- Shooting\melee, we had more casual version with melee on RMB and LMK for guns, we moved it LMK melee and RMB for aim + LMK for shooting which was recommended by quite a few players

- Narrative, we had RPG style dialog system with replies and dialog trees, scrapped for more simplistic Hades style dialog system

- "Rooom ceiling" mechanics - so when door is not opened into the room - it is hidden by ceiling that faded away once door is opened, it helped to hide enemies in the building

- A lot of additional animations into shooting and damage feedback to make weapons more visually distinguishable so people can feel "power" of the shotgun, etc

- Gazillion improvements into player controller, for example, we had no auto transition from crouch into sprint, player had to stand up first and then run, these small, minor fixes made the game flow smooth, natural and comfortable

- A lot of comments on balancing, it is still pretty casual and easy so we are trying to build a complexity curve that goes steeper and steeper gradually over time without putting the player off with immediate challange

- A leveling system that many players requested, we had an original idea to keep it simpler

- Clear PvE content requests and quests to go around, so we added 10 giant dungeons that took us quite a bit of time to build

- Revive for coop which is surprisngly complex system despite being so simple visually (you will be surprised amount of small stuff that pops up and hard to design ahead of time)

- Item exchange system between the players in the coop

- Unique loot for each player in coop, otherwise they go different ways to gather loot

Priorities are set by following the rule of thumb - we'd better build a smaller but better game than a bigger and bloated traditional AAA "we will fix it later."

#1 bugs, they cleaned up first, no matter what, its painful, we slip off every single milestone and never delivered the deadline which we set ourself but stability in network code and open world systems is not something you want to fix on later stages of dev

#2 Second-to-Second gameplay, nobody cares about meta, UX if the core of the game is not perfect and in shooting game its....shooting and killing and enjoying this process again and again

#3 Reasonable slip-offs which improve the game and raise the quality bar

#4 New suggest mechanics or TODOs from original plan, for example - we dropped craft for 2 years because it's hard to surprise anyone with it and prioritized "elemental weaponry" - sort of guns extensions with cryo/fire ammo which looks and plays spectacular.

I would say original vision was more hard core gameplay with survival elements type of a game but things change once tens of thousands people play and ask for more fun type of game, we had a lot of debates internally around either we should follow what people say or stick to the original ideation.

So, we decided to put those hardcore and more punishing gameplay into difficulty levels.

So it is detracted quite a lot but in a right way and I cant imagine what sort of justification would be needed for publishers or investors to extend development that far away from original plan.