Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

Oh, OK. That's quite a long one, yeah. So I think the existing meta emerged as people realized that you take additional damage on the body and head. And actually, back in the day, those were the limbs that we called lethal. So if those limbs actually reached zero health, then you died immediately. And we're going to revisit the health system at some point from a balance point of view. But right now, we're replicating that system by increasing the damage the head and the body take. So effectively, those are the critical parts that you want to protect right now anyway. So I understand why people did this, though, because obviously you're mixing light and heavy to prevent some severe movement penalties that a full heavy loadout would give you. I'll try and keep it short, but I am actually looking at the armor design at the moment, and it's something that touches on many aspects of the game. And I will say that any functional work, like the power system and all that work being done on the armor, is not going to be foreseeable. It's something that's very long term and will come down the line. But to keep it short, we do want to make all armor type combinations viable. So we're currently investigating options to make mixing and matching parts enticing. But also, we want to provide some sort of bonus to having a full mono loadout, so like a full heavy suit, for example. So we've been looking into things like: if you are wearing a heavy chest and helmet, you're going to be a lot heavier than normal. A heavy leg armor might have some exoskeleton-style support in it that helps you support that weight, and it might even give you a bonus towards going faster in heavy armor. So if you're using light legs or no legs, for example, sorry, leg armor, everyone needs legs, then you might actually suffer a bit of a penalty because your legs are unsupported. You're trying to run around without any of this exoskeleton-style support. So we're constantly thinking about ways to make all options viable. I obviously don't ever want to say wearing a heavy helmet and a heavy chest is a bad idea and we want to stop you doing that. We want to make that enticing in certain scenarios, whereas we want a full suit loadout to be enticing in others.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Just off the bat, just brainstorming on my own: we talked earlier about how the armor could act as a recharge for energy batteries. A full heavy suit gives you the most energy recharge for something like that, so if you choose to strip down the arms and the legs, you're not going to have as much juice to recharge. There's all kinds of things we can explore.

Jonny Jacevicius · Lead FPS Systems Designer

And there are so many things that it ties into as well. So obviously, if you're generating more power, you're generating a higher signal. So you might not want maximum power gain. You might want to recharge your battery as well, but not so much that it flares you up on everyone's radar. So actually wearing a heavy chest and head, if you want to be someone who goes out and does combat but doesn't want to be super obvious wherever they go, and you don't care about your movement speed or the penalties that come with it, then yeah, absolutely, we want that to be an option too.