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1: weapon scaling- almost immediately after this upgrade there were complaints regarding the size of the 'mech's arm. and rightly so. but the problem isn't that the Centaurion had too small of a gun- it's that the guns are scaled to be too small across the board.
an AC/20 weighs in at 14 tons. that's more than a third of the 'mech's weight in any circumstance. if a light 'mech manages to mount one of these it should rightly look like the gun is far too massive for the tiny little 'mech it's being toted by! but the barrel of thsi gun looks perfectly comfortable because light 'mechs are what the guns are scaled to. this is terrible execution.
'mech scales are more drastically different in MWO than in the classic tabletop game. this makes the scale you put weapons at a serious matter. however sizing the weapons to look like they fit on the smallest 'mech is not the ideal approach because in many cases they really don't fit on lighter designs without sacrificing a significant amount elsewhere. a light 'mech carrying a PPC should look like it's carrying a massive weapon because it's carrying a comparatively massive weapon! the main weapons of battletech are built to fit large, powerful assault-oriented 'mech designs and should look like they fit on large, powerful 'mech designs instead of looking like tiny gun-nubs.
this is what hurt the Centurion so badly- the ballistics hardpoints that replaced the old arm, being made to fit light 'mechs ended up looking woefully undersize on a 'mech nearly twice any light's weight because they weren't designed to fit the look of a 'mech twice a light's weight or even more.
this is honestly not a hard problem to fix, it just requires accepting that light 'mechs are going to seem to have guns too big for them when someone mounts a gun that's generally too big for them. you go back, and you resize the weapon designs. make them look suitably imposing for- let's say heavy scale- and this shouldn't come up as a problem again soon. you wouldn't even have to change the hardpoint's geometry. which leads into the other problem actually...
2: Awkward hardpoint geometry- right now, a number of 'mechs with dynamic hardpoints have the hardpoints sticking awkwardly out of the 'mechs. the flat, low-poly, boxy hardpoints bulge out of the geometry of the 'mech and ruin the way it looks and the work the designer put into it. the lasers on mest Centurion models look crudely stuff in there, but it's nothing compared to the hero Battlemaster, with it's massive hard points providing luxury seating to tiny SRM-2s leaving it look like a defaced mailbox. why does it look so bad?
each hardpoint fills one role, so you've made one hard point for each role. the problem is that "holds a laser" or "holds a gauss" isn't enough to give the slot the ability to fit into the designs!
not every point on a 'mech is going to be able to hold a weapon the same way. an arm is going to want to balance the back to counter the barrel's weight at the front. a PPC stuffed into the abdomen of an awesome isn't going to stick out as much as one mounted in the shoulder of a Shadow Hawk, in spite of the fact both of them are in LT slots. an SRM-4 will fit better stretched into a line across the torso of a Commando even if it's pressed into a block in the arm of a Raven. more hardpoints for each type are needed.
listen, i'll level with you here. the first 'mech i added to my stable was a Dragon-5N. that 'mech has one selling point to it and that's that the ultra autocannon on the 'mech gets a wicked cool model. go on, go boot up the game and have a look at it. awesome, heavy rotary-cannon design. a good looking weapon can go a long way towards making someone want to pick up a 'mech. the thing that pushed me to post insted of my usual "eh, the devteam bones most of the game up" is that this awkward geometry work means that arm will be repalced with a tiny arm mounting a tiny little dark cylinder weapon, which will look AWFUL.
the point i'm gnawing at here is that just one model of a weapon isn't going to fit every design, multipule versions of a given hardpoint need to be coded in to make the design process efficent. if we had version of the missle racks that compressed according to the number of launchers in the point, a Catapult wouldn't suffer from bulgy launcher ears because an LRM-20 could simply shrink to 10 tubes that fires twice leaving two rows of five-or-less for smaller launchers. energy points designed to be places inside of the 'mech's geometry with the guns pushing out to visibilty would mean there's less of these messy boxes bulging out os so many 'mechs lately.
you can argue that you want there to be one design per weapon to improve the ability ro identify what a 'mech is mounting in-game but honestly between the fact most players are sniping beyond where you can see them, night vision/ snowstorms obscuring vision, and ;mehc damage turning whatever your fighting into a mass of gunmetal ulcers making it hard to tell what you're looking at anyways the argument there is pretty weak.
the fix, unfortunately, is to make multipule hardpoint designs for each kind of hardpoint. it's not simple or terribly fast, and the way PGI likes to crank out 'mechs means there would probably be 'mech geometry redesigns for some time to come if they did do it, but the hardpoint geometry simply isn't robust enough for the number of 'mechs they're trying to work with.
well, i've said my piece, i hope some of you took something from it. if nothing else, that the DRG-5N has a wicked-awesome autcannon design.
Edited by Ragtag soldier, 22 October 2014 - 12:57 PM.
