I believe the weapon upgrades (when you upgrade from the pistol to the dual pistols, uzi and sawed off) should be modified
But I mainly say this because of one reason alone:
Once you get the uzi, the sawed-off shotgun isn’t a viable option alone
I know that seems a bit silly, but when I used the sawed off, I could barely kill any zombies when using it, and the slow fire rate was making it a chore to fire, even at close range when the damage should be higher, it didn’t do much damage; where as with the Uzi, it was stupidly fast, did fair amounts of damage, and honestly felt like a machine gun, not to mention it kills the boss really, really quickly when you’re not attacking zombies.
So, I have a few ideas
Add a final upgrade, that is like a slot machine of sorts, and you can pick a weapon from 3 (or re-roll once)
Replace the sawed-off with a better shotgun/different gun (Maybe the M4A1?)
Decrease the Uzi’s fire-rate and damage to make it less crazy against zombies and the boss
Get rid of the dual pistols, making it go pistol > uzi > sawed-off, then to another gun entirely
Make the sawed-off do more damage to make up for it’s slow fire-rate
Maybe i’m just terrible with the sawed-off, who knows, maybe someone can convince me that no, the sawed-off is actually great and the uzi is the bad one, but in my experience, it just feels better to go with the uzi, and maybe that’s just a personal preference, but i’ll never truly know until I post this
I agree, I never upgrade past the Uzi now because the shotgun doesn’t do as well.
I’d add another possible option: Make a weapon tree. So you start with pistol but you can choose a path like dual-wield pistols, single uzi or shotgun, then from those there’s like, duel uzis, duel shotguns, higher calibre pistols. I think it’d be more interesting since players could pick which route they want to take.
And maybe included in the tree could be some special class based weapons. examples;
Merc can unlock Dual Desert Eagles, can shoot through multiple zombies.
Electrician gets Tasers, regular damage but slows zombies.
Doctor gets needle guns, saps life and feeds to nearby allies.
etc.
Default weapons could do with spicing up for sure, and I think it would be cool if everyone had something slightly different.
However that sounds like they’d have to either increase the amount of days (because there’s only 5, excluding the boss round because you can’t spend your points after that), or increase the point (not units) payout because, unless you’re playing solo mode, you’re not getting many points (and even then, in solo your points are usually spread about because everything is usually pretty expensive)
I love the sound of a weapon tree system(although I’m unsure how they would implement this, upgrade store maybe?)
If they did add some sort of weapon tree system, I personally think it would be wise to have it branch off at third tier to keep it simple so you would start off with the handgun leading to the duel handguns and then your next two upgrades would depend on your personal weapon preference.
A few route examples could be…
SMGs: Duel Handguns -> Uzi -> MP5
Specialty Handguns: Duel Handguns -> Auto Pistol -> Hand Cannon
Shotguns: Duel Handguns -> Sawed-Off -> Tactical Pump
(The Sawed-Off might need some tweaking)
Some example stats for these example weapons could be…
MP5
More powerful than the Uzi but with a slightly slower firerate
20-26 base damage
Auto Pistol (Glock 18C)
Faster firerate than the Uzi but much weaker in power
12-14 base damage
Hand Cannon (Desert Eagle)
About half the firerate of the handgun but far more powerful
40-50 base damage
Tactical Pump (Mossberg 590/Remington 870 with Magpul Furniture)
Slightly faster firerate than the Sawed-Off & more powerful than the Sawed-Off
17-21 base damage per shot
I thought it over and I figured it might actually be a smarter idea to branch off at the final weapon to keep things simple, I figured the final weapon is what people would care about most and it would also be less hard on the guys over at PixelTail
So instead of my previous idea, it would simply be…
Handgun -> Duel Handguns -> Uzi -> “Signature/Final Weapon”
They could keep the Sawed-Off as the default Final weapon, but there would be alternate options to change the final weapon for those who would prefer something that fits their style like an MP5
(some could even be merely cosmetic like a KSG instead of a Sawed-Off)
What are people’s thoughts on this idea?
This idea is much better
The previous idea was better
I like the previous one better(but I would be happy with this one)
I do like the weapon branching. I think we should explore that in some update soon. Making new weapons for ZM isn’t as difficult as it is for Virus.
I wanted to do unique weapons for each class. I was thinking if we ever did a campaign map, they’d have their own set of starter weapons. They’d have one ranged weapon and one melee weapon at one time.
For example:
Doctor: Medic Gun / Axe Mercenary: M4A1 / Katana Survivor: Magnum / Baseball Bat Scientist: Uzi / Sedgehammer Electrician: Double Barrel / Retro Guitar (though I do like the taser idea) Journalist: Crossbow / Sword (crossbow needs improvement though)
