Weapon Types (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Monday, August 17, 2015, 19:16 (3483 days ago) @ Cody Miller

There's always a way, Cody.

When I worked on Call of Duty: Big Red One, we were balancing PvP and had a lot of trouble with the BAR. The weapon designer insisted (and rightly so, I think), that all of the weapon stats be based on reality, and the BAR was simply one of the best weapons in the allied arsenal. The reason that we didn't just give one to every soldier was that they were expensive and took a while to make, whereas the standard M1 was relatively cheap and easy to mass produce. But in a video game where you pick your weapon, cost like that wasn't a system that we wanted to build into the game. So we were stuck with a gun that was more accurate and did more damage than every other gun we had, by a pretty noticeable margin.

To fix the gun, we had to think outside the box. Instead of modifying the weapon's stats, we modified the player's stats while they were using that weapon. We slowed down their turning speed, slowed down ADS, and made them walk more slowly. Suddenly the weapon was fair.

In a similar way, we were able to increase the effectiveness of underpowered weapons by making the player move much more quickly while using those guns.

So for the sidearms, they could be made more effective by giving the player a speed boost while equipped, or a health boost on hit, or maybe giving the bullets a disorient effect on hit or something. There are lots of ways to buff the weapon for PvP without strictly affecting the damage output or unbalancing PvE. To say they haven't got the feel quite right yet is fair, but to say it can't be done... I disagree.

Edit: I just thought of a way that you could buff sidearms without tweaking anything weird. Give them infinite clips / no reload. The lack of a one shot kill is then made up for by the long and continuous damage output without any downtime for reloads.