The main issues I have with it are the grinding rpg style gameplay loop, and forcing players to return to the ship as often as possible.
Maybe I’m being too cynical but I assume its to try to get people to play as long as possible and look at the storefront as often as possible.
You can unlock a lot of things for free including some premium currency, but that’s just to increase player familiarity with the premium store and to make the player think about the cosmetic upgrades as often as possible.
Another issue is with the difficulty scaling: it doesn’t scale with the number of players or add AI players to the game if someone drops out. On its surface this can be explained by not wanting to spend the man hours to develop smart friendly AI or put more work into difficulty balancing, but the financial incentives also work against this as without it people are encouraged to invite friends to play with them, thus generating free advertising for the in game store.
That’s just a couple of examples, but every game design decision gets influenced to some extent by the way players interact and think about microtransactions. This isn’t really the case with baulders gate 3, which is in a completely different league in terms of quality(and dev budget tbf) to hell divers: it feels a bit like comparing McDonald’s with a michelin star restaurant 😂 (I haven’t played lethal company so can’t comment on that one)
Also riddled with microtransactions and yeah it’s not the worst in that regard but there’s still a lot of game design decisions that are worse off because of it.
GPUs are getting better, but the demand from the crypto and ML AI markets mean they can just jack up the price of every new card to higher than the last so the prices have stopped dropping with each new generation.