Weapon rolls, my variant/perk/emergent fun solution. (Criticism)

by dogcow , Hiding from Bob, in the vent core., Friday, January 19, 2018, 13:38 (2288 days ago) @ Cody Miller

But the issue is a drop in variety, mixed with less moments of excitement, and I put the blame on that to boring weapons and less abilities - both in regard to skill trees as well as rate of use. There are no longer emergent experiences with new weapons due both from everything being unlocked from the start and having less perks-per-weapon. Oh, and a single set perk that does anything interesting, instead of two which interact.

The weapons and abilities are boring precisely because of the investment system.

If weapons and abilities can interact in cool, fun, powerful, and skillful ways, then that puts people who roll the RNG correctly at a giant advantage, and conversely those who don't at a huge disadvantage. If you remove randomness, you can now have all of that since it's just a part of the game and not a random roll.

Bungie went wrong because they removed the randomness of the perks, but left in the randomness of the drops, AND THEN removed powerful interactions. The correct thing to do is to remove both random perks and random drops while keeping cool elements of multiplicative design.

I don't lament the loss of random perks on guns. I think the removal is a good thing, and I agree that the loss of the fun interactions is what has killed the fun here. However, I think Bungie went a little too far with the complete removal of randomness.

I'd like to see named sets of perk variants and the gun name would end with the variant you got, so: Matador 64-A, Matador 64-B, Matador 64-C. So the Matadors would all essentially be the same gun, only w/ one different set of perk nodes...

A perks: Aggressive Ballistics, Knee Pads, Rifled Barrel
B perks: Rangefinder, Full Auto, Performance Bonus
C perks: Reinforced Barrel, Fitted Stock, Field Choke

or something along those lines. That way Bungie could easily add a lot of variety to the weapons, give a greater chance for emergent behavior, allow for tuning specific god rolls that get out of hand (or buffing crappy rolls), all the while keeping the name of the weapon significant.