Will there be some way to either cancel or completely prevent reloading, since it's getting updated?
TL;DRPlayers will be able to cancel reloading, probably by sprinting or jumping, and force reactions, knockouts or death interrupt others' reloads, while a full actions matrix is still being worked out.
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.