Thoughts on Weapons Balance (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Friday, July 28, 2017, 00:49 (2685 days ago) @ Blackt1g3r

So it feels like maybe Bungie decided to move Special weapons into the power weapons category due to the difficulty in finding a good balance between primary, special, and heavy in PvP. I wonder if there might have been other ways of accomplishing the same goal?

For example, Titanfall 2 has sniper rifles, but they rarely get used in actual PvP instead of other weapons. For example, the Kraber has the is a one-shot kill anywhere on the body, but it has several disadvantages:

• Sniper bullets have travel time, so you have to learn to lead your targets depending on the range (extra hard because players move so much in TF2).
  
• Sniper shots have bullet trails so if you miss the player has a chance to figure out where they were getting shot from.
  
• Zoom is generally higher than other weapons

Similarly, shotguns in TF2 are either very close range compared to average engagement distances or they have travel time.

Are there other ways Bungie could have handled the special weapons slot without just turning everything into power weapons again?

Maybe they could have give snipers a long ADS time to give other players an advantage against a sniper that isn't hard-scoped down a hallway? Add aim movement so you have to constantly correct your aim?

Oh boy. Something I know about.

Titanfall 2 is both a good and bad example for a few reasons. First, it's a twitch shooter where if you get shot you're almost always dead with no chance of escape. Destiny is really not that and is much more about positioning and map control. Titanfall 2 has map flow and it's basically impossible to win by camping simply due to the nature of the game. It also has massive maps compared to Destiny. Like four to eight times bigger. Which means weapon zoom is a really important thing, and sometimes you'll encounter someone too far away to attack or too close for comfort and your best option is to run and hide *when you see them on your radar* rather than even trying to engage. Personally, I find the titan combat to be much more similar to destiny's combat than the pilot combat is. it's class-based, positioning based, and team-shooting based.

To get to the meat of your questions, though, yes, of course bungie could have balanced their weapons more effectively. I've talked about this a lot on these very forums. Everything from adjusting ADS speed to turning speed to movement speed to rate of fire to accuracy etc etc etc can be tweaked. Lots of it was. BUT... Bungie designed themselves into a corner, apparently, in D1. They made each gun draw its base properties from a class of weapons, so if they changed one gun, they changed them all. This was very problematic.

The other problem is map design. Bungie is famous for their wide open spaces in the middle of their maps, but Destiny is very much the opposite, with circular maps that have an obstruction in the middle and lots of twists and turns with few, very controlled sightlines for sniping. This makes shotguns and snipers super effective. A sniper can hold an entire avenue of approach singlehandedly, usually with some cover, and a shotgunner is constantly popping around corners to catch people by surprise, already in shotgun range.

Imagine, if you will, playing Destiny on Blood Gulch. Wide open middle. Ledges at the extreme ends for sniping. Warrens on one side for shotguns. But the vast majority of the map is medium range engagements with very little cover. The game would be completely different. In fact, I imagine everyone would load up a sniper rifle at the start, and - as the game grew more chaotic, would switch to their primary weapons more and more. Or maybe my favorite all time map from any game ever, Hang 'em High. Harder to snipe there, some places where shotguns would be useful, but mostly, again, primary weapons because of the excellent target acquisition.

One more problem destiny has is a shocking lack of verticality in pvp arenas. Or rather, poor use of verticality in a game where vertical mobility is so great. The strength of the game is player control and mobility, and yet most of the maps are strictly linear with small elevation changes. There are very few alternate traversal paths which require deft movement to successfully navigate. That's not to say you couldn't make novel use of the vertical space, but it was almost always with the appearance of glitching the geometry (such as being on top of the pipes by B on rusted lands) rather than going somewhere the designers placed with intent. Anyway, all of that generally circular, generally linear design with few open spaces lends itself towards sniper and shotgun play.