merge similar guns into one with more customisation

[cooonips]

a picture tells a thousand words, so ill start with that. these are all guns available for TR heavy assault

these are all nearly identical. not just visually, but they also sound and feel the same. the only difference is slightly different stats. it seems like a waste of space on the gun shopping screen.



(yes, i did just screenshot the gun previews and slap them together in paint.)

Hopefully by looking at this picture you should be able to see the issue: Lots of identical guns!!!1! so instead of having all of those, it should just be one gun that represents them all. that gun would then have a selection of upgrades to choose from, like they have on the class upgrades where u choose between flack armor, or nanoweave armor ect ect... it is much better that way than to have a whole pile of classes like:

"heavy assault with less health but faster sheild regen"
"heavy assault with more armor but carries less ammo"
"engineer but with extra shields"
"some other stupid class"

that would just be silly, but then thats what they have with the guns. it would be much tidier to have that all under one gun, and have a upgrade that say trades accuracy for more damage. these upgrades dont have to be stats only aswell, they could have visual differences too, like changing what the grip looks like, which is about the only visual difference on these guns anyway.

it may not seem so bad at the moment, but im also thinking about when there is more guns added in the future (assuming there will be), and then all those guns may have variations too. that would be like maximum clutter

of course having lots of different guns is part of encoraging people to buy station cash to unlock guns with it being free to play and all, but i dont see any reason why these upgrades shouldnt be purchasable with station cash... well except for those who complain about pay to win.

while changing this after release could potentially cause a bit of strife, just think about what it will be like in the not to distant future when more guns are added. i don't really want to be sifting through 40 or so guns for a class just to find the one i want.

time for a TL;DR version / summary:
rather than having lots of variations of the same gun, just have one gun instead that can be modified in ways that change the stats. variations of guns will bring extra clutter if/when more are added.