DevBlog - Energy Weapons (Patreon)

So, I've had a week off on family vacation, which means a week away from my pc, so no update on the prerelease. I am still looking for feedback on how the direct hit and bastion change feels. It's not a certainty that it's coming to the full list, very much still an experiment at this stage.


In between chasing a toddler around a pool trying to apply more sunscreen so she doesn't fry like the cutest slice of bacon ever, I've been thinking about the distribution of energy weapons and ammo. Yeah, I know, I may have a problem disconnecting. Anyway. Ballistic weapons have a really good distribution on LitR, with Arsenal giving weapons a bit more of a defined niche. Pistol, manual and auto all have their own ammo progression. But energy weapons are still the lazy, one-size-fits-all solution from vanilla. I've been thinking through options to fix that...


Laser weapons are relatively simple, just bring back Energy Cells for laser pistols, leave fusion cells for manual laser rifles (plus a small tweak to vanilla lasers to reduce the firing rate a little), and make Automatics use Electron charge packs. There's already an excellent mod for a laser pistol, and it's pretty easy to disable pistol grips on the vanilla laser and slow down it's fire rate, as well as make the institute version fully automatic , or I could just add a caliber swap on the automatic barrel. 


The problem, is plasma weapons.


Vanilla plasma has the same universal platform as lasers, however there isn't a precedent from older games for splitting plasma cartridges into 3 new ammo types (pistol plasma, rifle plasma, auto plasma). I'm also not convinced adding an additional two variant ammo types brings that much to the game here. In previous fallout games plasma weapons were effectively variant users of laser ammo. I cound do that here, and just remove plasma cartridges completely, however that does leave us with plasma weapons with reload animations featuring a non existent ammo type. Not the end of the world, but confusing for players who aren't aware of the change.


So what do people think. Does plasma ammo variants for pistol, rifle, and auto make sense? Or does more ammo types than we already have sound excessively complicated? Does the reload animation not matching the ammo type bother you as much as it does me?