Gun customization
hanky
Join Date: 2011-08-28 Member: 118944Members
Join Date: 2011-08-28 Member: 118944Members
So I was wondering how you guys felt about the ability to customize weapons, mostly the marine Assault rifle.
This doesn't have to do anything with cosmetics, or something you can do on the fly.
I'm suggesting when you go to the armory, you can set up your assault rifle the way you want it.
So if you want to increase damage, it will decrease the Rate of Fire, and maybe increase recoil.
If you want to increase the magazine capacity, it will decrease ROF and Damage.
Will be 3 sliders you are giving the option to change, when you increase one, it decreases another.
The default will be even on all plans.
This is set in a future setting so I feel it fits into the gameplay.
PS. Why do the marines only get a few mags? I carried 13 magazines when I was in Iraq...thats 390 rounds. I also carried 6 grenades, 2 flare and 4 HE for my M203....but a marine in the future can only carry....what 4? Atleast let it be researched. I'm not suggesting 13...but c'mon.
This doesn't have to do anything with cosmetics, or something you can do on the fly.
I'm suggesting when you go to the armory, you can set up your assault rifle the way you want it.
So if you want to increase damage, it will decrease the Rate of Fire, and maybe increase recoil.
If you want to increase the magazine capacity, it will decrease ROF and Damage.
Will be 3 sliders you are giving the option to change, when you increase one, it decreases another.
The default will be even on all plans.
This is set in a future setting so I feel it fits into the gameplay.
PS. Why do the marines only get a few mags? I carried 13 magazines when I was in Iraq...thats 390 rounds. I also carried 6 grenades, 2 flare and 4 HE for my M203....but a marine in the future can only carry....what 4? Atleast let it be researched. I'm not suggesting 13...but c'mon.
Comments
And I really like the sliders for the gun's stats, but I can't help but feel as though it could cause balance issues and screw with the Aliens too much. That is, Aliens couldn't really know what stats any given Marine's LMG has, so they could be conditioned to move in when a Marine has fired long enough to expend all of his ammo...then suddenly gets gunned down with another 25~ bullets he had in reserve.
As for additional magazines, this is also for balance sake, so that marines need to interact with their commanders when fighting for prolonged engagements, or fall back to resupply. It makes the commander remain a relevant aspect in each and every engagement with his competence to resupply his team, as well as his resourcefulness with armory placement, it was not an arbitrary decision to have marines be limited to 4 additional magazines.
If you hear a marine with a LOW rate of fire, its safe to assume he has his damage turned higher. So wouldn't be hard to gauge from a alien stand point.
Personally I would love to see more customization on all things in this game. The aliens kinda have it right now, you can pick armor over health gen, which changes up your style of play.
But what if you could make a tree of evolves that changed how each alien played. Would take some serious thought not to mess up the game play mechanics to much. Example lerks can choose to be a more stealth with more accurate spikes, or choose to be an assault guns blazes with a blast of spikes with wide radius of accuracy.
But figured a simple customization of the assault rifle would have a low DEV cycle to introduce or maybe something easy for a modder todo.
You can assume by the duration of the game. So don't really think this will effect balance, based on players judgment of what is now known.
If this was to be done, it would be with commander upgrades, things like (+10ammo to Lmg, 20% faster shotgun reload), they could be tacked on too the tech tree quite nicely if done right.
But if anything is going to happen, its post 1.0.
Hope that clears things up.
-Dan
This won't cause any unbalance in the rifle. Won't make it any better, or worst. If you want your rifle to shoot a little slower and damage a little more.
It still would kill the "skulk" (or what ever alien) in the same amount of time.
Ofcourse these things can be discussed further and actually find out where people want these values, but the sack of arguing will just say its the same time.
So balance isn't effective.
As for as confusion, well....like I said in my previous statement. Whats the difference between weapon upgrades and armor upgrades. The aliens don't know what you have. Hell some times when I'm a marines I have no clue what I have.
And also the Command can still research weapon upgrades, so next time you go to the armory it lets you slide ROF or Damage a little bit more. (ROF increases the time it takes to kill a alien, OR damage increases the time it takes to kill a alien)
As far as competitive, because "I" still believe things like balance and confusion and still implementing the role of the commander, believe this is untouched as well.
And for not being in the game. (no disrespect again :P ) Everybody imagines their own version of what a game really is, so what may not belong in your game, might belong in the others. BUT! if a HUGE majority say it doesn't belong...then it probably doesn't belong.
I understand people don't have to agree with me, or with anybody actually. But I feel like this will only add depth to the game. And nothing we say here will automatically be added to the game, or ever be added. So we can discuss things ;)
I understand depth can also mean complicating things...but thats why you keep it default to the setting it is now. You don't have to touch the slider if you don't want to.
This won't cause any unbalance in the rifle. Won't make it any better, or worst. If you want your rifle to shoot a little slower and damage a little more.
It still would kill the "skulk" (or what ever alien) in the same amount of time.
Ofcourse these things can be discussed further and actually find out where people want these values, but the sack of arguing will just say its the same time.
So balance isn't effective.
As for as confusion, well....like I said in my previous statement. Whats the difference between weapon upgrades and armor upgrades. The aliens don't know what you have. Hell some times when I'm a marines I have no clue what I have.
And also the Command can still research weapon upgrades, so next time you go to the armory it lets you slide ROF or Damage a little bit more. (ROF increases the time it takes to kill a alien, OR damage increases the time it takes to kill a alien)
As far as competitive, because "I" still believe things like balance and confusion and still implementing the role of the commander, believe this is untouched as well.
And for not being in the game. (no disrespect again :P ) Everybody imagines their own version of what a game really is, so what may not belong in your game, might belong in the others. BUT! if a HUGE majority say it doesn't belong...then it probably doesn't belong.
I understand people don't have to agree with me, or with anybody actually. But I feel like this will only add depth to the game. And nothing we say here will automatically be added to the game, or ever be added. So we can discuss things ;)
I understand depth can also mean complicating things...but thats why you keep it default to the setting it is now. You don't have to touch the slider if you don't want to.<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->
By no means is this a bad idea, its just too late in the game too do it. Balancing magic numbers is hard
aka -%30Dmg(7) +30%speed will kill a skulk faster then +20%(12) -20%speed. Why you ask? sculks have 50Hp 10arrmor, for the rifle this is 70hp. so 7*X_speed will kill faster then 12*X_speed due to "over-killing".
Hope that helps
Also while the slider approach that reduces some attributes of the rifle as you buff others can introduce some problems. Just like Burdock said, even though if you keep the Damage per second of the weapon the same, doesn't mean it doesn't have an effect on the game.
Rifle does 10 damage a bullet and shoots (lets say) 10 rounds / second.
Skulk has 70 hp + 10 armor [70+2(10)]=90 effective hp against a rifle.
Using extremes to illustrate this effect more clearly, lets say that you buff the rifle's damage 10x, but make it so you shoot it 1/10 the speed. So you've now got a rifle that does 100 damage but only shoots 1 bullet a second.
You've now changed a weapon that previously took .9 seconds to kill, and turned it into a weapon that could kill the instant you landed a shot. It also causes the problem where you've now buffed the rifle's "killing Power per magazine", which means that before, you could theoretically kill 5 skulks in one magazine if every round hit its mark, but now its 50 kills without ever needing to reload.
However that's speaking in extreme terms. But I did that only so you can still identify this effect when its not so obvious. Lets say you buffed the rifle's damage 5x but made it shoot 5x slower. You've got a weapon that does 50 damage but shoots at a delay of .5 seconds which means that the first shot is going to bring the skulk down to 40 hp from its max 90 hp, and now you've got to wait a half a second for your second shot, in order to finish the skulk off, this time bringing the time to kill from .9 seconds to .5 seconds. Now i know you probably never intended the rifle's values to be adjustable to such an extreme degree, but it goes to illustrate that these inconsistencies, no matter how small, have the same effect, just not as noticeable.
These are problems that arise when you try to balance a weapon's stats by trying to make various possible stat combinations equally viable, which can be a headache to achieve. It also means that a competitive community is going to simply experiment with combinations until an "optimal" setting, which maximizes a player's capability in combat, is found. It would ruin the "choice" aspect of the stats slider as it makes it so you "have" to chose a certain balance to compete equally with other players that also optimize their weapon's stats. You can see this in other games that are centered around having "different but equal" options, namely Battlefield 3, where the weapons are designed to have different strengths and weaknesses, but have there be no "best weapon". However, in competitions like PTFO, almost every player ended up using the M16A3, not because it was the best in any particular aspect, but because it had the smallest advantages that as minuscule as they were, removed all the variety of the matches. The fastest reload, the slightly faster bullet velocity, the fast rate of fire coupled with low recoil, its the slight advantages that put the M16 above most of the other weapons as the greatest overall gun, albeit by a not very large margin.
Don't take this as me trying to bring you down in any way, i'm just explaining why this approach probably isn't worth the effort to do right. Having the rifle's customization be achieved by Pres purchases by the armory for each player, being simply "upgrades" would probably be the best approach. It never attempts to have the weapon be made "equal", just allows the player to trade resources for increased fire power, as its a lot easier to balance prices than damage/recoil/magazine capacity/rate of fire/etc. If you want, see if you can program a server side modification, play around with it together with a few friends, make sure it works and brings in some substance, and perhaps UWE may actually implement it.
You never know - Heroman117
However I cant see how gameplay customisation would actually work, it would be hard to balance and unless it worked in a similar system to the lifeform upgrades (ie need expansion AND research) I cant see it being fair.
You have to be careful with the idea of actual strength and effective strength. Whilst adding say 10% damage for a 10% RoF reduction seems fine (same DPS) if that 10% damage lets you kill in less shots then its effective strength is substantially better
I do agree it would be a complicated thing to figure out how to balance..and I do agree people would find the "sweet spot" in the slider.
But the hopes of this was to add depth to the game. I personally feel the game is lacking in the weapons department. Rifle, shotgun, flamethrower, and grenade launcher. Well and EXO.
5 COMPLETELY different weapons.
So instead of making a bunch of differen't models and coding and all kinda of things, you could simply allow players to "tune" the weapons to there liking.
That was the idea.
But, it would be complicated. Personally I don't think it would RUIN game play. Because your weapon could kill in that one shot in the "extreme" case you pointed out....but he would have to wait another full second to fire. So...if you miss...your screwed. So it balances it self.
And theres all kinds of things you could do to balance it. Personally I think the "best spot" should be the default setting. This helps new players.
There is things like recoil and accuracy that you could implement into the game to balance these things. Lets say you could turn the weapon to one shot kill a skulk (which I don't think it should do) :
You could make it have really high recoil. and take a full second or 2 or 3 to fire it. Maybe even making it less accurate as the original.
That way if your a more precise aimer who like to take his time you could choose this setting.
Ok Now lets do another extreme.
Lets say you suck at aiming. Now you could buff the mag capicity all the way out. This makes the weapon completly un accurate. Just a spray and pray kinda setting.
If you wanted to be completely accurate. You could simply add recoil to the equation.
Maybe I'm just stupid...but not getting the argument for balance. (And I mean that saying you couldn't turn the gun into a one shot killer)
Yeah, well I'm a junior in my Computer Science degree...just 2 years coding simple projects..hardest thing I coded was a little ball shooter game in class. But who knows. Maybe I can try on my free time to implement this.
Lets say theoretically speaking if I were to make this. Think you guys would be interesting in playing this?