First off, this is going to be a quite long post, but it is purely about cosmetic changes to graphics, gun models and animations. It has nothing to do with actual game mechanics or stats. The heat mechanic on the Auraxium guns is in fact two separate, but related features: 1. Each battery is potentially infinite. As long as you don't max out the heat, you never need to reload 2. You have an infinite supply of batteries if you do have to reload It is this second point that makes no sense. With a normal gun, once the battery is spent, you see an animation of you pulling back the gun, ejecting the spent battery, throwing it away, getting a new one from your belt, and slamming it home into the battery slot/hole. Where do you get all those batteries from with the Auraxium weapons? Is it an infinite battery that is just cooling off? If so, why do you throw it away and get another from your magic bag of batteries? And Why can't I plug one of these infinite batteries into my SVA-88, V10 or any other gun? Or is it a normal battery and it's the gun that makes it potentially infinite? If so, how? Again it seems a little stretched. (of course it's actually just making use of existing assets and animations but it just seems ham fisted). The change What I would like to see it the gun graphics, and animations changed to make these guns and the heat mechanic make sense. To do this, we simply get rid of the batteries. Where now, there is a battery housing backing plate on the left side of the gun, and the battery goes in the right side (a bugger if you were left handed), we now have the same plate on both sides. Instead of popping batteries in and out we have a built in micro fusion battery with a life span or years, decades... longer than you are going to last before you die and are reconstructed. We also have heat exhaust ports on the guns. Now when the gun overheats, the animation changes to just pulling back the gun and instead of popping the battery, you see exhaust venting from the ports as the gun cools. The animation last exactly the same length of time as the current reload animation so there is no change statistically. It might also be nice to see energy stating to cascade down the gun as it gets closer to overheating. Visually the guns would lose the battery graphic and have the left and right sides the same. The exhaust ports would be added to the model. I would also like to see a visual style given to all these guns so they look like they are part of the same design. In fact this might be a duality on design: the core gun model from the weapon it was based on, plus these 'next generation' updates, such as the same stocks and the exhaust ports. I have produced some examples. It would be nice for something new, but I am not a 3D artist (or that good a 2D one) so I have used existing assets (one of the five or so Vanu stocks, and some widgets from the CME as the ports, and slapped these together in Photoshop. Also these are using base textures as opposed to fancy Auraxium textures. The quality is not great here, but hopefully you will get the idea: Thoughts?
While better aesthetics would be nice, personally my problem is that these are not necessarily the weapons I want infinite ammo on. It'd be more fitting on longer range, accurate weapons like the Pulsar C and the...well I guess the Flare or Ursa and Corvus albeit I consider them a bit lackluster. That's where you have few enough deaths and spend enough rounds per kill to need more ammo. I think the only one that really sort-of works for me is the Eclipse since LA is most likely to run out of ammo on a mid-range gun. It's very similar to the way they handled the underbarrel and burst variants, slapping the same stuff on guns that are significantly different and don't benefit equally.
The heat affected pack goes into a special spandex pouch called a "cod piece" where it can nestle in the humid warmth. Here the nanites get a chance to heal, listen to chilled techno and talk to the other packs in the pouch. Once the process is done it goes back into the chain of good packs, hence, unlimited. Would have thought all this to be very obvious!
Appart from the fact that you're talking about directive rewards weapons, your comment has nothing to do with the topic. You mention game mechanics and balance when the OP specifically said this was an aesthetic focused thread. I'm just putting that right now before we get into 15 pages of nonsense.
It would be better if the animation shows your character pulling out the battery - rubbing it a bit - then putting it back in. Well - it works with my TV remote
Pfft, boring, I want the 15 pages of nonsense. OP's suggestion is fine but there's not much to discuss other than "yeah better gun models/unique animations would be nice" which is true for most VS weapons right now TBH, not just these ones. And IMO they're unlikely to put that much work into these weapons considering how few people are ever going to use them.
Yeah and in addition give me heat mechanic on my Parsec. Also would have liked to see an energy ball thingy, like that on Spiker, on my Parsec. As it is now it´s just another Vanu rifle, with strange bullet velocity and strange bullet drop.
I think the heat mechanic is still in its infancy - it is a trial to see how it pans out. The weapon stats still show ammo count, so it isn't just the weapon graphics and animations that could do with a tidy up. The vents would be a great addition - ala the Lasher I guess - and could be forced to activate (as they are now when you overheat) as well as manually activated (to speed up the cool down process) via the reload button. This for me fits much better with the heat mechanic.
Well he could've simply said it that way then. He didn't comment at all on the looks of the weapon so I'm not even sure it was even his point.
Well I think the Betelgeuse and Eclipse are quite popular. Can't say I have seen any of the others, or been killed by them with any of my alts. I just think they need to finish the job.
This is not the thread I thought it was going to be. Personally, I'd be OK without infinite ammo but still keeping the heat mechanic. That way they could beef up the heat weapons a little without too much worry (Basically make them like Covenant guns from Halo). And speaking of Halo, the Plasma Repeater from Reach was interesting in that it never had to stop firing when overheated, but the fire rate slowed down to a crawl the longer you shot continuously. The heat still went down over time, but at any moment you could vent the coil to cool it down faster at the cost of shooting. Something like that might be very cool.
I think keeping the batteries could be interesting as a potential gameplay mechanic that would also mitigate having potentially unlimited ammo, which for some players, is huge. I think that you should be able to have infinite ammo if you don't overheat the gun, however you only have a limited number of replacement batteries if you overheat it. So you will have potentially unlimited ammunition if you are careful but if you are forced to fire until you overheat or are careless then you have a limited resource like anyone else. Because each battery can potentially give you unlimited ammo by themselves I would also give the player less reloads than the non-heat mechanic version of the gun. e.g. The Betelgeuse would have 2-3 replacement batteries compared to the (200/50) 4 that the Orion has. These batteries would also be replaced by engineer ammo packs so if everyone on VS started using their directive weapons, infantry support engineers wouldn't be out of a job.
