Hey Fatshark, I’ve been having a great time with your game and enjoying the gameplay immensely but I have found one aspect in particular to be rather frustrating -and I think I can safely say that many players agree with me- that is, the mechanic of weapon locks. Now, I know there’s been a lot of drama and fuss over this topic and by mentioning it at all I am risking being ignored out of hand, but I would like to politely offer a suggestion for a compromise of sorts between what is clearly the design vision of the game and the player base.
Many changes have already been suggested, such as a complete removal of the mechanic, a one-time payment of diamantine to either permanently remove the lock or perhaps switch the lock to the other blessing/perk, etc. and I won’t retread those, but I would like to add another one that came to me to the brainstorming drawing board if possible: remove locks by collecting blessings.
The idea I had was that once you complete a set of blessings -by which I mean all the blessings for a particular weapon category- it would unlock the perks and blessings for all weapons in that category. So if I collect all levels of all 12 blessings that I can get on the force sword, for instance, I will be able to change any perk or blessing on any force sword freely (though still paying resources for it, of course). However, I would not have the same ability on my devil’s claw swords, at least, until I separately collect all levels of all possible blessings for that weapon category.
What do you think? It would still take some investment of time to eventually gather all these which would help with giving a purpose to end-game grind (and give a reason for acquiring lower-tier blessings of already held ones apart from completionism), it’d be loreful as can be as it could be explained by us gaining sufficiently great insight into the Omnissiah’s Wonders that would allow Hadron to make such changes at will (it might even warrant a mini-cutscene, at least for the first weapon you achieve it on, where she ‘oohs’ and ‘ahhs’ over the Knowledge we’ve obtained for her), and it would still maintain the game’s design vision. Because, frankly, they are a little redundant for maintaining item uniqueness given that the base stats are already inherently locked, so good base rating weapons will still be important and sought after.
I think it would be a fair method. At a little over 500 hours I have only just obtained my first full set (tactical axe) and only have around 60% of the total blessings and I suspect the rate of acquisition will taper significantly toward the end and likely take longer than getting all the red illusions in VT2 but still be impactful enough for players to pursue.
I admit I didn’t consider curios. Well, my solution flying by the seat of my pants would be to unlock curios once a certain number of weapon categories are fully obtained.
Hopefully, something less than all of them, lol. Maybe after 5 weapons fully unlocked? 10? Whatever the number , it would warrant a second cutscene with Hadron commending us for being actually useful for once in our varlet life, and had we, by chance, considered donating our body to the Machine God? So blessed an individual would surely make a formidably competent servo-skull.
Maybe sacrifice the curio blessings to Hadron of certain rarities to permanently got perk slots or something to make it similar to your other suggestion.
Modifier upgrades, perk selection and targeted blessing unlocks should be available regardless of how the locks are dealt with.
Here is an alternative solution regarding how to deal with locks:
Only lock perks/blessings that were put there by the player, and only if they are T4.
So as long as you use T3 or lower perks/blessings, you can change them around as often a you want.
For trying out different builds or testing a bunch of stuff, very nice.
But if you want your items at peak performance and apply T4 perks and blessings, you can then no longer change them.
So you will need multiple copies of an item if you want max power and flexibility…
This would come with the problem though, that some blessings only exist as T4 vatiant.
Also, any change to the weapon or blessings of the weapon, would potentially require a different choice to be made.
So there should be an option (expensive) to remove a lock in order to adjust a weapons perks/blessings in response to a buff/nerf/tweak.
I love the idea of unlocking weapons when you get all the blessings - and also combining this with applying locks (in the meantime) for the perk or blessing that the player applies.
The latter I’ve considered for a while a nice a compromise solution because if you want to change up a weapon blessing after you’ve applied two blessings of your choice to it, you’d have to go back to hunting for a new base item to upgrade still, instead of just being able to have a “near perfect” base stat item that you constantly swap blessings around on (which let’s admit it, would be a little bit of a pain).
I do really like the suggestion, with locks being in place in whatever form, of always being able to upgrade a locked blessing to a higher tier of the same blessing. That would be nice.
