OK I have been plagued by this for a while but wtf is with HM giving the autobots and decepticons guns that use bullets? Is anyone else bothered at all by this?


I think the weapons need a major upgrade in this game.

No ammo counter unless its for weapons like the scrapmaker or missile launchers, energy weapons should use a charge meter and a cool down phase should replace the reload feature.

Guns:

Ion Blaster: orange bolts of energy, more accurate than fusion cannon, moderate damage and no splash damage, capable of firing quick succession of shots, rapid firing will decrease accuracy.

Energon Pistol: small purple laser bolts, lower damage than what is has now, larger round capacity, higher accuracy.

Energon Assault rifle: large purple lasers bolts, medium damage, medium accuracy, same damage, larger spread during rapid fire.

Null Ray: fires a pink particle beam, very accurate, slow rate of fire, high damage.





Grenades/Mines:

Glass Gas Grenade: a grenade that release a cloud of nanobots that greatly weakens the armor of anyone caught in it.

Cluster Grenade: Releases a cluster of minibombs giving it a wider spread of damage.

Goo Mine: A mine that once triggered releases a foam that quickly hardens and become sticky, trapping anyone caught in the blast radius in a sickening sludge. Think of a fly caught in a spider web. non lethal.

 

I like your ideas on the Grenades and Mines. It'd add quite a bit of depth and mayhem to objective based multiplayer maps.



As for ammo, I always thought of them more as thermal clips (ala Mass Effect) based on comments by generic Autobot and Decepticon troopers during reload:

"My weapons need to cool off!"

"Cooling phase complete."

 

They don't bother me at all, I mean it'd be neat to have a bunch of weapons that go PEW PEW PEW! but really they do a good job and I'm not going to complain. In fact I was pretty impressed with the variety of weapons they put on the table.

 

From a gameplay perspective, most weapons having ammo makes sense, even if it doesn't make sense from a fictional perspective.

Though I do think that everyone should have one basic, fairly weak gun with infinite ammo to fall back on.

 

I never have trouble with ammo, with all the ammo beacons, ammo matrix kill streaks and ammo refills across the maps I'm never out and on the off chance I do run out I change weapons until i can grab one.

 

singleplayer ammo is a pain always seem like im running out way to fsat exp in escalation.

as for weapons being bad or what not for online play its not so much the weapons its the peoples lag who are playing that through into effect. last night there was just a touch enough of lag for me to do almost everytime with a one hit kill lol

i honestly think the weapons are ehh semi balanced just would have liked to see all classes be able to select weapons. thats my only prob.

as well as the shitty thrid set of abilities there uselesss!!

 

I don't see the issues with bullets from a game play perspective it balances it out. Also if your call with rockets why not bullets? both are projectiles

 

I'm more for laser beams and stuff with my TFs. When I read the comics I don't see Optimus's gun shooting like an smg. I just find that high moon studios is lacking in creativity by giving everyone machine guns and rocket launchers. Though I can understand rocket launchers and all, I'm just wishing for more fictional weapons.

 

Personally I think it would take away from the game play, as it would create more havoc on screen that has to be rendered, not to mention that sometimes, playing as a scientist, the beam weapons get in the way. The flashing of these weapons on screen would be distracting. I could go for some more laser like sound effects tho.

 

That's actually a very good point. It makes you wonder if they tested out having all/mostly energy weapons at one time.

 

how would the flash be distracting thats a poor point!
it can be done just dont make super large and loud looking flash!
if u look at a game like Red Faction Guerilla they use multiple beam type weapons one being a rail gun, a gauss rifle and a machine gun type enforcer gun. all with glowing ammo non of whihc distract u!


i agree i always liked the way the cartoons and comics used lasers and beams opposed to bullets.

 

Very easily. The game has drab colors. Special beams etc would probably be neon colors. In a firefight, with everybody armed with these types of weapons, there would be a bunch of colors flying around the screen, which would distract you from aiming at your target. You've obviously not been in a firefight during which multiple scientist have activated drain and are using the repair ray. It is extremely distracting from aiming at the objective. Not to mention it would slow down the action on screen... they'd have to add particle effects for when the beam hits... it'd provide more atmosphere, but most likely at the cost of some effect on the actual gaming.

Alot of shooters don't even render (ie create graphics for) the actual bullet. What you see is a shell eject from the gun, and bullets holes or contact points on objects they hit. In effect gun gives the appearance of firing a bullet, and it's result, but in the game world, there actually is no bullet. This cheat is done to lower the graphic demands on the game and increase frame rates.

Also, not making it large or noticeable defeats the point of the effect anyway. I firmly believe that if the sound effects resembled lasers, this would give the needed effect, because most people don't actually stop to look at the bullets firing from the weapon, they're to busy trying to actually hit the target.

 

Yup, I agree that they should have been energy weapons. The ammo could still run out but lasers with Transformers have always looked better than bullets.

 

u ever play star wars battlefront?....
case closed.

 

im satisfied how it is now, they can add laser and plasma weapons on top of the weapons we already have later. other weapon ideas are rail guns, flame throwers, gravity guns, goo guns, freeze rays.

 

This seems to be a matter of flavor and on that I have to agree some what with the original post. Transformers in all other media are firing energy weapons, not bullets. So here it seems odd. But mechanically what we have is fine.

What I suspect happened is that High Moon originally had a heat based weapon system. I'm picturing something Mass Effect 1-ish where heat management was the biggest issue. My evidence for this comes from a few places. First off is the dialog. No one ever says they are reloading or out of ammo. It's always something about dissipating heat. "Recharging heat sinks." "Weapons over heated." Secondly the weapons themselves become red hot as you use them and are cool again when you reload. Thirdly it just seems to fit the license better.

But there are game play elements that work better with ammo. It's the same reason Mass Effect 2 introduced it. It allows you to have BFGs with little ammo. It's a resource to be managed in a fight. And face it, it's fun to have ammo in games. That's the reason it's the norm.

So I suspect fairly late in development something wasn't working as well as they wanted, be it multiplayer or singleplayer or both. So they moved to ammo.

The ammo itself doesn't bother me but the flavor rubs me wrong. The flavor of a weapon (including model for the gun, sound effects, and visual effects) can have a great impact on the player. There are cases where the only thing changed in a game is the sound effect when the weapon fired. Testing opinions went from weapon being under powered to being very over powered when the only thing changed was the sound effect.

Personally I would keep the mechanics the same just make them seem like they are firing lasers. Justify the ammo as energon shells with a less bullet like look.

... I have a lot of ideas that I would love to implement in the game.

 

I always assumed it was energy conservation. If you really value the stuff then you probably dont want to use it as ammo.
Every other continuity has treated it as an incredibly precious resource anyway.

 

I see it as this.

That's like making a gun that shoots your food at an enemy.

 

A nearly ten year old game is your argument (or 5 years for the sequel)?  

Battlefront was good... In it's time. It also didn't have environments as in depth as this, with Gears moving in rooms etc... they were rather basic, tho solid for the time. Didn't have to support flying, driving transforming characters with customizable abilities, multiple reachable areas... Just the space for the characters themselves is extensive... each one has to have 4 modes, which can be custom colored... Robot, robot to vehicle, vehicle, and vehicle to robot. A game like battle has one model , and each have different skins. The four classes in WFC each behave and move differently. They also have to be able to change mode on the fly in any situation... more processing power eaten up. The move list for each character in Battlefront is a lot more basic. One of the failures of the online in Battlefront was the overly frantic nature of sword slashing laser blasting flashes flying over the screen while you try and aim at your target. Especially in something like WFC where you are watching for cloaked scouts and disguised Scientists... such a distraction would be annoying. Battlefront was a ranged game, with large sprawling areas. This game is an up close firefight style game.

Battlefront also had slowdown during some of those large frantic battles. From a programming standpoint, neon flashes of light to look pretty and invoke laser battles don't help your game... they hinder it. Especially in a game you want largely to be played online. They add atmosphere... and that's it. So do you lower the resolution and detail of what matters... characters and environments... to add a possibly annoying, distracting light show, that adds even more rendering work, or do you use bullets, which can do the same damage, lower rendering work, and allow you to streamline the actual gameplay? The actual sound would give the effect. If you heard the sound you would think of lasers. Once again, are you actually shooting guns during the game and looking for the weapon discharge?

I'm not even thinking about that while I'm trying to avoid getting shot and shooting people. I'm just glad that they didn't include the laser animation for nostalgia sake... a bunch of color beams and confetti looking gun blasts aren't worth bogging down gameplay. Things are already frantic enough in WFC without it.

 

Dude, I don't see how 4 ingame models and the environment are connected to laser fire being distracting. Go play a round of Mechwarrior games. You got lasers all over the place in varying kinds of environments.