Intended design choice or something to be fixed?
Weapons having forced animations you have to go through do make sense in some scenarios, main example of when it comes to reloading for example; if you’ve not switched magazines yet in the animation before you have quickswapped off the weapon midway through reload animation, forcing the player to go through that segment of the animation again does make sense. It sounds reasonable for the new magazine to be actually loaded into your weapon and you can skip the rest of the animation when you see that ammo counter get full again.
Now on to the plasma gun, firing is cut into charging, firing and recoil segments of animation, whether it is a quick shot or a charged shot. Plasma gun is a fast weapon to equip to take a powerful penetrative shot with even during melee combat before switching to your melee weapon again to block or get back to swinging.
Now if for whatever reason you have made the mistake of immediately switching off from your plasma gun after firing, the next time you either begin a charged shot or a quick shot, you will immediately at the very beginning of the shot have to go through the entire remaining part of recoil animation segment you skipped, often without realizing you had skipped it. This makes your first shot kick your aim off wildly by however much of recoil animation you had left from previous time firing the weapon. This is a guaranteed way to always miss your first shot way off from where you aimed on quick shots.
The only way safely take the recoil hit is by charging your weapon for a second to check if there’s any recoil animation kick left to go through between engagements or being forced to have your first shot be a charged shot just in case so you can re-adjust your aim through the recoil before firing. Alternatively need to maintain awareness if you quickswapped or not during recoil animation or always wait for the recoil animation to end before switching off of the plasma gun. Or be a madman and estimate how much recoil animation you have left and try to aim off your target by that much.
The above is personally not a good design choice if intended, on an already challenging weapon if you want to maintain good heat management until you run out of fuel in your fuel cell and if you need to quickly take out sniper, you really don’t want your first shot to recoil kick three times the height of the sniper above him. The recoil being a forced animation segment the player will have to go through no matter what, and only while the weapon is firing, makes for a very clunky gameplay that can become frustrating. It is fully capable weapon to have fun in high intensity damnation, but as an example:
Walking with the plasma gun equipped in your hand without issue for a minute and when taking a shot, suddenly your weapon recoils seemingly without reason before any plasma has even left from the barrel of the gun, which is now bound for the ceiling above your intended target because a minute ago you quickswapped after the shot and forgot you had done so, is not only annoying but at times, even lethal.
Intended, or something to be fixed. Personally I hope for the latter, but am more than happy to hear if this is intended, why it should remain so instead of removing it from being an animation forced upon people despite the clunkiness and uncomfortable gameplay it creates.
Ps. Good work on the base game design and best of luck going forward with the patches and community changes on the game you’ve been up to after the holidays. Despite the difficulties and delays at the beginning, this game can and hopefully will be a wonder to behold with an amazing lifetime with work and effort.
Yuhwa out.