Ultrasonic knife
It's just cool and themely

1. All the combat messages. Each 'attack' has several messages. What you see, what the victim sees, what other people see. Each weapon has 5-10 attacks.

2. The balancing against other : each attack has modifiers, and a skill level requirement so it has to be balanced against the other attacks on the weapon.

3. The balancing against other weapons in its class (guns for example): Where does this weapon stand in terms of damage and usability against other weapons in its class? Where is it supposed to stand? How much should it cost? How available should it be?

4. The balancing against all other weapons: Where does this weapon stand in terms of damage and usability against other types of weapons? Is it now the best weapon in the game? What does it cost? How available should it be? Do we need to rebalance an entire class or classes of weapons? Have we created an escalation problem? Have we now disadvantaged everyone using a different weapon?

I think really cool weapons are awesome-- but one thing I've learned is that they can throw the entire game out of balance. My focus has been more on specific items that offer specific advantages that can be counteracted by other specific items.

Examples:

1. SIC Triangulator & SIC Jammer

2. Sonic grenades & Sonic Dampener

3. Security Gear & Spraypaint

Personally, I think these add more depth to the game without unbalancing the whole thing.

Don't take this as me shutting down this conversation, but more of an explanation of where my personal focus typically lies when it comes to adding new weapons to the game. I think of each of these things as a weapon in the toolkit of a prepared character, the same way a sword or a pistol would be.

Adding a mono-blade or an ultrasonic knife would be cool-- but how do we deal with the fact that it's not severing limbs on each attack? Or through someones skull when they are hit in the head resulting in an insta kill?

Most of you who've done combat for a while know it follows a pretty straight forward D&D style system of attacks doing some amount of damage, but we don't have 'insta kill' or automated coded limb loss currently.

We do have a gun that shoots darts that upon hitting someone reduces their stats, like a poison and I think stuff like that is pretty cool and more out of the box than simply escalating the damage that an existing or new weapon might due.

I'm also open to hearing how we might address some of the points raised in this post about more cyberpunk weaponry.

As someone who only made 2 firearms for the game, it is a labor of love man, slither is totally on point.

Futuristic weapons would be outstanding though. I often look at this ; http://cyberpunk.asia/index.php?lng=us and just imagine how much more themely it could be, but you work with what you got because what you got honestly isn’t bad and is all subjective to personal tastes.

I thought a cool way to introduce a new weapon into the game could be done icly by picky giving a corpie R&D character the format oocly, let the player spend their time on it, submit it to staff for oversight, then spend time field testing it in the game through monitored excursions by corpsec or hired solo’s for the explicit purpose of field testing to better tweak and balance. No matter how you cut it though you it’s a task that a lot of people need to be willing to undertake while you also have bigger undertakings being worked on.

In the same sense, armor could use revisiting with desc as things like the Protek dress are notoriously bland which means it sees little usage, and I know that it'd be easy to outsource with players jumping at the chance to make themselves look more badass.

Whilst weapons development is being discussed though I'd like to take the time to ask about where Heavy Weaponry is in the development stages? My understanding at the moment is that once upon a time it was available in game but was taken out for rebalancing (hence the skill still exists to invest UE in). How far along is it in development now and what factors are affecting its re-implementation? Only asking out of sheer curiosity so please don't feel too pressured to answer and let me know if there needs to be a separate thread for that one.