Ranged Weapon Animations Make No Sense - Slide Racking On Equip & Partial Reloads, Lasguns With Slides?

There are many instances where the animations that play for the ranged weapons make no sense and feel bad.

PROBLEMS WITH CONVENTIONAL FIREARMS (bolters, autoguns, stubbers, etc):

  • Racking the slide every time you switch back to your weapon, even if it has already been loaded and the slide has been racked, so a round should already be in the chamber

  • Racking the slide when reloading from a partial magazine (tactical reloading), again there should already be a round in the chamber and so it makes zero sense to rack the slide and feels bad

PROBLEM WITH LASGUNS:

  • Lasguns have a cocking handle and slide to chamber a round? Why on earth, when slamming a new powerpack home into a lasgun, is there a slide to rack at all? It’s an energy weapon. I am not a lore expert but my understanding was the entire POINT of the design of the lasgun was that it had an absolute minimum of moving parts. In the lore, do lasguns really have you racking a slide in order to prepare the first round of a new powerpack? How? Why?

SOLUTIONS FOR CONVENTIONAL FIREARMS:

  • There should be a shorter reload animation for a conventional firearm if reloading from a non-empty magazine. The slide should not be racked; a round is already chambered. Also consider adding +1 round to the weapon in this instance; the extra round that is in the chamber already.

  • Animations for equipping ranged weapons are deliberately a certain length for balance reasons, but please make a new animation of the same length that doesn’t involve nonsensically racking the slide - this should only happen when reloading from dry.

SOLUTION FOR LASGUNS:

  • IF my point about the lasguns is valid - (someone please confirm who knows more about the lore) - animations should not involve racking a slide at any point. If I’m right, there shouldn’t even be a slide? Again, I’m not claiming to know for sure on this one, but it makes no sense to me.

From the wiki:
Capture

^ This is the Kantrael. Note the complete lack of a cocking handle or slide. Lasgun | Warhammer 40k Wiki | Fandom

Capture2

^ The Lucius, same thing. Lasgun | Warhammer 40k Wiki | Fandom

I can’t see one on any of the other images on the wiki or elsewhere either. They should be removed entirely as far as I can see, and animations changed accordingly. Again: The new animations can be the same length for balance purposes.

The environment design is so beautiful and flawless, so why this bizarre change to the lasgun which makes it feel like a weapon someone modded into Fallout 4 and used the stock animations for it?

EDIT - Having played a lot more (30 SS 30 Zealot), I since noticed that I think FS have tweaked some of these animations for lasguns like the Kantrael - it feels a lot better now. It’s more obvious we’re adjusting a switch, and you don’t mess with it at all on equip!

We still have the problem of the slide racking on bolters and autoguns - that is the main thing from this post now.

40 Likes

I think you’re totally right, and this applies to Autoguns and several other ranged weapons as well. It makes switching to ranged in a tense moment even more punishing because you have to wait for the racking animation to finish.

If the frakking thing’s already racked, why do we have to rack it twice?

Maybe the dev team hasn’t actually used guns before or something. Seems like a simple fix to me, though. Unfortunately it isn’t exclusive to the Lasguns.

15 Likes

It does feel like whoever made the animations for these weapons doesn’t really understand firearms unfortunately, and while you can usually hand wave that away in some futuristic settings, it doesn’t work in 40k.

I’ve amended my original post to make better distinction between my points about conventional firearms and my point about lasguns.

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If this was COD or a milsim I’d be more behind this feedback but it seems clear this implementation is for gameplay balance purposes.

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If you had read the post you’d see I carefully worded my feedback and suggestions such that they completely respect the existing balance design.

It is extremely easy to decouple these animation changes from any question of balance, because you don’t need to replace them with animations of a different length. The only exception is for tactical (partial) reloading, which would actually be a good balance change. Not only does it make physical sense, but the player should be rewarded for managing their ammunition well.

And to suggest the game has to be a milsim in order to deserve animations that make sense is just a non-sequitur. And actually the point of my feedback is to make the weapons feel less like we’re playing CoD, and more like we’re in the 40k universe. The weapons should feel real and believable, and behave as they do in 40k.

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Seconding this. The racking animation every time you pull out your ranged is immersion-breaking and completely shatters the flow of combat.

On the energy weapons point, I could accept the use of a safety switch to complete the circuit between weapon and power pack, but what they have right now is just… dumb.

Take a page out of the breech loading airguns you find at carnivals: most have a safety switch at the breech you need to click in which prevents compressed air from entering the barrel. Just put one on the side of the lazgun that locks the magazine in and turns the light green.

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This so much, plus no crafting/rerolling system, dodges stopping stamina regeneration, slower movement, range enemies AI (release beastmen archers anyone??).

Sometimes I feel like this is different studio that made Darktide. Like litererally they make worse every single thing that made Vermintide 2 great and repeating same mistakes they did back in V2 (Beastmen archers…).

I feel like they totally missed why we loved Closed Beta…

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I don’t understand why this is even an issue. It worked great in VT2 (yea yea, “dIFfEReNt gAmE” blah blah blah) where if you were paying attention you could hit Q and quickly shoot a special but now they want to market buzzwords like “hybrid combat” but then they go and make the combat clunky as hell? Same with movement. VT2 felt so smooth with the shove-dodge-swing dance but DT feels like everyone is an Ogryn with 3 left feet.

From all the various changes we’ve seen since closed beta, it looks like a lot of stuff is “balance for the sake of balance because these spreadsheets I made said the balance wasn’t balanced, fun not allowed”. It’s a coop game ffs, not a competitive e-sport

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I agree with not having to rack the slide on swapping to a gun every time, it gets old and it very quickly “dulls the eyes” so to speak, like saying the same word over and over makes it lose meaning. However, I don’t agree with the other two things - always racking the weapon on reload (with a caveat), and the lasgun lever (though it’s just a lever, there’s no moving slide).

Darktide, for whatever reason or another, doesn’t support the ability to +1 guns, i.e. you will always end up with the exact same magazine capacity every time you reload, empty mag or not. Once you take that gameplay mechanic into account, the animations are correct. IMO just making the reload shorter when reloading mid-mag would undoubtedly annoy people even more since it would be half-baked - either go the full distance and implement a +1 mechanic alongside tactical reloads, or leave it alone.

As for the lever on the side of the lasgun, the way I see it, it’s basically a safety that opens or closes power to the firing capacitors (this is my own viewpoint, I don’t know if this is actually stated in any writing). When you pull the mag, power is disconnected and capacitors discharged automatically so when you insert the mag, there’s no potential arcing happening that could damage the magazine, the weapon, or yourself depending on the materials the frame is made of. Hit the lever to open up power again. I don’t get this anal viewpoint people have about lore - if it evolves in a manner that makes sense, I’m all for it.

@TheSoldier - I agree with much of what you say, but 3 things:

  1. My suggestions are predicated less upon lore and more upon the fact that the animations feel silly. It just so happens that the animations also go against the lore afaict, which makes it even more compelling to change them.

  2. The solution to nonsensical reload animations for partial reloads is not to say “Well they don’t correctly model a round being chambered in the weapon anyway, so we should do everything else wrong too”. The solution to what you mentioned here is to have the separate animation for a partial reload I suggested, and add 1 more round to the weapon in this instance. That part is trivial to implement (I’m not talking out of my behind here, I write code for a living). It also poses a minimal and, in my opinion, beneficial balance change. The game already heavily favours melee in its current state.

  3. The last point you make is, not meaning to be rude, just you inventing a ‘macguffin’ about how lasguns work, post-hoc in order to justify the existing implementation. It doesn’t change how it feels, or what it looks like, which is just ‘off’. If it exists in lore, eh, ok I guess, I’d still like to see a better animation that doesn’t look exactly like you’re pulling a charging handle on a modern day assault rifle, using a handle that doesn’t exist in any picture of a lasgun I can find. It makes playing the Veteran Sharpshooter feel like you’re playing “Warhammer 40k: Call of Darktide”.

What matters most to me is not the lore, it’s that the current animations when reloading (which you do like 100 times per game) feel annoying and jarring, it distracts from the immersion and flow of gameplay.

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This. I play game to have great gameplay. I could care less if anything is lore-accurate or “realistic” if the price I pay for it is frustrating mechanic. It supposed to be fun to play, that’s basic of video game.

Currently it’s just not fun.

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I think simply delete them is better. In V2 there is less ranged enemies but we have a qiuck sawp, and in DT theey are all ranged, and players will use worse weapons. Maybe it’s for lore but I do not think lore is more important than gane-play.

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Whilst I understand the lore/realism aspect not working, I think it does “look cool” and the tension/waiting time to switch I feel is a voluntary design choice.
I could, however, be a different animation.

For the lasguns: I imagine it being a securing mecanism for the power pack, not sliding a new round in the chamber.

Quite right. I have a thread on the autogun I’ll link below.

The thing is, this is really obviously a way for the devolopers to nerf ranged to give melee some degree of importance. Ranged is superior to melee in almost every way in real life and the reasons it’s superior also exist in the game. The devolopers are actively attempting to put speed bumps in the way of ranged.

That isn’t good, it’s bad, what is almost intolerable is the speed bumps are in every way as obviously wrong for the designs as this car:

cargun
Not only do they fail to conform to the absolutely necessary design elements of the autoguns, it is just plain annoying to set up a weapon, and have to do it again a half second later.

For the lasgun, I took some time to get some photos of one on the previous closed beta, and they have added a switch. It looks like an AK style dust cover pointed the other way, and also there’s a thumb safety. Made me think of the galil so I made up this image.

At least some of the time this large switch is what you are operating, but when just going melee/lasgun/melee/lasgun it’s unclear because the movement ‘feels’ like a hard pull, not a push down.

Autogun thread is here, with video.

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IIRC there are a number of paterns of lasguns with charging handles so as to stay as close to the terran roots as possible (ie, autoguns) so that guardsmen can, in a pinch, still effectively use those weapons. Lorewise anyway, that makes sense. My bigger issue with lasguns is that they show misleading charge amounts/ammo counts. Instead of that being the total number of shots per mag/in reserve (which would make sense as there’s a reason tougher enemies like orks call them ‘flashlights’) they instead shoot a variable amount (typically 2-3 ammo per shot)

If they are supposed to be ‘hotshot’ lasguns like Kasrkn Storm Troopers use (which have some serious stopping power to them) then they’d need to be accompanied by a backpack power pack (honestly I feel like this would have been a better choice to bolters as typically, unaugment normal humans can only handle bolt pistols, lore wise)

Lasguns in the lore have variable power setting. The higher setting take more power from the cell and in the TTRPGs that is modled exactly as they have here by taking more than one ammo per shot. Its not misleading its lore correct. A hotshot or Hellgun is a completely different kind of lasgun. The ammo per just needs to be listed on the infographic for the weapon.

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I don’t disagree so much as I find that would require a system other then just “Ammo”

It wouldn’t be hard to program the cogitator to convert ‘percentage of power remaining’ into ‘number of shots remaining’ instead of saying ‘80 ammo, but not really.’

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For the lasgun you can charge up, sure, that’s fine. For the ones that don’t do that though it’s simply misleading as we don’t get the option to change the power per shot. Same with the Heavy Las pistol too iirc as I’m pretty sure it burns 2 ammo pershot, and does this weird diagonal ADS thing too

This is becoming derailed, there are other threads about numerical ammo representation in the UI; this thread is about the animations that play when equipping guns and reloading them from a partial magazine.

Having played some more, I think most of the lasguns are fine, but the Kantrael has this same ‘slide racking’ animation problem the conventional firearms have (detailed in the OP).

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@Astronomer I feel like you’re not really reading what I’m saying. I addressed pretty much all your critical points already. I’ll just reiterate them.

  1. The important thing to me is there’s nothing inherently wrong about racking the weapon after a reload - you can do that, it wouldn’t break the gun, and while it’s not efficient in terms of what a real person would do, current game mechanics line up with the end results. Therefore I’m not fussed about it, and I’d rather have a complete mechanic rather than one half-baked. Furthermore, trivial though you may deem it, just because you write code for a living doesn’t give you authority to say what’s easy and what isn’t for the studio.

  2. I feel like you’re being intentionally rude here, because I did in fact say this was just something I came up with. It doesn’t look off to me, it’s just a lever that acts like a safety. You also use lore as a justification, then go on in the very next paragraph saying lore isn’t important. Throwing some mixed signals.