Seems to imply the weapons won't have random perks doesn't it? Pretty interesting either way.

This would be tops. I never understood all the random attributes and what was or wasn't a "good roll". It would be so nice and easy to be able to plug in [x number] of attributes to build a weapon to your play style.

I understand what they were going for. The idea being that you could feel like you had a unique gun that was your own, unlike every one else's. Of course the problem is the way that perks worked, was that too many directly affected gun performance in such a way that not having certain perks was a straight up handicap. The fact that 'God Rolls' existed at all is evidence of this.

I would rather see perks change playstyle rather than change weapon performance. I'm not saying this is an easy problem to solve, but you see it with things like Telesto, where you can set traps by spraying the walls and floors, etc. You are actually approaching combat differently.

The next best thing is simply fixed perks, with some other means of customization.

I front paged it just now, but I wanted to highlight a point of interest from the interview:

"[T]he tuning path is pretty different this time. The weapons are all hand built in a way where, before, they had random talents– We can look at an entire archetype like hand cannons. And then we can look at data on usage rates for hand cannons, and sort usage rates, and then within usage rates, check [kill death ratios] per hand cannon and find out what is actually effective and what’s not.
And then, because the weapons are all hand built, we can take a given hand cannon and say “let’s change this one hand cannon” rather than “let’s pave this entire archetype.” So we have opportunities in front of us that we haven’t had before because of the way we’ve built the weapons and hopefully we’ll seize those opportunities."

Seems to imply the weapons won't have random perks doesn't it? Pretty interesting either way.

I have always disliked how random the guns were. I hope this means weapon names will have greater meaning. As in, "Oh, sweet! I got a ABCXYZ! That's a great gun." Instead of "Oh, I got a BBQPDQ, I hope it's a good roll!" (double rng = :( and it's only good with certain perks = loss of meaning).

I think you are reading too much into what he is saying here. (See my other post)

My understanding is most game developers have been writing games like that for years now. This is known as an Entity-Component-System (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity–component–system). I'd be surprised to find our they didn't handle it like this in Destiny 1. It seems more likely to me that they did do this, but the weapons and the attributes were actually too separate such that they weren't able to modify how a specific attribute behaves when attached to a specific weapon because they didn't have a way to distinguish which weapon the attribute was attached to. Most likely the attributes had to be split up so that hand cannons get hand-cannon-specific attributes which they could tune, but they couldn't tune the attribute for specific hand cannons.

Anyone else read this and think, "They favored composition over inheritance this time around, giving them more flexibility to generate new weapons and sub-archetypes."

I've been studying a lot of CS lately and that's the first thing that came to my mind. Kudos to them for making a more flexible set of weapons. Should make sandbox updates considerably better in D2.

Yeah, the concept certainly fits, but as BlackT1ger mentioned, in actuality it's probably an Entity Component System.

PS: If anyone is interested in what Composition vs. Inheritance is, this is a moderately entertaining link that involves "murder robot dogs." Dark, but makes a good case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfMtDGfHWpA

Heh. That was a fun instructional video contrasting some of the advantages of Composition over Inheritance. I disagree with him that there is never a good reason to use inheritance, sometimes it's the right tool, but composition is usually a better way to go.

This is exactly how I took it. Didn't read at all like he was talking about specific perks being hand-catered to specific guns (though that's one way to do it). It read much more like they just have an archetecture now where they can say "Oh, Fatebringer just grossly outclasses everything else. Well, we can just make Fatebringer have less range than other guns in that 'archetype' so it's more in line with where we want its effectiveness to be, whereas in D1 we would have had to nerf every single hand cannon in order to make that 1 hand cannon be more in line with other classes of weapons (ARs, pulse rifles, etc).."

So this gives me hope that you'll be able to find a gun you like using without feeling compelled to switch to the flavor of the month god-roll gun since bungie can now tweak individual weapons rather than tweaking only entire archetypes at a time. Instead of "All ARs now deal 0.04% more damage" you'll see "Shadow Price deals 0.04% more damage while Suros Regime deals 0.22% less damage." and then you'll still facepalm because 0.04% is such an absurdly small change to make that, even though they deny it, it *has* to have been a mistake where they meant 4% or 0.04.

or should that be, "Moof! Moof! Mooooof!"? I dunno, but I'm excited.

YAY!

This is actually a pretty huge change. I'd almost go as far as saying that it's a bigger overall change than anything with classes/abilities and such.