Weapon maintenance in an FPS: Yay or Nay? (Poll)

Getting back to my FPS Metroidvania I’ve decided to go with 4 weapon slots that can be freely changed out at save rooms so that I’m not having to put any cap on the total amount of weapons I can make.

So if I’m doing this I think I really need to have a feature that forces players to change them up frequently.

I have three ideas and wanted to get a poll on what y’all think.

Should I:

1) Have all weapons regain 10% of total ammo every time I get to a save room different than the last one?

2) Have all weapons left in the room regain 100% ammo?

3) have a weapon degradation system that effects how well it works and have to leave it for repairs?

4) have a system where it gets a buff when it wasn’t used last time?

5) Allow the player to use a currency to restock their held weapons, but the ones left in the room refill for free?

6) Just let people use whatever they want?

7) Other?

 

Use the map and the enemy ammount/strength on the level to force players change the guns.

 

7 - other for me

i try to think of something simpler. If reload takes longer than change weapon and there is more enemies than you can kill with one mag, probably that should do the trick?

for designer and programmer that only requires you to change some values you already had ready. you can do a lot of testing that way and figure out if its fun without having to make anything new.

 

Truth be told, being a Metroidvania I’m deliberately making some choices that start the game off as a modern shooter with emphasis on reloading and head shots, then slowly increase the players mobility and have newer weapons not have reloads and decrease the importance of head shots, making it more akin to quake.

 

my predisposition is always to go for simplest thing first and only expand if necessary from that. I guess if I had to choose one of the options other than other, I might go with 2.

I also think about, how will you explain the mechanic in tutorial to players, and how will players talk about it to other players?

You probably know that audience better than I do, but I think in general if you can summarize basic game rules with really short, immediately obvious sentences that's good.

LIke many here my gaming days were in the 90's to early to mid 2000's so to me that is the "ideal" sort of game, regarding shooters. They tended to be really simple. I played the newest doom briefly and couldn't get myself past the first 30 minutes. It was just one tutorial popup after another explaining complicated rulesets.

Of course its still a popular game so who cares what I think, but I wonder if it didnt carry the Doom IP and just appeared on steam, if so, many people would say much about it? Can only speculate.

 

I’m not gonna lie, i’m exactly that demographic you described.

and I absolutely hated Doom 2016, I tried very hard to like it.

what made me commit to this project exactly is that I wanna make a game for people like me that want to move forward from boomer shooters and hit modern games.

I want to throw players at the gauntlet and require them to use aggression and speed, while letting them know that losing health and ammo isn’t going to affect them in the long run.

and I hate to Dooms push forward combat because it basically forced players instantly do glory kills that were a nonstop distraction from the game, not to mention felt like the developer were dangling keys in my face like I’m a toddler.

my solution to aggression is a shock and awe System we’re enemies hesitate and become less aggressive when you kill something.

so if you have a room full soldiers with guns you are going to need to keep moving and get kills While dancing around the crowd.

also, I plan on implementing something similar to the AI Director in left 4 dead. I know that goes at odds with exploration so I want to make it not as intense, but still dwindle your Health and ammo between save rooms.

lastly I am going to abolish creep and save why not allowing players to go right back into a save room and do away with any kind of save other than save rooms.

 

i totally love the theory and the premise to.

i guess if i was making it I'd try to find ways to accomplish it without making like, "game rules" that necessarily need to be explained, if you know what I mean.

I like that idea of enemies reacting to being overwhelmed. Create a sort of push and pull type of dynamic to a firefight where you try to maintain momentum to keep them from overwhelming you back. Like if you make it so that at maximum capacity the enemies can deal out enough firepower to severely punish the player, but they can only do that if player has been deemed to be playing defensively, maybe that could work?

But on flip side, if player is dealing out enough damage to X percentage of the total enemy unit, then they favor defensive/evasive manuevers.

immediately that makes me think of stuff to do with AI though, in which case if i am messing with AI i dont also want to juggle variables on the player side of the equation, you know what i mean? Like I need to solve one side of the equation at a time.

but i definitely love the theory it's the same sort of ideas i think of if i was ever gonna make a shooter. i think I wouldnt wanna mess with weapons and shooting to the point that it's not like, braindead simple though, because then you are asking player to make a certain level of buy-in that they might not want to if it's just "another indie game on steam."

But if it seems immediately obvious how to play and seems familiar, but then something unexpected happens like, player backpedals to last entryway to funnel enemies (like you do in any game), and then the enemies call out, "he's retreating, crush him!" and they gang up on you, then it's like, "holy S***! that was badass." So next time you go in the room guns blazing, and then you notice the enemies retreat and maybe give obvious callout for dummies, "retreat!", then I think you've shown player a pretty cool hook without them having to read anything or be like, "wait the rules are what? Why?"

 

It sounds like you understand exactly what I’m going for

 

This is essentially just a second, arbitrary kind of ammo counter. It sounds like it could be tricky to balance, and tempt inexperienced players into situations where they effectively run out of ammo without actually running out of "ammo".

That said, if you can make it work effectively it could also add an interesting dynamic to longer levels, where players reach the end with fewer working weapons.

This one sounds great to me, assuming that ammo inside levels is in low or no supply? It's very clear about both how it works and what the player has to do to manage it. It's also little or no effort to balance.

It could lead players into tricky positions if they, for instance, take all of the fodder weapons into a level, use them all up, and then only have specials with low ammo on the next level. So that leans towards "little" effort to balance, rather than "none".

This works exceptionally well in Hades. Something else which works well for them is giving side challenges which involve using certain weapons. Even though I'm much better at the game with some weapons over others, I keep switching them up because the game gives me cool and interesting reasons to do so.

This sounds like both a case where you can both push players into making interesting decisions, and prevent them from optimising the fun out of the game (which some players are prone to do). So I wouldn't just leave it to the player in this case.

That said, I tend towards positive motivators (eg: buffs, challenges, 'free' resources) over negative ones (weapon degradation), except where there's a thematic / emotional / mechanical reason to specifically go negative.