It seems like there recently are quite a few Arena shooters in development and unfortunately many aren't really doing anything new with weapons and are just tweaking traditional Quake or UT weapons to fit their game.. So i propose we just try to come up with some new features that could be implemented in weapons. Obviously without proper playtesting its impossible for us as general consumers to know for sure how balanced or fun our ideas would be, so i'll start off by clarifying that i am not claiming these concepts will be fun.
My ideas for goals a well designed weapon should meet:
The first goal is that it needs to have a range of levels of success to allow lower skilled players some success with them, which makes the weapon accessible, while still challenging the strongest players to maximize the damage they deal with a weapon. A shotgun's spread where you would have to aim almost perfectly center mass to fit the entire spread into the torso and deal max damage, but if your aim is off and you shoot when the crosshair is just near the target, not even on it, you are still going to do a little damage. Splash damage is another example of providing a range of success and rapid fire rates is a third example.
2nd eliminate random spread on primary weapons. It is significantly less rewarding landing a good shot if you don't know if you aimed well, or if random spread altered the trajectory and you aimed poorly, but through sheer dumb luck, the shot landed. Some people will point to the traditional machine gun or shotgun of quake and be like "but quake had random spread". The reason random spread works with the machine gun and shotgun in quake is because they were effectively secondary weapons. Random spread made it impossible to achieve great accuracy with them, which discouraged strong players from focusing on them, and made them fairly boring weapons, which gave them secondary weapon status without gimping their damage too much which would of made them more useless then the random spread does.
3rd. weapons should discourage spam. Weapon spam trivializes shots and eliminates the extra strategy of resource management. The challenge with this is strong players have way higher accuracy then weak players meaning they need less ammo. So how do you make strong players feel the need to conserve ammo without making weak players completely run out of ammo on their favorite weapons? So far Clips seem the most widely used solution to this although not the only one, where a strong player needs to maximize the effectiveness of his shots because he wants to minimize the vulnerability of having to reload. While a large max ammo allows a weak player to rarely run out of ammo completely.
I guess I'll start the ball rolling with a couple concepts:
Burst Sniper Rifle: Very small clip, 3-6 rounds and a long reload, but with a very fast rate of fire, and significantly lower damage then tradition sniper rifles. The goal would be to keep a very long range and accurate gun while making it more forgiving to beginners, by allowing them quick follow up shots if they miss, and challenging good players to make multiple shots in rapid succession.
Shotgun Sniper Rifle: A shotgun with a circular, spread pattern that is the same every shot, similar to natural selection 2's shotgun. It has a scope, when you use the scope, the spread pattern slowly tightens represented in your sights by a shrinking circle that is eventually tight enough to be effective at long ranges. This emulates the charging power function of TF2's sniper rifle used to reduce the effectiveness of quick scoping, but also makes it more challenging by requiring to aim center mass to maximize damage and also the amount the spread needs to shrink to do effective damage is different based on the target's range, so it isn't as simple as waiting for a max charge. Finally, it makes the sniper rifle more versatile with a shotgun spread for close range targets.
The rocket launcher is probably the most popular weapon in arena fps. The splash damage is a good way to create a range of success that absolutely should stay despite it not being uncommon to see games remove or significantly reduce it. Introducing a clip which isn't all that uncommon in rocket launchers, in order to create a preciousness for ammo for skilled players without making ammo too scarce for beginners. It could be interesting to see the velocity of the projectile change, slower right out the gun and faster the farther it travels, this could increase the range at which it is difficult to land direct hits, decreasing the min distance and increasing the max distance its feasible at.
anyone else have some cool ideas?