Well, I asked to be vaulted and I was. I don't really see anything
definite from Josh in all that though; just concepts he was running with at the time, and many of them well over 5-6 months old. That's a lifetime in LT-development terms. I'm going to say that my point still holds: "Much of this depends on how sophisticated blueprints are when it comes to materials. Josh hasn't mentioned anything about blueprints for quite some time, so I'm not really sure what his thinking is these days" (though I now suspect that Josh will probably write a monster dev log tomorrow that lays out the entire concept...
).
Incidentally, that second quote ("...perhaps a few exotics as Gazz mentioned for advanced stuff") could almost be tailor made for this thread.
Hardenberg wrote:"Yaaay. Another single un-reproduceable special snowflake gun which doesn't match the tracking/projectile speed patterns of our main turret batteries. Be a dear and toss it into the "resale" bin, will you?"
What good is Zappy the Wonder Gun™ if it's outperformed by a full battery of "normal" guns and you've basically got to choose between hitting things with all guns at once, or just with Zappy because tracking and projectile speed don't match? I've grown to loathe these things. Their only use is mounting them in the den and using them as conversational pieces...
"Quite the clunker, my dear. Came across this beast in the Aldebaran sector while sawing derelicts apart for a living. Hefty punch, too, but the beam colour clashed terribly with the rest of my armaments. Fabulous particle effects, though."
Looking back, I can recall spending quite a lot of time in Freelancer with guns of variable fire rates and projectile speeds. Sometimes the loadout wouldn't even be symmetric
. Happy times. Besides, asserting inferior properties for a made-up item produced by a theoretical feature isn't a great argument for excluding said feature. I could assert that Zappy has superior tracking rates, making a combined battery significantly better. QED, we must have it?
Whilst I'm not married to the idea, I still quite like the concept of having one off
significant bonuses tied to extremely rare (or "exotic") materials. It would nicely together up three parts of the game: exploration (since it would be unlikely that rare materials are found in well developed systems); prospecting/mining (to get hold of the ore); research (to create blueprints that get the bonus). There's also quite a bit of strategy involved in deciding to sell rare ore to free up credits or keep it in case of a killer research bonus...?