I don’t see any anger, keep trying ;)[/quote]
Patience.
I reject your "video games should be simple" assertion.
‘Simplified’, not ‘simple’. In real life, you’d need a few months of practice to get decent with a gun, or a bat, or a soldering iron. For that matter, in real life, gun stores have way more guns than Cataclysm.
My primary issue is that there can currently be several different options, sometimes non-evident and usually barely distinguishable from each other in any way but name, to go with the box of ammo you found in a rack; I would rather it be two of the same pistol than one with +1 damage and -1 accuracy from the other and a completely different name. Lighting it up in green was a good first step, but I’d like either less ‘realism’ concerning the potential choices or for there to be a more noticeable difference. I agree that the complexity can add a certain tension if you’re rifling through racks with a horde on your ass, but what it gains in that situation it loses in every other one where you’re completely safe… and arguably, the tension in that situation isn’t coming from which 9mm pistol to choose, but whether you can find a gun at all.
However, you're in luck, because there are two (2!) devs actively working toward moving gun and ammo definitions into config files instead of them being hardcoded in the source.
Would this extend to modding in custom weapons, or is it going to be a stock list? Would it also include spawn weights and stack sizes? I wouldn’t want to reduce the number of firearms or add new ones and suddenly have none appear at all.
I think rather than removing the grenade launcher skill, I want more heavy weapons to use it with, along with a potential rename to "heavy weapons" or similar for highly ballistic weapons with large projectiles.
[size=8pt]finally, thank you[/size]
I disagree in general about there being too many skills, and in fact one system I like very much is one with even finer granularity where you build up familiarity with a speci
Will there be familiarity for bats and knives and thrown rocks, too? The major problem with adding more skills is the current experience system. I hope you change ‘whoops, ran out of exp, better not do anything’ before you add anything else to soak it up. And for that matter, are we ever going to see changes in character creation making 0-skill starts less feasible? I remember something about classes and skillsets before Whales moved on.
Is 3* variants in some of the common calibers really too much?
Yes and no.
Shotguns have four types of ammo, and what do they do? One is low-powered, good for hunting. One is standard. One lets you use your shotgun as a rifle. The last lets you use it as a frag grenade launcher. (Notice that Cataclysm’s shotguns all use the same ammo, too!) Same for grenade launchers: most of their rounds have very different effects and can be loaded into any grenade launcher you find, and I’m holding out hope for RE-style acid/cryo/lightning grenades. 9mm, on the other hand, is one of seven pistol calibers and has plain, then +P, then +P+. One is the baseline. One is slightly better. One is noticeably better. Just kill the second type, balance the stats and rarity, and have the third be ‘the 9mm that’s better against armor’. On that same note, you could say that regular 9mm was hollow points all along, and I wouldn’t notice a difference, as it barely pierces armor now, anyway. This isn’t getting into .45’s three (thankfully varied) types or the two (slightly) different revolver calibers with two (slightly) different ammo types each.
On an almost identical note, 5.7 and 4.8 are the same, save for the one-point damage difference, the P90’s giant magazine, and a five-point AP difference (which doesn’t matter, both are ridiculous). Cut one of them, make the spawns a bit rarer, and it turns from ‘have 5.7 gun, 4.8 ammo’ to ‘have 5.7 gun, no ammo’, also known as a scarcity situation that happens all the time anyway.
Reducing complexity should not be confused with ‘dumbing down’, which is not to be construed as the polar opposite of what Cataclysm should be. There does exist a level between ‘hurf durf too simple’ and ‘more everything please’, and that’s what I’m trying to aim for. In the same vein, ‘difficult things can be time consuming, therefore the more time I spend, the more difficult and thus rogue-like Cataclysm must be’ is an erroneous assumption. Something can take a lot of time without being difficult, like sifting through a gun stockpile trying to find the statistically-barely-better option for your .45 ACP because you ran out of 9mm or something.
You’ll notice how I’m not complaining (nor will I ever) about adding construction options, different science labs, crafting options, gun maintenance, themes and flavor, stuff like that, because those things make the game more fun. Making your own ammo? Badass. Nothing is wrong with them. Skill bloat and overloaded item lists, on the other hand… if you want complexity and realism, why concentrate on infinity guns when you can add melee weapon durability, or deeper inventory management, or crafting options, or making staying fed more challenging/involved/varied, or balanced bionics, or something besides cramming more data into an area that doesn’t really need it?
Are they a minority who walk into a gun spawn zone and mentally distill things to ‘hmm, that’s a shotgun and shotgun ammo; hmm, that’s a revolver and revolver ammo; where are zombie faces?’ I like the sound of more flexible configuration in the future.
The differences between pepsi and coke are practically nil.
What’s the difference between a Glock and an USP 9mm? The response to these comparisons are the same: negligible to the point that only the people who maybe care about them a little too much will notice.
