On Itemization & Crafting

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The current itemization system is kind of broken.
Crafting useful gear is really expensive, the weapon drop rate and level progression means that anything awesome craft for yourself gets outpaced by a common or uncommon weapon / armor real quick.
The upgrade system is even more useless, as creating a new item at the current level is cheaper than upgrading.

What all this really amounts to is that players have an incredibly high gear swap-rate where the choices really don't matter much, given that there is rarely any qualitative decision beyond "what kind of weapons do you want to use?" and "which item has more dps?".

This has - in its current implementation - also the problem that it is pretty much impossible to focus on style - any visually coherent "set" you manage to put together will not last beyond the next level. If that. (more thoughts on the style discussion here)

This makes item modifications rather pointless, unless you invest into tech to get the Perk that returns modifications when you scrap items.
Not too much of a problem though, since the mods are lackluster to begin with, so it ain't much of a loss.

Soooo ... I'd love to see a few points considered:
  • Weapon Modifications & Upgrading
  • Armor Modifications & Upgrading
  • Crafting System

Weapon Modifications & Upgrading
At this time we can - for each weapon - modify a few things:
  • Scope (if viable)
  • Silencer (if viable)
  • Up to 4 Modification Slots depending on quality
  • Item Level (through Upgrading)

The key reason for deprecating weapons - and swiftly so - is the escalating upgrade cost that is already too high on the first upgrade.
Now, to improve the gearing choice situation and give meaning to your weapon preference - as well as reduce the insane swap rate, I would see the entire weapon system overhauled:

A weapon consists of multiple components that can be upgraded and modified separately.
Let's use a pistol for example:
  • Base Frame: Determines the base damage of the weapon. The "rarity" of a weapon is tied to the frame and determines how many capacity options are available and what the upgrade cost of the frame is.
  • Grip: Modifies recoil handling and how fast you can draw the pistol
  • Upper Barrel Attachment: Scopes, Gun Camera, Laser Pointer
  • Chamber: Defines whether the weapon is a power weapon, a tech weapon or a smart weapon. Also modifies damage, fire rate and secondary modifiers
  • Capacitors: Number depending on frame rarity. Adds secondary weapon traits, such as adding elemental damage or crit chance / crit damage / etc.
  • Barrel Mod: Silencer & Recoil reduction
  • Under Barrel Attachment: Gun Camera, Laserpointer, Micro-Smoke-Grenade, Micro-Poison-Grenade
  • CPU: Program Capacity
    • Programs: You can load any number of programs into your pistol that modify your pistol experience
      Examples:
    • Assassination Calculator (Massive damage modifier against target that does not know your precise position, replacing the damage mod from the silencer)
    • Smartlink (Required for smart weapons)
    • Camera Scope Link (Provides a digital scope if you have a gun camera and a SmartLink cyberware)
    • Intercept Fire: Smart Weapons get a chance to shoot down grenades in air
    • Counter Fire Module: Enables Smart weapons to automatically counter-attack a sniper if hit while aiming and sniper is in front
As for upgrade costs of the Frame itself: No more scaling costs based on previous numbers of upgrades. While it shouldn't exactly be cheap, it should be affordable.

Armor Modifications & Upgrading
Well, well, well. Armor / cloth and how we modify & upgrade it.
Modification slots are ... decently rare and upgrading items is indecently expensive.

Given that, there is very little to choose from between two pieces of cloth - it's almost always a plain comparison between armor rating and that's it.

The thing though is ... there is only so much we can reasonably do with clothing.
Aside from adding some visual flavor (imagine being able to add some badges to your jacket), I think we definitely should here too remove the scaling upgrade cost in favor of a flatrate fee depending on the rarity grade of the item.

That said, I think we could probably add a few more "interactive" mods - imagine a health injection system that triggers automatically or a melee repellent system, that can push back a melee attacker once every X minutes (which could have the drawback of also pushing back the user, messing with your aiming).
Also need better info on what each mod actually does.
Oh, and also stop eating my modding slots when I use armor upgrades!
Is there a camouflage mod?
Also maybe something that is geared towards net runners?

Crafting System
Ok, let's be honest here, I've seen worse crafting systems. But there's definitely room for improvement.
We've already covered the scaling upgrade costs above, but I'll bring it up here again - the scaling upgrade cost prevents reasonable upgrading over time, forcing you to switch gear frequently.

Bad idea.

Another problem is the proliferation of upgrade and creation components.
We have 10 different component types and epic and legendary resources are so rare - especially the upgrade components - that that fully compounds the upgrading problem for good gear.
I mean, yeah, it's a totally legendary gun - I'll even be able to keep it for a level!
Legendary.

So, proposal:
Cut down the components to three grades of rarity for baseline items:
Common, Uncommon and Rare
The rarer the item we want to craft or upgrade, the more of each it takes.
But with blue items contributing at least some as I scrap them, it becomes a lot more feasible to maintain my favorite iconic legendary weapon.
Maybe add some special components for special kinds of items (e.g. for crafting weapon mods).

Dismantling weapons will then only reward those components, maybe grant the chance for an Upgrade or two with the proper Perk in crafting.


And that's it, as far as I've thought it through so far.
Any opinions? Thoughts? Comments?
 
I really like your weapon and clothing ideas. I've felt that clothing should have no armor value at all and the rarity of the clothing item should define how many slots it has.

Armor would come in the form of attachments that use up a clothing mod slot. That way people would be able to craft the look they want without worrying about armor value. Need better armor? Craft a better armor mod and swap it out, keep your same look.

I also like some of the ideas for additional clothing mods. Want some special abilities for your clothing? you'll have to sacrifice some armor for that.
 
Problems with Crafting

  • The armadillo mod can get out of hand. Level 20 crafting was getting me 200+ armor on a single mod. I would just craft a dozen or so until I rolled all epics and then just break down the blues and below netting me more crafting materials than when I started anyway. The base armor on gear becomes meaningless at this point and the only thing that matters is the number of armor mod slots.
  • Randomized number of armor mod slots. The fact that gear, even legendary gear, have a randomly generated number of slots when you loot them means that the best course of action is to save scum before looting legendary clothing until t rolls with max slots. Any mechanic that favors save scumming is poorly designed.
  • Crafting itemization. The fact that a weapon's statistics will be randomly generated favors save scumming. (see above about save scumming)
  • The upgrade system of exponentially increasing material component costs is an utterly repulsive game design that only an unholy demon would conceive of
 
Yea, mod slots should fix with their rarity instead of randomly generated, or give us a add slots perk.

Give us clothing recipes like iconic guns and let us upgrade the rarity too.
 
I agree. The constant cycling of weapons is really unenjoyable. You get attached to a loadout, and then it becomes useless and/or superseded by some random drop off a generic NPC a level or two later. It's really not a good system for roleplay or even general game enjoyment, since the constant need to keep your gear up to snuff is at the back of your mind at all times.

I'll just come right out and say they should do away with leveled items and go to the tried and true system of automatic leveled damage scaling. I do like that you can switch to any weapon type and still do decent damage without needed to spec into the corresponding skill tree, so scaling damage based on skill would be less ideal. But overall level would be great.
 
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