Eclipse Phase

There are very few viewpoints shown, despite pretty much every faction being pretty justified in their beliefs and having their own advantages and flaws that you can sympathize with. Instead of exploring different views and ideologies though, the writers pretty much tell you how to think, which pisses people off.

Leftists ruined Russia.
Leftists ruined Asia.
Leftists are ruining the West.
Yet somehow, leftists are not going to ruin Space.

SocJus

You can't have a game that has politics in it without people getting upset.

The system is a Stygian abomination that mixes the worst parts of Shadowrun 4e with the weaker parts of Call of Cthulhu and GURPS, yet manages to make the worst parts completely original. The result is an experience of playing the game that is at best awkward and at worst painful.

This is not helped by a complex setting that is difficult to get into not only because of the density but because it's so alien from what people are used to that we just don't have any references for portraying what it's like to live in a post-industrial nanomanufacturing panopticon.

While the early books start out strong, there's been a general decline in quality paralleling increasingly hackneyed portrayals of capitalism and conservatism. As a lesbian dickgirl socialist I can't say I'm fond of either, but there's better ways to deliver a political message than mustache-twirling NPCs in a roleplaying game.

The biggest killer, though, is probably the dearth of releases over the past few years. Early in EP1e they managed a 200-page sourcebook dense in information a year, but the last few years have seen almost nothing, so there's just less to talk about and be excited about.

This. Over and above the endless /pol/tardery of the heavy handed political crap they stuffed into it, there's also the fact that the game adds cartoonist magic/psi superpowers crap.

Finally, there are the players. Short of FATAL, I'm trying to think of a worse fanbase than Eclipse Phase.

There's also the fact that the whole thing is a cartoonist rip off of the brilliant and groundbreaking hard sci fi GURPS Transhuman Space. GURPS 3rd edition sucks, but it's telling that the system is still not quite as bad as EP.

Transhuman Space does. It has a wide diversity of ideologies, portrayed sensitively and in a balanced fashion. The secret is that the game isn't a thinly veiled excuse to push the authors' politics.

You can't take a genre/setting that's arguably all about major conundrums and moral/philosophical issues of the future, then turn around and say "no this is the right way. People who believe other things are shrieking retarded racists". It basically robs the setting of its depth

Personally, I think it takes more wholesale from Altered Carbon than GURPS.

I think there are too much different habilites. And some of them are way too symilar to others.

Ivory tower game design. The devs flatly refuse to clarify any of the myriad contradictions, loopholes or oversights in the mechanics. The 2E rules (pic related) fix a bunch of things that worked fine before, but leave untouched some of the most irritating oversights of the 1E mechanics. For instance we still don't know how explosive seekers are supposed to interact with the Fray skill, despite it being repeatedly asked during the "playtest".

I posted the wrong prophecy