Pascal · Gameplay Programmer

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.

Nick · Systems Designer III, Core Gameplay

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.