Weapon Visuals and Vanity Weapons

cheri474

>be me
>play the TREK online
>they announce a new feature
>vanity_shields.png
>"Aww yiss, they look amazing, great job cryptic!"
>customize starship to own liking with new ship visual slots
>go into battle
>weaponry of choice looks like a mismatched rainbow and don't fit the ships asthethic
>immersion broken
>hearts too

I apologize for the sh*tpost above, but I hope I could bring the point across to you.
I really like the new ship visual slots and the customization possibilities they open up.
As a long time player who dropped the game 3 years ago I can say they are the single new feature that brought me back in the game.
Ship customization options were limited back in the old days and this is definetly a fresh and welcome addition.
But unlike in the old days there is now a staggering amount of new weapon sub-types of the same damage type which allow for infnite min-maxing, but they all come with different visuals.
And I find it a shame that there is no possibility to unify all ship weapon visuals under a single weapon's visual.

So I suggest to add 2 more slots to the ship visuals tab. One for energy weapons and one for projectile weapons. Put a weapon with a different visual in there and all weapons would look and sound like that one.

angrytarg

> @somtaawkhar said:
> Even then, theres some long standing rumors from the game's olden days that CBS actually told Cryptic they wouldn't do it to begin with.

Which, to be fair, was before they made weapons of any type in any colour. We don't know if such a decree ever actually was, but if 'phasers are orange and disruptors green' was ever a thing it should be moot now.

rattler2

I kinda feel that the variants were a way to sidestep it. They're not standard variants of damage types, so that allows them to have different colors. And one can headcanon the various colors on a single ship as alternate frequencies like we saw in Best of Both Worlds.

fallenkezef

It does annoy me sometimes that I have gold beams from my spiral wave Disruptors and then green from the Nausicaan and Romulan.

That's the price we pay for stacking on the set bonus I guess.

evilmark444

A more practical solution would be for them to make all weapon flavors available in all types (including both forms of Omni). The easiest way to do that would probably be through crafting. So for example crafters could make a "Low Power Omni-Directional Assimilated Plasma Beam Array" to act as a mission/set omni for that weapon flavor(maybe they could add a generic crafted weapon set bonus for these?), or they could make normal, non-set versions of the Quantum Phase weapons, etc. Unlike vanity weapons this wouldn't require reworking how weapon animations work, though you'd have to settle for whatever procs/set bonuses are linked to the weapon animations you want to use.

revanantmorituri

Aiming for a simpler option, I would love to apply cosmetic skins to ground weapons. That functionality is baked into the base code they inherited from Champions Online, and would let me feel better about the Recruit event.

foppotee

Just make those "specialized" weaponry more accessible to players. In other threads we've discussed potential methods numerous times.