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Can We Actually Make Exotic Weapons... Exotic? | Semi-Ramblomatic (Patreon)

Published:
2026-05-21 15:44:17
Imported:
2026-05

Content

This week's episode of Semi-Ramblomatic is now available!

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Can We Actually Make Exotic Weapons... Exotic? | Semi-Ramblomatic

This video is brought to you by Ember, the digital roleplaying game world and TTRPG system from the creators of Foundry VTT: https://foundryvtt.com/ember Video game weapons have a utility issue. Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/SecondWindGroup Second Wind Merch: https://shop.secondwindgroup.com/

Comments

SCP 3887B

This assumes all players want to maximize efficiency over novelty. In something like CoD multi-player I get that being the focus. But in Mouse PI, that is already heavy in the novelty of its setting, there will be players who don't care about what can kill something faster, when they can have cartoon shenanigans with the classic dropping of the piano. I'd say you could see this as an alternate argument to the eternal "Should Drak Souls have an easy mode". One of the best point to that argument is its a single player game (mostly), so if someone else is having fun, why should you care? If all devs went for efficiency above all as their focus, then games will be even more similar to each other then they currently are.

Robert Bevill

I'd say the BFG-9000 succeeds because of the limited ammo - you're encouraged to only use it in specific scenarios, where you're given a big cathartic moment every time it happens. And while it's not a shooter, I always appreciated the Spider-Man mechanic where if an enemy was close to a wall, you could spam web shots and glue them to it permanently, creating an incentive to consider positioning during a battle.

rhekke

To me, "Why Not Use A Gun" is less a criticism of weapons, and more an observation on the stagnancy of the game mechanics for shooters. Mega Man has spent decades playing around with ways to make alternate weapons interesting and useful, with varying results.

Sharien

i think the point he was making isnt that they shouldnt have those options - but that they should put in a bit more design thought as to what unique niche those options should fill like for example with the anvils? make them cause cartoon shenanigans if you pull it off - you know some way that an anvilled enemy causes a bit of a rube goldberg effect that impairs or eliminates other enemies in a hilarious way also yeah sometimes just the visual novelty is enough to fill a niche as you said - doesnt always have to be purely mechanical its also a good consideration when it comes to status effects (like with the freeze guns) - a lot of games have great engines for control through status effects and then completely ruin that by making direct attacks just significantly better than interacting with the system - pokemon is a classic example... unless you are doing special challenges - there is never any reason to use status or setup moves... just pick the elemental counter and oneshot the opponent (or twoshot if unusually durable) but there is a pretty solid system of status effects and stat modifiers underneath that... but its mostly utilized as an annoyance for the player (because those effects are persistant on the player but enemies are one and done fights, so they dont care) rather than a tactical tool and that kind of problem is really common - and thinking about that question might help design around it (in pokemon the question would be "why not just do damage?") and the point of the question isnt to discourage adding interesting stuff - its to actually keep in mind that you need to design a working system around it

Raven xtreme

At least Half-Life 2 waited a while before giving you the Shotgun, letting you get used to the "Exotic" but actually useful Gravity gun beforehand, now granted I know that was more Valve showcasing their physics system by letting you basically use telekinesis with practically unlimited ammo provided there's enough objects laying around.

Ultraczar

I love how saying the acronym for WNJUAG has more syllables than just saying Why Not Just Use A Gun. Saves writing time but not speaking time. So Yahtz kind of played himself with having to say it a lot.

Jakob Hjorth Hansen

How does an indirect weapon like a grenade launcher fit in? I like it in half life except when I accidentally use while facing a wall....

Jakob Hjorth Hansen

Perhaps worth exploring the same concept, but in RPGs. Like cyberpunk or fallout where you build additional bonuses apart from player skill

Andrew Hannon-Rizza

I don't know why, but for some reason my mind jumped to the Unreal Tournament Bio-Rifle. It was functionally a kind of shotgun, but if the goo missed your target, it would leave behind a damaging puddle that enemies can walk into. Which of course brings to mind that the video focused mostly on a specific 3 factors of a gun while ignoring other kinds of functionality. Things like debuffing enemies, buffing yourself, creating traps/hazards/walls, distractions, or even mobility (the Rocket jump being an example even from Quake)

JDINCINERATOR

Yahtzee spoke about exotic weapons in videogames but never mentioned the Ratchet And Clank because they're the epitome of unique exotic weaponry in videogames.

Paul Hofmann

High damage, lowish rate of fire, really low accuracy (slow projectile + arcing trajectory)

Paul Hofmann

You are not alone, I thought of it too. Epic really loved the concept, it was in Unreal 1 as well and it was the same kind of useless. Yes you can create a very temporary minefield against an incoming Skjaar but WNJUAG if there is a burely dude running at you with two knifes for hands? Maybe shooters NEED bad guns in order to keep the main attraction, the JUAG, fresh . Limited ammo forces you away from the MP5 in HalfLife or the Chaingun in Quake II and has you try the strange stuff like biogun or the razer. And then you find that big box o' bullets and you can whip out the minigun again :-)

Adam K. Foote

Yahtzee I think you're stepping on your own point about pets when you pretty much immediately then say ~I really like making the enemies fight for me~ that's just pet mechanics with more steps. - Overall I think this is just a symptom of approaching a game with the intention of experiencing a broad sample as quickly as possible so you can review it instead of playing it to enjoy the activity; optimizing for done instead of fun. Now I need to go watch that video about Yahtzee doesn't know how to have fun anymore because this is my sentiment here.

Adam K. Foote

The Electropylon Driver from Returnal is probably my favorite exotic. It fires metal stakes into anything and when it's in range of another one they have an electrical arc between them and you can very quickly build a web of electricity that can be a devastating obstacle. What makes it useful across situations though is that when you stake an enemy they receive damage from the pylons it connects to, so you can put one stake in a mobile enemy and make a huge chain of tethers or for a very strong enemy it lets you add damage and set up traps from safety. Also it looks, sounds, and feels very satisfying and chonky.

Tippis

To be fair, the Skaarj was sort of the answer to WNJUAG in and of themselves, since they would happily evade anything that wasn't a hit-scan weapon, and by the time you enough ammo for those to deal effectively with the Skaarj, they immediately hit back by getting beefy or using shields. You want them dead, NOW, and even a minigun will be a bit too slow for comfort. So indirect-fire weapons that don't trigger their dodge become the best way of dealing with them or at least interrupting them and the bio rifle worked wonders for that. Or the alt-mode Flak cannon. Or the razor jack — no amount of dodging will help when the entire room is filled with head-cutting bouncy blades :D

Tippis

What about a gun that fires shurikens and lightning? Or a gun in the exotic weapon category that shoots viruses or worms, and do lots of damage to bio-engineered horrors using other bio-engineered horrors as ammo?

OSchmitt

Shout out for the guns in Resistance Fall of Man. Game 3 had what yatzee called the Jimi Hendrix Gun back in ZP days. I mostly played game 1, and on the higher difficulty, you had to use every weapon to the fullest, partly cause you didn’t have enough ammo otherwise!

OSchmitt

I still remember that ZP episode from way back.

Swift Justice

Pokemon oddly enough has the setup and status powers be a lot more relevant both in competitive multiplayer, given how almost unique actually reliable status effects are in JRPGs, and in capturing Pokemon, since they both make wild Pokemon less dangerous and also increase the capture likelihood. (With even some risk-reward, as the highest bonus comes from poison and burn, but those also cause ongoing damage that will eventually KO the Pokemon you're trying to capture)

Swift Justice

There's a lot to be said about opportunity cost and positioning as mechanics, which also depends a lot on what you're fighting and how they act. Bulletstorm way back has been said to have clashing design aspects, where you're given lots of spectacular area weapons like huge shotguns but not nearly enough enemies at once to actually justify using them.

Swift Justice

Shooters having deliberately bad guns reminds me of the dear ol' Klobb. Goldeneye in particular had a limited set of weapons at a time, both in singleplayer and multiplayer, so you'd sometimes have to use whatever you could find. The Bio-Rifle description reminds me that's how pretty much every weapon in Splatoon works, as territory control and area denial is a core mechanic of the game as much as shooting is. (and both players and enemies tend to go down quickly under sustained fire of anything) Combine that with weapons having specific selections of sub-weapons and special weapons, and they've all got a distinct playstyle.

Swift Justice

I was thinking the same thing; unleashing a pet on enemies is very much advantageous because of the assumption the pet will be handling enemies in that area and giving you the opportunity to deal with other things, or provide supporting fire. That said, I think this might be specifically a reference to implementations in particular games where it basically is just an exotic projectile fired at someone.

Thomas Daniel Robertson

Armed and Dangerous (an enjoyable daft shooter from decades ago) had some fun stuff on this line - like the landshark gun, which fired a burrowing landshark that would burst out under people and eat them. Or the anti-grav tool which just reversed gravity and made all nearby enemies fly off into the sky as you desperately clung to the ground. Were they the most efficient? Prolly not, but they were weird and creative enough to be goos fun, especially for something I got for a fiver in a Game discount bin.

Douglas Wykstra

The circular boomerang blade in the Turok games was a fun exotic weapon, and had a fairly unique balance, and a fun mechanic. I always liked when it would miss an enemy only to get them from behind on the return. One cheap-but-effective way to encourage playing a shooter for reasons other than maximal efficiency is a scoring system that rewards novelty, giving you more points for environmental or exotic-weapon kills. It's always been a little surprising how few shooter since, like, Serious Sam seem to take the pure-arcade approach. The last one I can remember is probably Bulletstorm, which was fun but didn't exactly set the world on fire.

StephieF

You can hate the writing all you want but I personally find the variety of exotic guns in the Borderlands games a lot of fun. I've found more than a few of them that manage to make me laugh and be satisfying to use.

Aaron

High on Life? With the sentient guns and the one that fires little aliens that attack your enemies?

Kelley Kirven

Was waiting for painkiller the whole video...