Preface: if you don't know what a Doppel Diatribe is, read here.
(and strap in, this will be a long one, but I hope you stay with me until the end)
In this one we'll talk about the horrible gun loadout we currently have at our disposal
....Yeah, I wanted to mince words, but there's no way around it. There are, however... a lot of problems to list so let's go to it.
But first, we need to contextualize a bit by talking about the on-foot combat itself.
It's fun! I mean, it's no Warframe or Battlefield or Titanfall, but it's reasonably tight, movement feels okay, shield regeneration has a decent timing, the stages usually have plenty of cover and places of approach (specially if you use your jumpjets correctly), it's reasonably fast-paced (specially for a game that essentially only has a Battlefield-style "capture the points and deplete their deployment pool" mode thus far) and the suit battery mechanic adds a neat layer of complexity to it; if you're in an adverse temperature planet, or you have to recharge your shields too much (i.e get shot often), or use your jumpjets too much, or use your lantern/nightvision too much, battery will deplete, and without it you have no shields and very few audio cues until you recharge your suit (you can also run out of air if this goes for too long). This can get so important than unless you have the Battery Capacity upgrade, finding energy it can be more important than finding ammo. So overall, it lave lots of potential!
...Some would argue "But Doppel, CZs aren't the only place where there's on-foot combat, so it's not all 'capture the point'", and normally I'd say "sure", but uhn... I don't count the scavengers that are waiting for you in crash sites because anyone can put pairs of dumbfire rocket pods on a Sidewinder (or in my case, a DBX) and just gunship them to death before landing. Ditto for killing scavengers in invaded settlements (some argue that remote flechettes also work well, but I myself had mixed results). Assassinations can be carried with the starting laser pistol, and as for murder-hobo-ing in settlements.... well, you either do your best Space Solid Snake impression and get around with silenced/suppressed guns and shutting down alarms, killing them one-by-one like in a slasher movie, or you murder-hobo with pure bloodlust, at which point it's just a CZ without capture points.
So. What's the problem?
...Well, for starters, it's kinda two-fold...ish: 1) Even after 2 years, it's still a pretty small loadout, 2) ...It kinda looks like it was made for a completely different game (...and it sorta was).
Let's tackle those separately.
1) The loadout is still pretty small, with lots of overlap. It has a neat flavor in that the guns are made by different corporations and thus have a different design language to them, but when you look at it as a whole, it boils down to:
So the numbers aren't exactly impressive for a shooter with warzones, but it kinda gets worse with the overlap: The kinetic assault rifle and SMG can overlap a lot in some ranges, same for the laser rifle and burst pistol, or the sniper rifle and the revolver, etc etc. So when you're handling the guns yourself, depending on your playstyle, different guns can feel exactly the same. That's not uncommon for shooters, but that's usually compensated with, ya know, a bigger loadout with some degrees of variety, or at least guns that please on different aesthetic ways.
And that's not mentioning how kinda bad and situational some of these guns are: the Plasma guns all have a ridiculously slow projectile speed, so the Sniper Rifle is anything but, the Plasma Assault Rifle is seldom used when compared to the others (even though it should be a jack-of-all-trades gun), and the Rocket Launcher makes into some specialized builds, but... usually you don't expect players having to rely on a rocket launcher all the time on their loadout.
Usually, if you search for threads on people debating weapon upgrades and loadouts, you'll see most people gravitating towards laser guns (because they shred through shields and, at G5, they have enough damage to dispatch health pretty easily), particularly the Laser Battle Rifle for all-ranges, or the Laser Carbine for people who like to go up-close (some even use Fast Handling + Holstered Reloading and just have two of them), or the Plasma Revolver (which is devastating in medium to close range and extremely accurate) or.... theSuper Plasma Shotgun, for reasons I'll elaborate later. Some also use the Rocket for shield removal and just shred enemies with the kinetic SMG, but I've seen that less often.
Even if you start counting weapon upgrades (which other shooters have, so... moot point), it's still a fairly restrictive loadout on a mechanical sense. Heck, lots of shooters have functionally similar guns to each other just for the sake of variety of look and feel; just look at the modern Call-of-Duties, or Battlefields or even CS-GO.
Also, just take a look at the weapon "classes". Most of them only have a single representative. There's only one sniper rifle (and it's not even hitscan), only one shotgun, only one burst-fire gun (and it's a pistol), one "battle rifle" (high damage, long range, small magazine), etc etc.
But all of this is kinda moot because let's be frank...
2) This loadout was made for a completely different game (and not even particularly well). And this argument will seem like it's going one way, but it'll take a weird turn down the line (people more versed in game design probably already figured what I'm talking about)
Let's be frank. The division "kinetic/laser/plasma/explosive" makes it pretty clear this was designed to mimic the ship combat in Elite Dangerous.
But uhn. With seemingly one oversight. Humans don't have multiple hardpoints. So they can only hold one gun at a time.
This means that the usual E
ship combat dynamic of "taking down shields with lasers, then switching to kinetics and explosives to shred armor" gets a LOT more clunky when you have to keep switching your gun all the time, instead of just toggling which one is active. Heck, that's why some people use some "kinetic SMG + laser carbine with handling + holstered reload" loadouts, to ease this out by cutting swap time (...but others just take an... easier solution that I'll talk about later). But considering the very small time-to-kill of an on-foot fight (seconds, while a ship fight often takes multiple minutes), spending a lot of time switching guns just feels clunky and annoying. As for the guns with travel time, humans are far faster and more twitchy than ships, so... good luck aligning that perfect plasma shot (even though, at human scale, the projectiles shouldn't even have a noticeable travel time, but here we are).
This could be countered by just... coordinating with a squad where one person shreds shields with lasers while others finish the enemies with kinetics, but.... this is a very very vast galaxy, so even if you do dare to play in Open (something many players avoid), you might not find many human players to coordinate with. And with no matchmaking, you have to rely on coordinating with friends, and... well, I hope you have more luck than I have with D&D nights.
So yeah, if you count this as a single-player PvE environment (and most of the time it will be), the gun switching and plasma travel time are just... annoyances. They don't add to the richness of gameplay on a fast-paced warzone scenario, they just make it clunkier and more cumbersome. And that only gets worse because of...
2.1) ...Shield Gate. People who played games like Mass Effect 3 (and its amazing multiplayer) and some other multiplayer games with shield mechanics will probably already be used to the concept of "shield gate": it means that as long as the human has ANY amount of shield left, it always neutralizes any instance of damage, even if that damage is far more than the shield. In other words, there are no "one-hit-kills" on shielded targets; you need at least one hit to take the shield down, and at least another to take the person down. This might seem like a small thing at first, but this all but invalidates the utility of the sniper rifle, which always needs two shots to kill a shielded target, regardless of how well-upgraded it is. Heck, lots of people just prefer to go more "up-close-and-personal" and just use the Plasma Revolver instead, which fires and reloads faster, negates part of the projectile travel, has at least twice the magazine capacity and it's still powerful enough to shred the shields and then the meat in quick succession(...or they just do the other thing that I'm delaying for dramatic effect).
Shield gate is usually there to add survivability and a tactical element to the combat, making you choose your loadout and your engagement approaches carefully to account for it. But that becomes hard when you don't really have guns made with shield gating in mind.
....Except one. A SINGLE one. By far the most powerful weapon in the game, so much so that it looks like it was tailor-made to fly over any sort of game balance:
2.2) ...The Super Plasma Shotgun. It's just the Super Shotgun from Doom. Don't get me wrong, it's a SUPER fun gun, and taken in a vacuum, it's balanced in its advantages and drawbacks: it has high damage split between multiple slow-moving pellets, it has a very steep damage falloff, the pellets have a huge spread, it has a magazine capacity of 2 but reloads very fast, its ammo pool depletes quickly and it's intended for close-range combat only.
...Except this gun is not in a vacuum.
This gun is equally effective against shields AND health (giving it full versatility), it's in a game where there are ammo pickups everywhere (negating its low ammo capacity), you can ambush enemies at very close range thanks to the jumpjets (negating the range and pellet spread issues), and since each pellet counts as a separate hit, IT'S IMMUNE TO SHIELD GATE. It's an extremely fun weapon to use and makes you feel extremely smart, that you're "gaming the system", "tuning the gun to your advantage", except... that's the only gun that can do that.
(Technically the Burst Pistol can do it too, as the first shots can take the shields and the others take the health, but the damage per shot even at G5 is too low unless you have Stability, Extra Headshot Damage, and are VERY lucky)
So. This loadout was not thought out for a multiplayer, team-versus-team first person shooter. And at first, it looks like it was made for ship-based Elite Dangerous combat, since that's what it was based on. But that's not completely accurate... Because while being inspired by Elite's ship combat...
3) ...It was actually made for a single-player immersive shooter. Yes, there's a reason why I mentioned DOOM, Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid (and would have mentioned Prey and Deus Ex too but you already got the idea). Odyssey's loadout not only matches them in the quantity of guns, but also the attempt at niche specializations (only one or two kinds of gun per category), upgrade slots that you work a lot for, and focus on PvE encounters where the player engages with the enemies as a puzzle, both in the actual combat, and in how they upgrade their guns and pick their loadout for each fight. Even the switching between "shield shreddeds" and "meat shredders" is more appropriate for a slower, more personal and tactical experience.
...And that's why settlement runs feel so nice with the current loadout system; the present 11 guns are pretty sufficient for it (if anything, you can make do with just the shotgun and one of the pistols) and everything else boils down to your approach to combat.
...Meanwhile CZ combat boils down to who can put a handful of plasma buckshot into the other's face first.
So.
How do we solve this?
And for now, that's what I have about this.
See ya folks in the next one!
(and strap in, this will be a long one, but I hope you stay with me until the end)
In this one we'll talk about the horrible gun loadout we currently have at our disposal
....Yeah, I wanted to mince words, but there's no way around it. There are, however... a lot of problems to list so let's go to it.
But first, we need to contextualize a bit by talking about the on-foot combat itself.
It's fun! I mean, it's no Warframe or Battlefield or Titanfall, but it's reasonably tight, movement feels okay, shield regeneration has a decent timing, the stages usually have plenty of cover and places of approach (specially if you use your jumpjets correctly), it's reasonably fast-paced (specially for a game that essentially only has a Battlefield-style "capture the points and deplete their deployment pool" mode thus far) and the suit battery mechanic adds a neat layer of complexity to it; if you're in an adverse temperature planet, or you have to recharge your shields too much (i.e get shot often), or use your jumpjets too much, or use your lantern/nightvision too much, battery will deplete, and without it you have no shields and very few audio cues until you recharge your suit (you can also run out of air if this goes for too long). This can get so important than unless you have the Battery Capacity upgrade, finding energy it can be more important than finding ammo. So overall, it lave lots of potential!
...Some would argue "But Doppel, CZs aren't the only place where there's on-foot combat, so it's not all 'capture the point'", and normally I'd say "sure", but uhn... I don't count the scavengers that are waiting for you in crash sites because anyone can put pairs of dumbfire rocket pods on a Sidewinder (or in my case, a DBX) and just gunship them to death before landing. Ditto for killing scavengers in invaded settlements (some argue that remote flechettes also work well, but I myself had mixed results). Assassinations can be carried with the starting laser pistol, and as for murder-hobo-ing in settlements.... well, you either do your best Space Solid Snake impression and get around with silenced/suppressed guns and shutting down alarms, killing them one-by-one like in a slasher movie, or you murder-hobo with pure bloodlust, at which point it's just a CZ without capture points.
So. What's the problem?
...Well, for starters, it's kinda two-fold...ish: 1) Even after 2 years, it's still a pretty small loadout, 2) ...It kinda looks like it was made for a completely different game (...and it sorta was).
Let's tackle those separately.
1) The loadout is still pretty small, with lots of overlap. It has a neat flavor in that the guns are made by different corporations and thus have a different design language to them, but when you look at it as a whole, it boils down to:
- 3 kinetic guns
- Assault Rifle
- Submachinegun
- Semiautomatic pistol
- 3 Laser guns
- "Battle Rifle"
- "Carbine"
- "Burst-fire pistol"
- 4 Plasma guns
- Assault Rifle
- Sniper Rifle
- Shotgun
- Revolver
- 1 Explosive gun
- Rocket Launcher
So the numbers aren't exactly impressive for a shooter with warzones, but it kinda gets worse with the overlap: The kinetic assault rifle and SMG can overlap a lot in some ranges, same for the laser rifle and burst pistol, or the sniper rifle and the revolver, etc etc. So when you're handling the guns yourself, depending on your playstyle, different guns can feel exactly the same. That's not uncommon for shooters, but that's usually compensated with, ya know, a bigger loadout with some degrees of variety, or at least guns that please on different aesthetic ways.
And that's not mentioning how kinda bad and situational some of these guns are: the Plasma guns all have a ridiculously slow projectile speed, so the Sniper Rifle is anything but, the Plasma Assault Rifle is seldom used when compared to the others (even though it should be a jack-of-all-trades gun), and the Rocket Launcher makes into some specialized builds, but... usually you don't expect players having to rely on a rocket launcher all the time on their loadout.
Usually, if you search for threads on people debating weapon upgrades and loadouts, you'll see most people gravitating towards laser guns (because they shred through shields and, at G5, they have enough damage to dispatch health pretty easily), particularly the Laser Battle Rifle for all-ranges, or the Laser Carbine for people who like to go up-close (some even use Fast Handling + Holstered Reloading and just have two of them), or the Plasma Revolver (which is devastating in medium to close range and extremely accurate) or.... the
Even if you start counting weapon upgrades (which other shooters have, so... moot point), it's still a fairly restrictive loadout on a mechanical sense. Heck, lots of shooters have functionally similar guns to each other just for the sake of variety of look and feel; just look at the modern Call-of-Duties, or Battlefields or even CS-GO.
Also, just take a look at the weapon "classes". Most of them only have a single representative. There's only one sniper rifle (and it's not even hitscan), only one shotgun, only one burst-fire gun (and it's a pistol), one "battle rifle" (high damage, long range, small magazine), etc etc.
But all of this is kinda moot because let's be frank...
2) This loadout was made for a completely different game (and not even particularly well). And this argument will seem like it's going one way, but it'll take a weird turn down the line (people more versed in game design probably already figured what I'm talking about)
Let's be frank. The division "kinetic/laser/plasma/explosive" makes it pretty clear this was designed to mimic the ship combat in Elite Dangerous.
But uhn. With seemingly one oversight. Humans don't have multiple hardpoints. So they can only hold one gun at a time.
This means that the usual E
ship combat dynamic of "taking down shields with lasers, then switching to kinetics and explosives to shred armor" gets a LOT more clunky when you have to keep switching your gun all the time, instead of just toggling which one is active. Heck, that's why some people use some "kinetic SMG + laser carbine with handling + holstered reload" loadouts, to ease this out by cutting swap time (...but others just take an... easier solution that I'll talk about later). But considering the very small time-to-kill of an on-foot fight (seconds, while a ship fight often takes multiple minutes), spending a lot of time switching guns just feels clunky and annoying. As for the guns with travel time, humans are far faster and more twitchy than ships, so... good luck aligning that perfect plasma shot (even though, at human scale, the projectiles shouldn't even have a noticeable travel time, but here we are).This could be countered by just... coordinating with a squad where one person shreds shields with lasers while others finish the enemies with kinetics, but.... this is a very very vast galaxy, so even if you do dare to play in Open (something many players avoid), you might not find many human players to coordinate with. And with no matchmaking, you have to rely on coordinating with friends, and... well, I hope you have more luck than I have with D&D nights.
So yeah, if you count this as a single-player PvE environment (and most of the time it will be), the gun switching and plasma travel time are just... annoyances. They don't add to the richness of gameplay on a fast-paced warzone scenario, they just make it clunkier and more cumbersome. And that only gets worse because of...
2.1) ...Shield Gate. People who played games like Mass Effect 3 (and its amazing multiplayer) and some other multiplayer games with shield mechanics will probably already be used to the concept of "shield gate": it means that as long as the human has ANY amount of shield left, it always neutralizes any instance of damage, even if that damage is far more than the shield. In other words, there are no "one-hit-kills" on shielded targets; you need at least one hit to take the shield down, and at least another to take the person down. This might seem like a small thing at first, but this all but invalidates the utility of the sniper rifle, which always needs two shots to kill a shielded target, regardless of how well-upgraded it is. Heck, lots of people just prefer to go more "up-close-and-personal" and just use the Plasma Revolver instead, which fires and reloads faster, negates part of the projectile travel, has at least twice the magazine capacity and it's still powerful enough to shred the shields and then the meat in quick succession
Shield gate is usually there to add survivability and a tactical element to the combat, making you choose your loadout and your engagement approaches carefully to account for it. But that becomes hard when you don't really have guns made with shield gating in mind.
....Except one. A SINGLE one. By far the most powerful weapon in the game, so much so that it looks like it was tailor-made to fly over any sort of game balance:
2.2) ...The Super Plasma Shotgun. It's just the Super Shotgun from Doom. Don't get me wrong, it's a SUPER fun gun, and taken in a vacuum, it's balanced in its advantages and drawbacks: it has high damage split between multiple slow-moving pellets, it has a very steep damage falloff, the pellets have a huge spread, it has a magazine capacity of 2 but reloads very fast, its ammo pool depletes quickly and it's intended for close-range combat only.
...Except this gun is not in a vacuum.
This gun is equally effective against shields AND health (giving it full versatility), it's in a game where there are ammo pickups everywhere (negating its low ammo capacity), you can ambush enemies at very close range thanks to the jumpjets (negating the range and pellet spread issues), and since each pellet counts as a separate hit, IT'S IMMUNE TO SHIELD GATE. It's an extremely fun weapon to use and makes you feel extremely smart, that you're "gaming the system", "tuning the gun to your advantage", except... that's the only gun that can do that.
So. This loadout was not thought out for a multiplayer, team-versus-team first person shooter. And at first, it looks like it was made for ship-based Elite Dangerous combat, since that's what it was based on. But that's not completely accurate... Because while being inspired by Elite's ship combat...
3) ...It was actually made for a single-player immersive shooter. Yes, there's a reason why I mentioned DOOM, Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid (and would have mentioned Prey and Deus Ex too but you already got the idea). Odyssey's loadout not only matches them in the quantity of guns, but also the attempt at niche specializations (only one or two kinds of gun per category), upgrade slots that you work a lot for, and focus on PvE encounters where the player engages with the enemies as a puzzle, both in the actual combat, and in how they upgrade their guns and pick their loadout for each fight. Even the switching between "shield shreddeds" and "meat shredders" is more appropriate for a slower, more personal and tactical experience.
...And that's why settlement runs feel so nice with the current loadout system; the present 11 guns are pretty sufficient for it (if anything, you can make do with just the shotgun and one of the pistols) and everything else boils down to your approach to combat.
...Meanwhile CZ combat boils down to who can put a handful of plasma buckshot into the other's face first.
So.
How do we solve this?
- Add more guns. We need more variety. More brands, more styles, more firing mechanisms. Give us a kinetic, hitscan sniper. Give us a burst-fire rifle. Give us a laser or kinetic shotgun, with different spreads. Give us light machineguns, for suppressive fire. Guns with different magazine capacities, different handling, recoil, sight systems, reload speeds. Variety is the spice of life, even when it comes to guns.
...I know this requires a lot of dev time (modeling, texturing, animating, programing, playtesting, balancing, etc) but.... it's been 2 years already. We should have more by now. - Add different, maybe even gun-exclusive, upgrades. Add upgrades that change the gun's behavior. Burst-fire upgrade, that changes its recoil and damage profile, but helps with denying the shield gate. Add a penetrator upgrade, that deals a percentage of damage straight to health, as well as shield. Add an upgrade that penetrates soft cover but only applies to sniper rifles. Add chokes to shotguns. Add an "integral silencer unit" that takes a single slot, works everywhere, but costs a lot more materials and only applies to pistols. Add a scope that can highlight targets, but can only be installed on carbines or bigger. Add a "split-chamber" upgrade that makes a single shot have "pellets", again to help with shield gate.
Just do some research. Mass Effect and Warframe alone have plenty of options to serve as inspiration. I'm pretty sure you can come up with more on your own. - Add more armor variety. Really, the only viable options here are the Dominator and the Maverick; and even then, the Maverick is only a valid option because the Dominator was nerfed a lot early on, and the Maverick can compensate with more mobility if you're going for the dominant Shotgun loadout (as well as being abnormally sturdy). Add variants with more shields. With flipped resistances. That carry two primaries and no pistol. That carry two pistols but have some neat feature, such as enemy detection, or transferring energy to allies. I know, same difficulties apply as adding guns, etc etc, but again, it's been two years. We have the right to expect more.
- Remember you're making a diverse game. This advice goes for... almost everything you do, but you folks at Frontier seem to forget this annoyingly often. You yourselves chose to make Elite Dangerous a game where players can pick different careers, playstyles, mission types, approaches. So design and balance your systems accordingly. Don't tailor your guns to a Metal Gear Solid experience when you're also going to use the same one for a Battlefield-esque team deathmatch. Don't try to make the handheld guns behave the same as ship guns, since the combat is completely different. Take into account those differences, and then design things with the proper care.
And for now, that's what I have about this.
See ya folks in the next one!
