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What about other sidearms like machine pistols, personal defense weapons or sawed-off shotguns? Can you tell us about more diverse sidearms?

TL;DRA weapon audit is making sidearms and other weapons feel distinct, for example turning one pistol into a machine pistol and another into a burst pistol, with changes to recoil, art and manufacturer identity.

Zac PreeceFPS Systems Designer III

So this is the thing we obviously care a lot about. When we say we want to add a weapon or a sidearm or something, we want it to be very impactful and meaningful. So I've been doing a bit of a weapon audit, which is analyzing what we have and how useful things are. So for example, the LH86, the Gemini pistol: we're saying, OK, this could probably be a machine pistol. This is an interesting, fun difference that this pistol can actually be. So it's a lot more meaningful and impactful compared to the Behring pistol and so on and so forth. When we make these changes, we're very considerate of how the weapon looks and how it feels. So that will come with a whole new recoil for it and some art changes, like extending the magazine. Another example of how we're making sidearms more interesting is the Arclight pistol, where we're going to potentially turn it into a three-round burst pistol, just to get that variety up, and people who like burst pistols, they've got something to play with. And going further than that, we'll talk about this weapon audit. We're looking at all our FPS weapons and how they can be improved. So, for example, sniper rifles: when you're aiming down the sights and you fire and you pull the bolt, it can jitter a bit and not look as great as we want it to be, so we're really looking at this kind of stuff to make them feel better. But as far as the weapon audit goes, it's pretty all-encompassing at the moment. We've been doing competitive analysis of different titles, slowing their stuff down frame by frame, looking at real life, to understand where that weapon juice comes from. We have this great roster of weapons, but we want them to feel like they're in a game that's launching in like five years. We want them to stand out and feel fantastic. So we're really looking at how we can make these things feel as juicy as possible, but completely looking at our tools and changing them up. If you were to see what the P4 looks like now in our current weapon branch, it would blow your mind. It looks like a thousand times better. It's insane. It's something we really care about, making them feel as good as possible, because it ties into looking at the weapons in general. We've been looking at some weapons, and their functionality is maybe a bit samey compared to other assault rifles. So, for example, the Gallant rifle, it's a Klaus & Werner weapon, which is our all-around weapon. So it's like, well, this could be a burst weapon, right? It's purely a burst weapon. But then we say it has a three-round burst and a five-round burst. Five-round burst, obviously, a bit heavier recoil, a bit longer downtime compared to the three-round burst. But it gives you that active choice as a player to do something interesting. Then we look at the Lumin V. That's a five-round burst SMG, I believe, currently. We want to make that far more interesting and give it a bit of uniqueness. So we say, yes, this is a burst SMG, but you can tap down the trigger because the actual downtime of the burst is a lot lower. So you can basically get it going full auto, but it is essentially a burst SMG. And then another good example, the S71, right? That's supposed to be a marksman rifle. And the recoil is a bit weird. It can move up and down a little bit. But we want to get it more in line with what it feels like to shoot a marksman rifle, where we have a consistent offset pattern that you can go shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot with. If you tap the trigger as much as possible, you should be punished for that. And then I'd say the last one I'm going to mention is probably the Arrowhead. It shakes when you aim, which isn't great, which isn't what we want. And we're looking at that and how we can make a Klaus & Werner sniper rifle more interesting, basically. So it's been really good. We've made a lot of really good progress making the weapons feel amazing. Big thing as well: leaning into manufacturer identity, right? If you've got a Behring rifle, you expect that to be sensible. You've got a Kastak Arms rifle, you kind of want that to be crazy. You'd almost refer to it as being a bit more what you'd expect from a Soviet weapon, right? Like in a thousand years' time. What would a crazy Kastak black market weapon behave like versus something like a Behring, which is a lot more military, a lot more sensible. There's lots of stuff going on right here. Did you want to say something, JJ?

Jonny JaceviciusLead FPS Systems Designer

Yeah, I was just going to say a lot of it's about weapon personality. You've covered the manufacturer stuff. And it's just, we don't want all of our weapons to feel the same. We want them all to feel different. And obviously, Joes, you were working with me on this a while ago now: one of the things that we did was put our weapons in a spreadsheet and just say, how do we want to make it feel different? How do we want to set it apart from other weapons? Obviously, down the line, we might make more weapons that feel the same, but right now, we want to give a breadth and selection of gameplay options for everyone to use, and we want to see how those are applied in the PU. We were looking at real-world analogies of weapons, weapons from other games, and just saying, where does this fit in? What's our first stage of where we want to aim this thing at? And then obviously, we do the Star Citizen pass and make sure that it's suitable for our game and that it feels right. So it's been a very long process, and it'll probably keep going for a long time. But the first stage is using the tools that we've got. Zach's been doing a lot of improvements to things like the recoil, which hopefully we should be seeing in the relatively near future.

Star Citizen Live›First-Person Features·
Published on this date.19 Nov 2021
EpisodeFPS weapons & gear