How the low TTK neuters weapon variety

I miss me thumper and rocklet.

The most disappointing thing about the thumper and rocklet is that they just wouldn't work in this game. Same goes for the raditator, spiker, dragon, scorpion, and malestrom. Same goes for some of the vanilla weapons too like the scatter pistol. The TTK is already too fast for infiltrators to have shotguns.

Does anyone really want to see more grenade spam and explosion spam with PS2s TTK? It would be a nightmare.

Direct explosive weapons/bullet weapons are the only weapons that can work at this low TTK.
If you could extend the TTK x2-3 we could finally start seeing more interesting AOE and denial weapons.

Yeah they "can work" but probably not in any enjoyable way is what I was trying to say. Do we really want to see people spamming thumpers that kill faster than they did in PS1? Or worse, a 6 shot rocklet secondary volley that would probably kill groups of people instantly?

Either infantry armor or infantry shields should be doubled (armor buff cert needs to be nerfed then but yea).

I think doubling both would overdo it but doubling only one of the values would allow for more actual difference on single weapons having real hard hitters that shoot slow or really fast clip killers.

Right now the fire rates and damage per bullet and accuracy can all only be varied far too lightly to make a difference anyways. currently only bullet velocity , rof and attachments really matter for choice as the damage difference on all the automatics doesnt mean **** in the end.

Well when I say "work" I mean they are not immediately completely OP.

Is it just me, or does the content of the video not really match the name of this post?

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I just envision them being disastrous.

The difference in comparing games like PlanetSide 2 to older shooters is that older shooters rarely had sidegrade weapons. Instead, every weapon was a completely different weapon, sometimes despite how odd that was as a "weapon," and they had a scale of weapons that did considerably less damage and considerably more damage, to appropriately not have to waste a whole rocket on a Lost Soul, for example. It was permissive to have slower rates of fire because things could do more damage in one pop.

On one hand, what really made weapons feel different might have been what made sidegrades so functional as a balancing tool in this game; on the other hand, since all older-style weapons were unique, what also may have made those weapons feel different is their look, sound, and what they fired. What I mean is one or both of two things: the difference was real, but that would lead to class imabalance; and, the difference was mostly in the player's head, but the weapons were designed to appear and sound like they were different enough. The introduction of recoil created a new dimension of making weapons feel different, and became less pre-planned motion as time went on; now there is a key randomization of the jerky motion, which requires greater control.

tl;dr: The way older FPS weapons were designed to be distinct of each other was that some did incredibly more damage, and some did less, for the most part, sometime which would kill class balance in PS2. They also had a bolder, if sometimes ridiculous, individual design and presentation, but that only made them "feel" different without actually needing to be too different.

On an unrelated note, I watched an instagib deathmatch last night on Youtube (for the first time; as I often say, I am not by nature an FPS player). While it did seem exciting on some level, and probably on an individual level, I also thought it looked like some of the worst gameplay I had ever seen.

Flawed arguement. BF3s weapons have plenty of character and variety (actually some of the best gun balance, character and feel that I've seen in any game to date), but that game has nearly half the TTK that this game does - so I don't see the correlation at all. On the other hand PS2 with its twice as high TTK unfortunately have a load of weapons which feel for the most part highly interchangeable and same-ish.

- They all look damn near identical (I wouldn't want to try to blind-identify them for sure...). There are minimal differences between stark opposites like carbines vs LMGs - much less between weapons inside the same category which to my eyes might as well be clones of eachother...
- They sound identical (?) Is there actually more than one unique firing-sound for each empire? If there is I can't say I've noticed...
- They feel more or less identical. I'm not saying I treat carbines like I treat LMGs but between the weapons of the same class they feel very same-ish. For the most part same recoil patterns and directions, inherent accuracy and COF increase ect. This problem of what the guns "feels like" is surely also compounded by the two first points as they are a large part of the total experience.

On the other hand in BF3 its a wide variety within weapon classes - like assault rifles. An AN94 vs an AK74m vs a Famas are totally different exeriences on all these points described above, and I think I could probably identify them fairly quickly in a blind-test where I only was exposed to one thing at a time (only the gun model, super easy), or only the sound (also super easy) or only the firing characteristics, ie. playing the game without gun-sound and a gun model (a little harder but very doable).

The issue is with the weapon design not the TTK. It is unfortunately just a little sub-par in many important categories that serve to bring character to the weapons.

-Stigma

PS2's TTK is great. Low TTK encourages thoughtful movement instead of bullet pissing contests.

Agreed - it is easy to only look at the positive points of high TTK and think that with a much higher TTK it would turn into a game where only skill would decide the winner in a fight and not "cheap" deaths from some player you never saw or had the time to react to but a high TTK also brings with it a whole host of problems that are quite frankly much worse. heal/tanking, inability to realistically take on higher numbers, drastically lessened point to flanking and stealth - even culminating in the circle-strafing battles of oldschool FPSes if taken too far.

Take it from someone who is old enough to have gone through that phase of PC gaming where all FPSs where insanely high TTK (compared to now) - its not something that would make for good gameplay in PS2. Modern shooters with generally low TTKs are better off for the change. I'm not saying that there isn't a limit to how low you want to go. There is such a thing as too low TTK, but PS2 is surely not on the lower side of that balance point as it is. I feel the TTK is pretty well balanced in PS2 as-is.

-Stigma

PS1's TTK and PS2's TTK aren't too off from each other. The only differences are:

A) Long ranged weapons did far less damage over range, so people would just hide and repair.
B) Close range it was easy to enduce warping, and when both people did it, it felt like a 'higher TTK'.

So... horrible ranged effectiveness on ranged weapons, or glitching.

But that's wrong. The majority of guns in BF3 are statistically identical or nearly identical to one another.

low TTK is why i like this game . in no way i want some halo TTK or gears of war TTk ........
guns should kill you fast .

Erm... no?

I'm not sure what you expect out of a gun for it to be different from another gun... I'm not talking about one shooting bullets vs another shooting cannonsballs here, but an accumulation of subtle differences that give each weapon a distinct character (and playstyle/usage area).

Again, I would have no issue identifying most of the guns in BF3 by model alone, sound alone or firing-characteristics alone (for my top10 used ones at least in the latter category). That by definition means they did a good job of creating character for the weapons. Granted - they had the advantage of being able to base themselves on real weapons but still very well done.

If you seriously can't tell the difference between them in the first 2 categories you are blind/deaf, and if you can't tell the difference in the third category then I'm guessing you are probably a sub-100hr player. There is no shame in that of course, but you can't expect to grasp the different feel of all the weapons without putting some significant degree of time into it. The difference in firing characteristics is subtle. Its supposed to be subtle. If they weren't the guns wouldn't be in the same class to begin with.

-Stigma

Offtopic:
I love how in ARMA TTK doesn't depend on how many shots it takes to kill, it depends on how long the engine takes to realize that you're dead.

Or that you got smacked in the head by a stray bullet because you wandered behind someone who was being surpressed by AI at the wrong time. It wasn't even aimed at you, it just hit you in the head so you died instantly.

The low ttk doesn't just kill weapon variety, it kills the FPS aspect of the game entirely as well.

There's no style, no skill, no meat to the actual shooting aspect of the game.

I've gotten more kills jumping around like a monkey and holding the trigger than taking my time and aiming due to the low TTK and how bad the servers are.

That too I need to play more ArmA. Pretty hard to get into if you're not into joining clans and stuff though.