Why are you comparing an on rails stealth game, with a FPS mode in a space sim that has stealth features?
Makes zero sense.
There is no reason the stealth mechanisms that work in the former could not work in the latter. Same with comparing to dedicated shooters.
Anyway, I've used Deus Ex as a comparison...multiple gameplay types and relatively open settings, as well as being more than twenty years old. It still does most of what EDO does better than EDO, and does all sorts of fun stuff EDO doesn't even attempt.
Its not a typical FPS. Realistic is a term i use loosely, a better term would be authentic. Just like ED is a authentic space sim. It cant be realistic as we aren't 2000 years away, but if you imagine how realistic it could be, it seems possible. Which is exactly what i mean about EDO combat.
I don't feel the on foot stuff for EDO is even remotely authentic or plausible, given the setting. The damage done by on foot and ship based weapons are using the same scale, yet the ship based weapons are orders of magnitude
less potent per unit of volume/mass. This makes zero sense and is exactly the opposite of what one would expect in a setting that has a cube-square law, and no setting without such a fundamental attribute can be anything short of magically surrealistic to the point of barely being comprehensible. There are things in EDO that would not fly in my AD&D Planescape game because they are so far fetched.
Projectile velocities are another example. Energy delivered by a kinetic projectile is directly related to it's mass and velocity, with velocity being the dominant factor because energy increases with the square of velocity, but only linearly with mass. Kinetic projectiles in EDO cannot be massive; the 24-36 round magazine for the Karma P-15 sidearm is very small and my CMDR can carry upwards of a thousand rounds of ammo with some weapon combinations. Even if these are extremely dense caseless projectiles, the velocity has to be relatively high to give them energy competitive with projectiles fired from weapons designed before Christ was born, let alone with the ship mounted weapons they actually out-damage in game. Yet, the projectile velocities are obviously extremely low. From what I'm being shown, I would not expect these projectiles to reliably puncture human skin, let alone inflict mortal injuries. There also doesn't seem to be any projectile drop, irrespective of gravity, which is something else I find very hard to ignore with projectiles slow enough to track visually.
The whole idea that switching weapons in combat, to deal with a single infantry foe, could ever be authentic is absurd to me. There is no successful weapons designer or arms procurement department in history that would accept designs for infantry weapons that required one weapon to penetrate personal protection and another to kill the person wearing it. Expecting that to be viable in actual combat is nuts. Inevitably, some form of compromise would be adopted or different kinds of weapons suitably integrated, rather than expect discrete weapon systems to be swapped to handle individual targets in the heat of combat.
There are countless other issues, from running endurance, to battery capacity, to the inventory system, to the indestructibility and non-interactivity of environments, to NPC behavior, to suits reactions to cold temperatures on nearly airless worlds, etc and so forth that crap all over my sense of authenticity, verisimilitude, and immersion, making my EDO experience, in combat or otherwise, far less enjoyable than it could be.
Radically augmented capabilities are fine and don't disrupt my sense of verisimilitude in the slightest. If anything our CMDRs mobility is significantly worse than what feels plausible to me, given the context of the rest of the setting. However, the Engineering stuff and scaling is problematic. There is no conceivable augmentation that could be done to a rifle that would double the energy it delivers to a target, per projectile, with no downsides, unless radically different propellant technologies were involved, which itself doesn't make sense if better propellants are known to be available. And even if this was the case, it would be reflected in dramatically different projectile velocities...but a G5 Karma has the same projectile velocity as a G1 and certainly doesn't have less ammo capacity than a stock weapon. Blatantly defying conservation of mass/energy, without an extremely good explanation, is the quickest way to upend my suspension of disbelief.
On it's own, there are too many absurdities in EDO's infantry combat for me to take it seriously. As an extension of the
Elite setting, it's even worse, because it ignores those precedents and establish constraints too...the energy-drink sized rocket coming out of my CMDRs three-shot shoulder-fired weapon doing more damage than the man-sized rocket coming out of his ship is hard to ignore.
used up on all of their equipment, similar to Thargoid encounters / soloing Wing Assassination missions in the base game strongly encouraging a fully Engineered ship.
