Star Citizen Live Q&A: FPS in Alpha 3.23

So sniper glint occurs when a sniper is aimed down sights and they are aiming at you at a specific angle. So imagine if we say the sniper is here, the target is here. It won't matter necessarily what your angle is, it matters what the sniper's angle is. And we're primarily doing that based upon, imagine FOV, the player, right? They have a cone in front of them and that determines whether you can see the glint or not. And that glint angle is customizable. I've previously said 11.5. Again, we were spitballing. We were just trying things out. There's a minor glint and then there's a direct glint. So the minor glint is obviously when you're in, let's say it's 10 degrees. And that minor glint is visible for 7.5, but when they're directly on you, we shine that major glint. This is primarily done because of how powerful snipers are in the Persistent Universe, and if you're injured at all, and you're wearing a heavy helmet, they can just one-tap you in the head, and the cost of death is very punishing, it's very high. Along with, obviously, a sniper being a powerful weapon, we still want to enable the fantasy of it. But you've got to have that initial feedback for: they're lining up a shot, they're doing things. And two, obviously, there's a lot of gameplay implications there with how that looks, how that feels. I've seen a lot of people talking about a lot of suggestions, and a lot of them were very post-fire-oriented. So we want some pre-fire-oriented warning that this is going off and occurring, and hey, you should be careful. We're doing some other things as well with regards to snipers, with removing auto-zeroing off all scopes. And we're increasing the zeroing increments, so you have to focus more on landing your shot.

So you mentioned customizable. You mean we can customize it, not the player?

We can customize it. So different scopes may have different FOVs and things like that to allow differentiation between manufacturers. So some might have different modifiers on, different glint angles, and you can pick the one that is, okay, cool, this is how I'm going to play my sniper.

Regardless of lighting conditions, the glint is there. And that is because of how powerful these weapons are, and these things are needed to essentially say, hey, there is this incredibly powerful weapon aiming on you. You have time to react if necessary. They have to line up their shot on you and so on and so forth. So it is visible during the night. I'm aware that is controversial. And if anyone has any good alternatives they'd like to suggest, please give feedback. We're more than open to hear it. But this is a very gameplay-oriented thing.

Zach and I, we had a playtest the other day with our lead, Torsten, other Torsten, not Nook, Lehmann. And I really want players just to have a go with it, because I think it really adds to the gameplay, especially when we want to make snipers really powerful, especially the .50 cal snipers like the P6-LR. We really want them to be beneficial and really reward that gameplay. But at the same time, it needs some sort of balance. It needs some sort of counter to that. So I think, especially with the angles that Zach mentioned, at first it's a bit like, oh, I'm not sure, but once you give it a go... Like the crosshair: at first, when we were talking about the crosshair, we were like, how are we going to implement it? And then after you've been using it for a while, you're like, actually, this feels great, and we can't imagine not using it now.

Yeah, the key thing is when you look at people, especially in places like Jumptown, where it's very dark, it's very hard to see things, and you have a sniper. And currently, we obviously don't have the most fantastic post-shot feedback for the snipers. For example, we don't have the really obvious tracers, we don't have the really obvious muzzle flash, and the audio doesn't go far enough, and things like that. So we are aware of those things. But it's very hard to see the sniper at Jumptown, and it just leads to this kind of degenerate play style where someone is not engaging with Jumptown, right? They're there to just sit and be a sniper. They're not contesting Jumptown. They're not doing it for their team. And there's a couple of examples of this, and it's healthy for the game.

One more thing I will add on this as well. I've seen some comparisons to other games and looking at glint and stuff. Our glint is a lot smaller. Our glint is a lot less obvious. And obviously, we only showed one distance. But you'll see that the glint is not like the light of God itself looking at you.

No, because we're increasing sniper ADS time as well. So snipers will have a longer ADS time, because if you've played against them in close quarters at the moment, they're very oppressive. So they're also going to have bigger hip fire and things like that. But they're also going to have much higher damage profiles than they currently have. The falloff on them is very strong and things like that. So leaning into the power fantasy elements of the sniper while making sure that, hey, I'm playing Star Citizen, I don't expect to die to some guy who's running around with a sniper rifle, because that's not the FPS experience that we really feel.

And you don't need ADS if you're no-scoping. So if you're trying to quickscope, that's where the ADS is. If you're just no-scoping, it doesn't affect you.

We adjusted no-scoping as well a little bit. With the whole recoil thing that we added with these FPS improvements, the snipers got their recoil pass as well, I think. Obviously this is still a work in progress, but spread and recoil when no-scoping can be different from spread and recoil in ADS. So when you're not ADSing, no-scoping can be adjusted by increasing spread or increasing the recoil there to make it harder to hit.

We typically don't have spread on our weapons when you ADS. There are very few exceptions.

Yes. We have a lot of grenade types already prototyped or implemented for Squadron. The basic FPS grenade types that you know: smokes, flashes and whatnot. And from there on, we're going to move on to the more sci-fi things and other FPS devices as well.

Nick, do you want to give some of the examples that we've been cooking up and can talk about? I'd say the more standard contemporary ones.

Yeah, so obviously we've got the flash done, like Pascal mentioned. With the flash grenades or even the stun grenade, concussion grenade, we're playing around with different ideas of how exactly we want to do it with Squadron, and obviously with PvP as well you've got to be careful with balancing and stuff like that. But we have played around with the idea of the angles of where it goes off. So obviously if your flash goes off directly in front of your face, how long that would have that effect on screen, as opposed to if it just happens in your peripheral vision to your right-hand side, and how long that would have an effect, and then after-effects. And obviously, we've got a really great health system, like the BDL system, in our game. And we looked at some of the effects that we could produce on the eyes, the after-effects of being stunned, and how that all plays into it as well. And again, smoke grenades: it's so different between PvE and PvP. How long does the smoke last, performance-wise? So we're obviously looking into all the different factors of bringing something from a single-player experience into a multiplayer experience. We're not going to reinvent the wheel necessarily. They're going to be what you expect for those classic items. But then, like Pascal mentioned, we are going to start introducing some more sci-fi elements, things like area-denial types of devices as well.

So in terms of the overall health meter, that's the current goal at this time, but we are doing some things related to medical gameplay at the moment. For example, with injuries, we're doing a balance pass to make them more of a story of the combat that you've been through. At the moment, they're a bit too heavily RNG-reliant for my liking. You can sometimes enter a bunker and walk out with the worst injuries, and sometimes walk out with none at all. When you look at your character, it's not really the story of what your character's going through. But there's also some things we're working on to add to medical gameplay. So the big thing we've been talking about is the pre-down state. We want to move away from reviving people with the general MedPens and have specific pens to revive people with. The pre-down state is also very handy because, imagine, as soon as your health hits zero, you can essentially focus on crawling into a safer space to be able to be revived. Because at the moment, if someone goes down, the majority of the time people are just tractor-beaming their corpses into cover. And obviously, it looks a bit wacky. So the pre-down state is quite nice. And increasing the BDL costs for being revived and getting back up and things like that. The pre-down will be a very limited window of time as well, so it's not like you're going to see people crawling on the ground for two minutes.

We'll talk about it in a couple weeks on ISC, but there's a new health app being added to mobiGlas in 3.23 that'll give you more detailed stuff like that. It's still being developed past 3.23, but you'll see more health-related information being made available to players, which might help with that sense of immersion there.

I can chime in. It will be bespoke to each weapon's ammo. So, for example, when you're repooling a P4's ammunition, the ammunition that belongs to the other weapons will not be touched. It's for that weapon only. A couple of things to add here: right now, in the current iteration, you will be able to repool only if you actually have that weapon either in your hand or on your back. You saw the rummage animation in ISC, so you have the weapon in your hand. If you have it on your back, you will automatically unholster it. And if you don't have that weapon, you won't be able to repool. So that's the current situation. We'll see where we go from there, so please give us your feedback when you get your hands on it. One more point, actually, something that we didn't show in ISC but will be included in 3.23: you will be able to trigger repooling in the inventory UI. When you right-click on a magazine, you see the context menu, you will see the repool option there, and when you click that, the inventory UI will close and it will trigger the regular rummage animation. And similar goes for the loot UI as well. When you're in the loot UI and you hover over the weapon and press a hotkey in the same way, it will trigger repooling. So you will be able to trigger it from the menus as well.

Yes. It's actually going to work the same way. In the current iteration, all mags are subject to repooling, except for tools, so not the dedicated salvage tool at this point in time. All are the same. We have the mid-term, long-term idea which revolves around differentiating energy weapons from ballistic weapons by giving energy weapons some automatic ammo regeneration. But that's for the future. So for the time being, they will repool all the same.

So basically, for right now for 3.23, it's much easier for balancing and stuff to make sure that both ammo types will repool. But as Atil mentioned, we are talking about, when armor suits get the resource network, potentially looking into the idea of the ammo being able to trickle charge, because at the end of the day, the energy weapons are using batteries, right? So they don't have a physical capacity. And so the idea is that they might be able to slowly charge up. So there's obviously pros and cons to both, and that's how we are going to eventually differentiate them from ballistic. Ballistic may do more damage, heavy-hitting, but obviously it's limited by its capacity, right? And you need to reload and run out of bullets and repool, whereas laser, for example, doesn't have a drop-off, so it can travel much further. But then obviously we've got to think about overheating, and if it does overheat, it can also just recharge. You don't need to worry about running out of ammo per se. So currently right now it's the same, but eventually we are looking at ways we can differentiate the two different ammo types.

Yes, you will be able to cancel the reloading and repooling process, probably by sprinting and jumping. There's a list of actions which we can cancel repooling with, or which we cannot do while repooling. We already have the system, but I don't have the full list of actions in mind right now. But you will certainly be able to cancel that rummage animation.

Can you cancel other people reloading?

If you kill them; death is the ultimate cancel. Or knock them over, right?

Can you knock them over and it cancels their reload?

Force reactions will throw you out. That's the intention. If someone throws a grenade and you go flying, you're not going to be able to rummage through your backpack.

And if somebody's in the middle of reloading and I punch them in unarmed combat, will that interrupt?

Depends on how hard you punch them. If you knock them out, yeah.

Zach and I obviously spent a lot of time looking at what we've called an actions matrix, basically. We've looked at everything: jumping, crouching, proning, what actions are you doing whilst you're doing that. So we're definitely working through it. It's a big list, because if you try and think of every single action you're doing, then it's: do I reload, do I want to heal, do I want to holster? So it's a big list to get through, but we're working with engineers to basically decide exactly the game that we want to make, and where we want to give freedom to the player, and what actions are more punishable, like if you've committed to that, then you've got to finish the animation and so forth.

Yeah, an example from the action matrix work could be the MedPen, right? Obviously, it's very quick now. But if we were to make that MedPen process longer in the future, you might not be able to sprint out. You have to commit to it. On the design side, we can pick and choose where that goes. It goes a long way to making the game feel less clunky when you have more autonomy and control over your character and the movement and the feel of that. It's very important. It's where the word 'clunk' comes from, right? It's an indescribable feeling of, oh, this feels janky, this feels clunky. It typically comes from actions not working as you'd expect.

Yeah, obviously. There are other situations where you might not want to wear a combat helmet. Like, we have these environmental suits. And in these scenarios, you might want to wield a weapon or a tool and equip a laser pointer to it to know where you're aiming. Or further down the line, with different armor types equipped, like a medical helmet or whatever. I'm not sure what the design is for all of these armor types; Nick can go into detail about this. But there are definitely situations in our game, and we will create even more situations along the line, where the laser pointer will still be necessary or useful.

Like I said in ISC, this is kind of the start of our branching off into the archetypes for armors. So as Pascal mentioned, we do have different ideas. We're still playing with ideas. Nothing's concrete right now. And Rich talked about this in 2019 at CitizenCon on stage: for example, medic gameplay, what would that visor look like? Would they see the vital signs of their teammates? Or if you're a miner: if you're just wearing a combat helmet and you do a scan, maybe it'll just tell you the type of rock it is, but if you're wearing a mining helmet, maybe the visor will give you extra details like the clarity of the material or how efficient the rock will be to break down, and stuff like that. Or even a specialist: if you're pinging as a bounty hunter, maybe you get to ping further and get a bit more of a head start on who you're trying to track. I don't think we touched on this in the ISC, but we also looked at the HUD, for example, with backpack reloading. With the combat helmets, obviously, it gives you the information of the magazines on your suit and the backpack. We may actually lose that information when you use, for example, the environment suit. To answer your question, I think the laser sight still has a very viable path, because if you are doing a profession, let's say you want to be a miner or you want to be salvaging or whatever, obviously we're in a PvP environment. You just don't know what's going to happen. If you still want that freedom of knowing exactly where your barrel is pointing when you're getting jumped by an enemy team or whoever, then it still has that choice when you're outside of a combat helmet scenario.

So again, we've spent a lot of time working out exactly how we want damage to apply. A few years ago I wrote the design for wear and dirt and everything that comes with it, and overheating, and we've implemented that in Squadron, obviously thinking with the PU in mind as well. We really are quite keen on the idea of an explosion applying to the specific area that you've been hit. So, for example, if a grenade does go off right by your weapon, then the level of wear and the damage applied to that weapon will skyrocket, as it's gone off right next to it. And the same could be applied for dirt. So, for example, let's say you're in a swampy environment and you walk through; if you then sprint through, the amount of dirt that's applied to that specific area, like your legs, will skyrocket. Same as if you were crawling through the mud: your whole armor will be caked in mud. And the same for damage on items as well. So yes, it will damage certain items, but we are still playing around with how much of a factor that will play in overall.

Since ISC, we actually did a few adjustments already to the crosshair, and we are now looking into adding maybe an opacity slider or something like that, so you can at least say, oh, I don't want it fully visible, or just half visible, so it doesn't really obscure my vision. And later down the line, let's see what the future brings, right? If we find the time, I would like to do it, but maybe we have other things that need more fixing or more help from our side.

It's always a matter of priorities. When you say that since ISC you've begun working on opacity stuff, those are technical explorations, and that's not you saying these are guaranteed to be in 3.23?

Let's see what the future brings. We just started looking into this again.

All this season, since we came back, we've been talking about all these tremendous things that are being targeted for 3.23. There is still a go/no-go process. And if it comes to the point of whether Dynamic Crosshair goes in and we don't have the opacity slider, that's not the thing that's going to stop it from being a go. So it's definitely something we're exploring. It's definitely something we want to work at. There's just no guarantee that the opacity slider you just mentioned will be a 3.23 thing; it's just something down the line we're looking into. Dynamic Crosshair, though, I think that's working really nicely. Our guys had a lot of fun with it when they were doing the stuff for ISC. I don't think we have to worry about that not being in 3.23.

Yeah, it's really amazing. When I first implemented this, obviously I liked it. But nowadays, every time I don't have a combat visor on, I feel like something's missing. I really enjoy it. I hope you guys enjoy it too. It's a really great thing.

We develop all of these features in silos: this team working on this, and this team working on this, and this team working on this. And those all come with their own struggles, their own bugs, their own things where, oh, we tried to get this to work and we just never found it. Or we got it to work and then we found out it wasn't fun, so we want to do it differently. Then when you start to combine them all in a bigger patch, you find a whole new series of bugs from different interactions: oh, this worked great on its own and this worked great on its own, but when you put it together, we've got two piles of bugs. So we need to do more work and more adjustments, and that's where the go/no-go process comes in. It allows us to look at these things and determine whether they're ready for prime time, whether they should go into the patch or whether they should not go into the patch. Very few things generally fail a go/no-go. I think the last one we talked about was the last Xi'an ship that was supposed to be in a patch, and it failed a go/no-go. Nobody liked the cockpit. It wasn't a good experience and they held it back. There's a couple other examples like that, but for the most part, that's what the go/no-go is. It's how we attempt to prevent things from causing more trouble than they're worth. Do we always succeed? No. But having the process and trying is better than not having the process at all. So that's what a go/no-go is, and that process happens much closer to the release of the patch.

Sometimes they're really beneficial as well, because you'll get a point of view from someone from a completely different department, like you just mentioned, who brings something up, and you think, actually, that's a really good point. And then it leads you down another path. So it's very, very important that we do these.

And then you'll get the other end of that, where, for example, we talked about optic zoom, which was on the inner side of sights, but then we had issues with upscaling. So we've had to take out the inner optic zoom on the optics, which we showed off at CitizenCon, because it just doesn't work with upscaling. So, like Jared was saying, when you work on a bunch of different stuff and all of a sudden it comes together, you're like, oh, oh no.

Quickly adding on to that inner zoom thing that Zach mentioned: we're still trying to get this back in, because we like the look of it, right? And the graphics guys are currently looking into solutions to that problem to give you that zoom effect on the actual scope. For 3.23, it's probably not going to happen. Let's see what they can come up with.

So this is a technical limitation, basically. A lot of games have a separate render layer for the weapons, which is obviously why, when you go to a corner or something holding a gun out... they do that because the gun would clip through otherwise. So it is a technical limitation currently, but we are working on alleviating that. We've seen a lot of feedback along the lines of, hey, if you blur the outside, it's more believable to me. So it's something we are working on. The outside of the scope will be blurred to kind of trick your brain, almost, into not seeing behind the curtain. But we do something called the Universal Rig, where first person is equivalent to third person. So what you get is what you see. And obviously that has some drawbacks in this instance: how we render things, how the Universal Rig is set up, and so on and so forth.

Yeah, I can take this. So for Star Citizen right now, we're quite happy with what we've covered so far. We have some nice burst weapons and we have some powerful snipers and whatnot, but with energy, we kind of treat it as an umbrella term for that ammo type. So under that umbrella, we have lots of plans. Obviously, players will have seen laser. We also have plasma. Currently Atil's done some really good work with damage over time with plasma. So that burning effect: once you've been hit, maybe for a certain few seconds after that, you've got that sizzling, burning effect from being hit by plasma. We also want plasma to be different from laser in terms of how volatile it is. Maybe it overheats a lot faster. So just certain different factors like that. Then obviously we're discussing all the time, we're throwing ideas around. We've talked a lot about tachyon, the idea of faster-than-light ammo, but obviously with balancing we don't want it to necessarily be hitscan, because that can cause a whole lot of issues. Then we've talked about neutron: what does that mean for FPS? Does it become more powerful the further it travels? And then obviously at CitizenCon we showed the vault weapons. We have a really exciting opportunity right now, because we feel like we've covered a lot of the standard FPS, what you'd expect. And now this is where we can really branch off and be a bit more sci-fi and introduce some really unique mechanics that can really differentiate gameplay and make each energy type really stand out from one another and really create that difference. So, some exciting things hopefully on the way soon.

It's going to get sci-fi up in here, which is nice.

Yeah, hopefully. It's something we're currently working on. I don't want to definitely say yes or no. It's something we're definitely interested in. I actually had a meeting last week with Tech Animation and Character Art about the possibilities, because, as most players will know, we spend the majority of our time in armor, and we really want to utilize our clothing sets. So it's definitely something we're interested in, and it's something we're trying to figure out how we would go about.

And to clarify this, there are some weapons you can use with civilian clothes. We're talking about the ability to stow them.

Yes, and being able to holster on your back. A lot of it is, obviously, we have such a high attention to detail, so we don't want clipping. We don't want it to just completely break the asset, essentially. Obviously, we have a lot of legacy clothing, and we're also introducing a new clothing style. It's just basically working with different departments to see, okay, what is an absolute no-go? What works? Different ideas: would it necessarily have a magnetic plate that would attach? Would it attach via a holster? All these different ideas are being thrown around, because it is something that we are quite passionate about getting into the PU, so hopefully.

So in regards to this, there's got to be some confusion, because obviously we shipped a lot of procedural recoil in 3.22. So there are some improvements coming to the recoil system in general. Well, let me answer the initial question first. Each weapon does have a recoil pattern. There are minor amounts of variation on the recoil pattern, so the weapon isn't feeling the same every single time you fire. But each weapon does have a unique recoil pattern. So imagine a Kastak Arms weapon is more unwieldy, there's a bit more noise, it's more horizontal, whereas something Behring is more traditional, very vertical, with less firepower than Kastak Arms. So what we've done for 3.23 is we've refined these recoil patterns and made the general visual recoil and actual recoil a bit smoother than previously in 3.22. Not to any very noticeable degree; you're not going to get very static and boring weapons, but it's in the sense of helping firing at range. Because if you try to use things like the Behring at 40, 50 meter engagement ranges, you can typically struggle. And it's not the gameplay we want with the scope and the expanse of our world. It will help you basically take these fights. Other things as well, just off the cuff: looking at magazine sizes, especially damage profiles in regards to damage falloff, projectile speeds. So overall making on-the-ground PU, contesting Jumptown, contesting Ghost Hollow, far more viable with an assault rifle, as it should be.

Sliding won't be in 3.23, but in general, I've seen a lot of cause for concern around this potentially being very arcadey. And obviously, we don't want that to be the case. It's primarily a thing that is used to get into cover. For example, in our game, when we talk about what a slide is, it has a high stamina cost. You can't fire whilst you're going into the slide. You can't ADS while going into the slide. It's basically a full-body commitment action, primarily designed to be defensive. I've seen some concerns about initial bursts of speed when you go into the slide and things like that, but obviously our intention is to make this a slide that makes sense in the universe of the game, and that is what we are planning to do. No details for 3.23, but obviously as we go on, more will be revealed.

I don't want to talk again, but it is my area. So we are doing a big balance pass for 3.23, taking a lot of community feedback, like we've been talking about, damage profiles and stuff. Shotguns are going to bring the pain. The game director is very fond of shotguns, so they will be coming in soon. Pretty powerful. But obviously we don't want to make them busted. So this will include some things like tighter spreads to make them more accurate at distance. I know a lot of people are very annoyed when they shoot somebody with a shotgun who's 20 meters away and they don't do anything. So that is not going to be the case. Shotguns haven't been viable for a very long time, and we don't want that to be the case. Some other improvements as well to pain points that we've seen: Railgun and Grenade Launcher in PvP scenarios on the ground were becoming stronger, and the intention of that is so [unclear] can actually win a Gun Rush game.

I think we've kind of already brushed on it, but I will just quickly say: we put so much work into our scopes, and we've got such a wide range of armor sets, and having, as Pascal mentioned, the armor sets completely block the vision, and then having to do that workaround, and making sure... Especially when you make a game for PC, you've got to think about different FOVs and different setups and how it will impact different players. So I think that's been a bit of a pain point, but I think the change that we're doing now, and eventually down the line, hopefully, the change we make later on, will really be so beneficial. So that would be my point.

Just to add on to that, obviously the biggest one for me personally is sprinting and general movement and how that feels. Sprinting is a prime example of one of the improvements that we're planning to make. When you run, the gun goes below the camera, there's not too much head shake and things like that. So the overall feel when you're sprinting, especially if you're on a planet, it doesn't ever feel like you're properly sprinting. Again, that ties into how much stamina that takes, because it's not too expensive or painful to sprint at the moment, and that plays into how much weapon sway you have. Some stuff I mentioned earlier: tracers, more obvious muzzle flashes, improvements to how we do medical gameplay, and some other stats we need on the weapons, like sprint-to-fire, which is a big one. At the moment, all the weapons use the same sprint-to-fire, which is a big reason why the P6LR was a very big offender in 3.22. And if you basically say, okay, cool, it actually takes you time to shift your LMG from the sprinting pose to the return pose, then LMGs are not as good in CQC. And we can make them slap incredibly hard over those 40-meter ranges, because the LMG person is already prepped. They're aiming at you, they will shred you. Because LMGs at the moment feel like assault rifles with big mags, where everyone uses LMGs. These are examples of things that we're looking at to say, hey, this is how we improve our weapon sandbox and overall get something where the weapon variety feels very intentional, just like we're doing with armor.

Pascal and Atil, I know these are the designers and they get to set a lot of direction, but as programmers, there's got to be some things that you want to get in there to really bring the experience up. What have you got?

Honestly, from my side, I have put a lot of focus on the clunkiness, and the biggest point I always had was that firing the weapon doesn't feel really smooth. And now we've worked on the recoil; that's the great thing about the procedural recoil, right? I did the tool, and Zach has to do all the work now, bringing in the recoil. So that's a nice benefit of being a programmer. I don't actually have to do the work. I just do a small bit and then Zach suffers. But this was, for me, the biggest gripe about our game. The HUD also was always a little bit not too clear to me. We're improving that as well with 3.23. And for now, we have all of these new improvements going in, and all of my biggest concerns have been answered or addressed, and I don't really know what I want to improve at this point in time. Obviously, when I play more, I will start picking up on the more minor annoyances and then want to improve those, until they eventually become a major annoyance for me. But for now, I'm way happier with 3.23 and don't really have anything that I must do.

Well, I'm going to mirror Pascal here. For example, the combat HUD was a really good addition, a really good improvement. Now we convey information way more accurately, and a lot more useful information, to the player. For example, from time to time we play Star Citizen in the office and I see the old UI, and when I'm working on this new HUD, the difference is unimaginable, really. And it's going to feel really different. And especially what the guys were working on with the recoil and the new scopes also made a difference. So probably this particular update brought a lot of things closer to our golden standard. I will probably get a more concrete opinion on how awesome we made things after a few more playtests, but it's really, really promising.

What a question. So the big thing I want is a slug shotgun, easily. It's my favorite weapon type in games. I absolutely love them. I also want an incredibly quick...

No, just one.

Okay, okay. Slug shotgun. That's what I'd take, hands down.

Probably a rocket launcher from one of the old-school shooters. That feels really good to use.

A chainsaw. That would be great.

Man, what a question. I would love some sort of gameplay kind of weapon. Maybe shoot a mini black hole and they all get sucked into the middle and then something happens. I'd love that. Something really out there.

There was a funny thing with Pascal's answer, actually, because he says chainsaw, the most Doom thing. When we were making the procedural recoil, when Pascal was testing it, he would always hip-fire the weapons and say, hey, look how cool this looks, because he basically only plays boomer shooters. So we were in a feedback loop of him making recoil purely from a hip-fire perspective, because obviously you can't ADS in a lot of boomer shooters.

You should see his test level.

It's E1M1 from the original Doom. It's not for the public, but I just took the map layout to learn our editor, right? I had to learn it at one point, and I know how E1M1 looks.