Meaningful Customization & Balance via Tradeoff Decisions

[Malorn]

Originally Posted by CutterJohn

Why?

Because "meaningful customization" wouldn't have much meaning if everyone could switch those customizations on a dime to whatever situation they are in. Some level of commitment to a speclization is what makes it meaningful and makes a specialist interesting. That isn't to say you are stuck with it, but I'm imagining something along the lines of PS1 implants. You can change them whenever you want, but there's a bit of inconvenience that lends you to generally run with the same ones most of the time. That makes it a real tradeoff.

Presumably you won't be able to fit all upgrades at the same time, so there will be tradeoffs.

You know what they say about assumptions. I'm giving the explicit feedback that your presumption is not only important, but essential to having that system work in a way that is meaningful and balanced for the game.

Originally Posted by EASyEightyEight

Eh, this sounds like it's already in game to some degree.

Weapon attachments are one form of this, but I'm talking much more broadly than only being able to have one type of weapon sight.

If you played EVE, the way I'm seeing this is that a player's character is like a ship in EVE with different slots for augmentations. For example, you might have two "high slots" that are for damage/survivability type augmentations. You unlock them with the cert tree and put what you want there. You could have a set of "medium slots" for mobility/miscellaneous things that aren't direct damage/survivability, such as runspeed or vehicle handling, ammo carrying capacity, that sort of thing. Then you have your "low slots" for quality of life things like reducing MAX/vehicle timer, maybe lowering resource costs of specific types of upgrades, that sort of thing.

And of course then you have your resource-consuming upgrades like your weapon, MAX suit, tank, aircraft, etc that you customize.

So there's weapon/vehicle/max customizations that cost resources and then there's player character customizations that agument your play style which operate similar to implants - you pick them and can change them but only at specific places.

That's more or less the concept in a few paragraphs.