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It's not about making stealth more useful or more necessary, but feasible.  There are times when you're going to want more reaverbots to show up (Zenny/part grinding, for instance) or, you might just have an easier time fighting and keeping enemies in front of you than trying to sneak past.  I imagine most people playing recklessly early in the ruins and fighting a lot until their health gets low, then things will start to get interesting.  But, yeah, it's mostly about having multiple ways to play the game and having each with its benefits and caveats.  Stealth leaves more reaverbots alive and less of an escape route (if you go passive) but if you fight effectively, you can whittle down their numbers to more manageable amounts.

It's just ASH or Another Story in Halcyon, no MegaMan or Rockman.  While it is meant to fit in with the rest of the series, it would be misleading to slap either of those titles on it, because it doesn't star MegaMan, and rather focuses on the potential of the Legends universe to craft an engaging story.  Everyone has their own opinions on MML3, and short of Capcom telling us how it works, there would be no pleasing the fans in that regard.  As well, the one Legends game that didn't star MegaMan (Misadventures of Tron Bonne) omitted MegaMan from their title, so I do feel it is the proper decision.

Aside from that, we've stepped forward from Legends in most respects.  We want to change things, we want to try and make the game better than the Capcom releases.  We don't exactly fit in with Legends in terms of gameplay and design.  You're not some overpowered super machine/person (depending on your theory for Trigger) blasting through defense drones.  Rather, you're a normal digger, who has to face off with the very machines designed to keep you out.

That's actually a very difficult question to answer.  Just before this video, we removed the auto-lock on from blind fire because it was a bit glitchy and liked to screw up the trick shots I needed to do in order to defeat bigger rooms unharmed.  Now, I didn't show this in the video, but it's possible to kill the Foo Roo in about three or four hits without an eye shot as long as you focus your attacks on a small portion of it's armor to make a quick breach.  I spread out the damage because I like seeing it react to shots and spin around, at least when there's only one left.

Now, into the dilemma between using Lock-on or not.  Legends was a console game, and you didn't have the precision of a mouse.  As well, we designed ASH's gameplay around having manual aim.  In my experience tuning lock on in ASH, it has either made the game too easy by being too accurate, or when we tone it down it's useless because it's too inaccurate, and you're better off with it disabled.   Killing Foo Roos with the default buster may be tricky, but in the full game you'll have a lot more options on how to fight them (the engine is incomplete, especially our moveset) and hitting them will slow them down as you hit them, instead of just dying once their armor is breached.

So, to answer your question of whether or not there will be an auto lock feature?  It depends on how the game plays when it's more complete.

We'll gladly take any help. MaJoR has had to do without orthos so long that he doesn't even need them, but the lack of character art has hurt us. Without artwork, the character has to be designed and created entirely in 3D, and 3D is not the best medium for design work. But we haven't had the character artists we need, so we do what we have to do to move the project forward.

The distortion was something we threw in at the last minute, it wasn't a serious attempt at it, we were just excited for the initial announcement.  But... the furnace shots were shown right around when Capcom announced a certain bombshell game; so things are just starting to make the rounds now.

I'm really good at making animation terrible animation, trust me!  I'm not a natural animator and I don't have the time to dedicate myself to it alone, so it's been an uphill battle to get the animation quality anywhere near passable.  Countless hours have been spent on making sources, working with the rig, learning blender, and redoing animations, over and over again.  If you want to give 3D animation a shot, I'll try and get you set up for it.  But, I wouldn't have you work with the current rig outside of practice, because it won't be used passed these demonstration videos.  It might be useful for getting used to blender, though, if you're truly interested.

This is JMC47 here, I'm the team leader of this fangame and felt I should be here to answer some of the questions personally.

It looks great so far. Makes me wonder, why not go the extra mile and do a game starring Trigger? Not demanding, just curious about hwy you decided to go this route.

On top of what MaJoR explained, I also headed up MMLEx, which was a typical MML3 styled plotline about getting Trigger down from the Elysium... but after dealing with that so long, I realized it was a fairly conventional.  Not to belittle some excellent fan efforts, but most stories revolve around them getting home, fighting the elder system and everything is happily ever after.  As well, most of the characters are established, people know and love them.  Getting voice actors that would satisfy the wide variety of characters seemed impossible, and while there are definitely gems in the fan community, it was more miss than hit.  There's only so much you can do when the first two chapters of a story are already written, so I thought that the best course of action would be to write something from the ground up.

Does that make the story worse?  Does it make it bad?  Of course not, there are bad fanfics and good fanfics of all kinds, I just want to make an interesting and engaging story and setting that not only is improved by the source material, but strengthens it all at the same time by adding depth and weight to ideas that may have been merely glossed over in the original games.  Having been on both sides, I have to say as a writer I do believe this will provide the strongest story I can make for the community.

Also, although you want her to be lean and fit, she STILL is a bit TOO thin. if you remove that armor, she is incredibly thin. some more thickness to her arms and legs and maybe neck would seem better (all opinion mind you)

We've had a serious lack of character and orthographic artists throughout development, so designs shouldn't be considered final at this point.  Even so, none of her proportions are outright wrong within the human realm, it's just very tricky to nail a style without an experienced character artist overseeing development.  That said, your opinion is not an uncommon one and it will be addressed when we have the resources to design the models properly.

Pretty. I like the lighting algorithms. Not particularly convinced by the heat distortion though. The concept seems pretty cool, on the other hand.

The heat distortion looked far better in motion; but it didn't really translate to screenshots.  Though, those are very old screenshots and most of the effects used for them have been obsoleted or removed altogether.

Okay I know you've been bugged enough about the character design already but are you going to redo her animations? One of the things that squicks me the most in 3D games is bad animation, which is easier to pull off than you'd expect.

I'll gladly admit the animations are bad... we don't have a true animator, so I was pulled into duty, because I was the only one with any experience.  If you think 3D animation is easy, then please give me a hand!  I've been trying to figure it out for years!  We were fairly new to blender when this started, but the rig is fairly solid, and I recorded my own sources with two video cameras and learned the basics of 3D animation to at least make them passable (depending on definition.)

If you've seen MMLEx, you'll know that I've improved, because there I was also called into service there except didn't have the resources to do much other than guess.  3D animators are hard to find, and ones willing to help out on a small fangame is even harder. 

The other thing to note is that well over 80% of the animations are either missing, incomplete, or really bad and not implemented because I'm not a capable animator.  Really, I'm just doing what I have to in order to keep the project moving.  As such, yeah, the animations will be redone.  It's just a matter of finding someone capable of doing the job right.
 

Btw, what program do you make your 3D models in?

All the models are made in blender and we use a custom exporter script to get them in engine.  Animations, Rigs, and other model based resources are also created in Blender.