Nick · Systems Designer III, Core Gameplay

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.

Zach Karev · Senior Game Designer

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.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

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?

Pascal · Gameplay Programmer

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.

Atil · Gameplay Programmer, reload improvements

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.