Do folks have ideas about what they could have done better?
I think that, particularly in a post-No Man's Sky environment, one might expect the gaming press to have a heightened sensitivity to things like technical shortcomings, broken promises, and misleading hype. In that environment, probably not such a good idea to push ReCore out in a state that (as their QA personnel must have known) would need post-release patches. Especially unwise to push the game out using verbiage like
“From the legendary creator Keiji Inafune...” (if the MN9 associations are already less than helpful, not sure 'legendary' makes it any better) or
“...and the makers of Metroid Prime...” (widely perceived as a bit of an overstatement, although the makers in question -- Pacini, Keller, Matthews -- were certainly key personnel).
Stuff like that is not likely to earn much good will from the gaming press, and only makes it harder for reviewers to keep in mind the game's constraints (smaller team, smaller-budget, lower price, Unity engine), when coming upon those aforementioned technical shortcomings. On the other hand, they could have put out
stuff like this earlier, which would simultaneously highlight the game's constraints (Unity engine), its ambition (aiming for things that haven't been done in Unity before), and accomplishment (achieving many of those things within Unity, sometimes at the unfortunate expense of longer-than-AAA loading times). This is all aside from giving the game a bit more time, which would have been ideal.
They could also have done a much better job explaining (within the game itself)
the game's structure, to better help players avoid insufficiency of cores later in the game.
Likewise, some pre-release demo videos (like Polygon's) showed players did not have sufficient awareness of the key game mechanics: even the Staten & Major Nelson stream could have chosen any number of sections that would have better demonstrated the range of ReCore's mechanics and gameplay.
