I found this concept of laser/kinetic swapping to make fights more technical.
It does, but in a purely arbitrary way, that I feel neither flows well, nor makes a whole lot of sense from a verisimilitude perspective.
I'd personally prefer if this kind of technical depth was reflected in things like facing, shot placement, cover vs. concealment, and the like.
It's not a unique mechanic, though AFAIK possibly quite uncommon. Metroid Prime 1 made you swap visors & weapons to beat the later stage Metroids, they would change form midbattle and thus become immune to whichever weapon you were using, and/or become visible only to a different visor. Though you had unlimited ammo there but Metroid Prime 2 continued the theme with the light & dark ammo types with limited ammo. Both of those games are rated as classics and are two of my favorite games of all time. So maybe that's one reason why some are not bothered by this mechanic? If anyone hasn't played the Metroid series, I highly recommend them btw. Very much looking forward to Metroid Prime 4.
Metroid Prime isn't a tactical shooter (which is clearly what EDO's ground combat is emulating) and doesn't primarily feature combat against infantry foes with similar capabilities as Samus.
Weapon swapping is fine as a matter of necessity to deal with different kinds of foes, circumstances beyond what individual weapon systems were designed for, or other extremes, but explicitly designing a weapon system that requires swapping back and forth between independent weapons, to tackle each and every individual infantry foe encountered, is never going to feel right to me, or most others expecting their shooters to make sense, contextually speaking.
If personal shields are ubiquitous, weapons intended to defeat them will be used, and if, for whatever reason what's ideal here is suboptimal for whatever is under the shield, the individual/discrete weapon system would itself be a compromise. No one would issue a weapon that destroyed body armor and then another weapon that killed the person underneath it, because having to swap between them would be a larger disadvantage than using whatever compromise system could manage both. Given the infantry damage resistances depicted in Odyssey, the standard loadouts wouldn't feature pure lasers or kinetics (except perhaps as sidearm), or even plasma (if the projectile velocity was an actual constraint and not an arbitrary gamism for balancing purposes), they would be dominated by direct fire grenade launchers and possibly various forms of combined weapons (say a laser rifle with an underbarrel kinetic shotgun attachment)...which don't exist in this game because they would work too well. And that's the problem; when something, that should exist, given what's possible in the setting, doesn't,
because it would work, we have a context-defying gamist absurdity. That this is exactly what FDev was going for doesn't help, because it makes it extremely unlikely the dynamic will ever change, which means those looking for a believable (distinct from realistic) system are never going to get it in this game.
