Its not fair because he may not be at liberty to tell or have the authority to do so.
OverCharged Weapons
- Thread starter DeathDealerGod
- Start date
here here! Interesting stuff indeed
This post should be put in caps and stickied. I want to hear what's going on inside FD more often, without a ridiculous mob of villagers carrying torches and pitchforks behind me.
oh very nice Mike! Thanks for sharing us this yummy information!
I did send you a PM very soon after the change Mike
I quess you thought I just wasn't looking hard enough...
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Please try to re-implement the hard coded variants in the meanwhile. The current lack of variety is crushing, and you already created a fine selection.
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Wow. I find that Borderlands (which really touts its procedural weapon system) gets fairly compelling ongoing gameplay just from the existence of it - eg the eternal quest of "find a gun that is EVEN COOLER than your current favorite custom gun!". Because there could be a sweet sweet upgrade or a bizarre spectacular oddity around every corner, you never want to stop playing. I love the idea of that eternal-quest being part of Elite! Then of course, there is also trading your sweet finds with other players whose class or preferences are a better match for it than you are, etc.
In Borderlands 2, they added a "golden key" system whereby they could give out promotional codes that generated a weapon randomly but with exceptionally good stats. On the one hand, these codes were a cool bonus to get, but they also kind of killed the eternal-quest gameplay because enough codes are handed out fast enough that you'll pretty much never find any equipment in the game that's better than the equipment you're getting from the golden chest. (Fixing that would simply be a case of giving out codes less frequently.)
A procedural equipment system has so much gameplay potential - I'm very excited to hear that it is being considered for the future!
In Borderlands 2, they added a "golden key" system whereby they could give out promotional codes that generated a weapon randomly but with exceptionally good stats. On the one hand, these codes were a cool bonus to get, but they also kind of killed the eternal-quest gameplay because enough codes are handed out fast enough that you'll pretty much never find any equipment in the game that's better than the equipment you're getting from the golden chest. (Fixing that would simply be a case of giving out codes less frequently.)
A procedural equipment system has so much gameplay potential - I'm very excited to hear that it is being considered for the future!
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Totally agree, rare gear should get lost on death(or even dropped!) It'd keep it feeling rare, and a bit special...rather than just another tier that everyone will eventually have...
Don't worry about it. I work in games, and this sort of thing while not ideal, is more normal, more justified, and less worrying than it sounds.
Fer starters, it's not really that they don't know something had been disabled, it's more that in this case it took several weeks before that change filtered to their attention. We want (and are receiving) fast responsive bug-fixes, and part of that is empowering people to make rapid fixes in the short term and leaving the lengthy committee-driven robust feature-creeped solution for a different week.
Everyone is busy working on various triaged things, and individual features often don't need to be coordinated more frequently than every few weeks. In years-long production cycles covering millions of features with only tens (or even hundreds) of people, weeks are a pretty small unit of time.
Imagine the designer knew from day one when the bugfix required this feature to be suspended. What difference would that have made? Would it have made any difference at all? If not, then that information was low-priority and putting it immediately on the radar would be displacing something else - something else that could have be more important.
So instead of seeing that weeks-long delay as evidence of poor communication, it could be evidence of good communication - information triaged to mostly what is relevant when it matters, unnecessary meetings reduced, people not bogged down in minutiae that will be forgotten by the time it becomes needed, etc.
(If their studio is anything like mine, it's really both - that time gap is a less than ideal situation, but no significant problems will result, so it's a small and worthwhile price to pay for generally efficient communication and higher productivity.)
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Imho:
1. Rare gear should never ever be about being purely better than "normal" gear.
2. Therefore, rare gear would be a novelty, providing benefits as well as drawbacks, and never a no-brainer upgrade.
3. Rarity should never be artificially enforced by the game. In the case of the proposed procedural generation of equipment, a specific item would be rare because of the likelihood of the game spitting out the exact same item again.
4. Rarity should never be so high that it becomes futile to even try to attain a certain piece that you have seen another player use, or do get a pair (or more) of the same item. Ideally, they'd be sold just like normal items so when you see them, you are free to grab 2 or more.
5. I hope FD never introduce equipment trading between players, because combined with the procedural weapon generation and the notion of "rare gear", it'd instantly produce an MMO-style player market that would be dominated by those with the biggest ingame wallet. In other words, if unique stuff is truly as rare as some people probably hope, we would see them sold at price points of hundreds of millions of credits, making them mostly a feature for the few ingame billionaires. (See the Diablo 3 auction house debacle and how its removal was the best thing Blizzard could ever have done.)
Edit: 6. I forgot the most important point - nothing should ever be lost upon death if* you have the insurance money.
(*In fact I would prefer even that if-clause to not be the case - i.e. an overhaul of the loan system to completel abolish the "died with too little money, back to Sidewinder" syndrome.)
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This is could be very nice mechanic of interaction commanders with very different systems and factions.
So maybe the player should know that if he will perform several conditions of faction (like influence, reputation, special delivery and ect) it will bring to him some special services and access to the new equipment.
So from one faction you can get special shield generator (maybe even specific class), from another you can get overcharged pulse laser and ect. There will be a need to travel the galaxy in searching of faction with rewards that you interesting at the current time.
Yes!
No getting the extra special purple gun back so easily though if they are really expensive, that is ok as well. It could be neat if you need to pay the full value for them, or at least more than the few percent you pay for the regular stuff.- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -
There is definitely something to what Mephane says.
Let's say I like using a fixed beam laser on my Cobra (I do). Using a grade A beam with no attribute should be a very solid choice. Going for "Overcharged" or "Focused" or whatever we get later, should have drawbacks as well as perks. It can be better, but at the very least the added power has to come with a huge increase in the price ticket.
Precisely not. Simply making a weapon more expensive as the only drawback for its greater damage output turns it into a simple power progression. Plus, even if outrageously expensive to buy and maintain (a notion I would prefer not to see, either) it'd automatically become a PvP weapon of choice, as has shown for anything that is financially unviable to use in everyday NPC bounty hunting but technically a solid weapon of choice.
The suffixed weapons were fine the way they were (remember they were only removed due to technical problems with the stations and outfitting system, not due to balance issues), for example overcharged lasers did more damage at the expensive of greater power draw, greater heat and lower accuracy, overcharged multi-cannons had higher rate of fire but smaller magazines and would thus churn through ammo faster and have to reload more often.
Yep, agree with this. It would also be cool to be able to choose a laser that isn't quite as powerful, costs a lot more but is an interesting shade of the colour blue for example. There are people out there that go for style over substance after all!
Even something like 3 to 5 shots per second for the large C class multi cannons would be acceptable above the heavy cannons that already exist in the game, also maybe a heavier ''Auto Cannon'' for Class 4 like around 1.5 to 3 shots a second, both with ammo limitations offcourse..
got to love the forums.. folk complain about a lack of communication from the devs, and then when we do get a little positive informative contact, some people just cant help throwing out some negs.. and they wonder why communication is the way it is [slow clap] yep, really good way to keep channels open!