Hammercalled, Weapons, and the Borderlands Problem

One of the series of video games that I remember with the most mixed memories is Borderlands. With a mix of humor that sometimes didn't sell and gameplay that alternated between feeling amazing and feeling bog standard, it got to be both a really fun series of games and a huge chore to finish, depending on the installment and the mood I was in.
But there's one point that I remember the most about Borderlands.

According to Randy Pitchford, one of the developers, "There are enough [guns] where it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter [how many there are]."

I think Hammercalled may have hit that point with its weapon customization, although I'd welcome others to take a look at it. We've rewritten the system to have no advances any more, with gear being strictly point-buy. If we allow players to spend a mere 7 points on a weapon, they'll have something like seventeen million possible combinations, and that's a simplified conservative estimate (for instance, you have seven different options for the Target Attribute quality).

The problem I face as a designer looking over my work is: "How many of these options are significant?"

I was a playtester and minor contributor on Open Legend, and one of the things that I noticed fairly on in the system is that I had a fairly clear playstyle: go for Haste and as many attacks as I could. That was mildly annoying for Brian and my fellow playtesters at times, especially since along the way I got all sorts of cool sequence-breaking abilities (coughteleportcough), but it was also something that hinted at a potential for a single dominant meta-strategy.

Now, some of that is based on my approaches to other games. There's no secret that a flexible action economy in games is one of the most easily unbalanced elements ever (which is why Hammercalled steers away from that, with only a few things like Automatic allowing a character to have more than one attack), but it bears thinking about:

How are players going to interact with the weapons in Hammercalled?

I've tried to include enough parts to allow people to build based on concepts and ideas, and that's a good goal, but at some point I also want to make sure that things feel good no matter what you choose.

Now, a lot of that comes into the combat mechanics. Almost any weapon is tuned to be pretty dangerous in Hammercalled: even punching someone stands a decent chance of at least minor inconvenience, and can be tremendously dangerous to an unarmored enemy who eats a really good hit.

The problem, however, has to do with novelty, and I think we get around that in a couple ways that Borderlands can't.

First, Hammercalled lets people build their weapons from scratch, unless you're wanting to adhere to a premade list. That means that you don't have meaningless random combinations (though a Blast Automatic Incendiary ranged weapon may seem arbitrary until you use it, and then it becomes really cool). Borderlands has a semi-random system, which means that occasionally you'll get really good guns (especially if you find a unique gun with a special effect that doesn't come random most of the time), but a lot of the time you're stuck with random stuff, and even if it's capable it's not necessarily interesting.

Second, characters get meaningful talents and other abilities that change how they interact with the battlefield. If you count combat talents like Twist the Knife, you actually can get quite a bit more out of how characters interact with their weapons–Borderlands has this in the form of passive effects for some characters, but they're generally passive and either provide a simple numerical boost or encourage you to play in the same way all the time to get stacks of a buff).

This isn't to denigrate Borderlands, either; they're stuck with a first-person ARPG format, and balance dictates that they don't do anything too interesting because the game is entirely combat, and turning someone into a god of war mid-battle hurts the cooperative play element, and isn't necessarily productive in their main gameplay loop in the best of single-player times.

Another thing that helps, again, is that Hammercalled isn't strictly focused on combat. Weapons take away from a character's development of armor, skills, tools, and even vehicles (once those systems get fixed up), so players have an incentive to choose things that they find interesting.

Now, the counter-part to that is that while characters can freely swap out gear at semi-regular intervals (they invest points, which they can then redistribute), they are generally forced to go to one option, where Borderlands has a sort of Darwinian system where they can keep swapping out guns until players find something interesting.

So in a sense, my goal as a designer is to hunt down and remove uninteresting qualities from weapons. Things like the Armor Bypassing quality, for instance, don't necessarily offer immense benefits and may not really appeal to people. A player who chooses these qualities may find themselves finding that it's not worthwhile.

This is where I need to do playtesting. There are actual times when Armor Bypassing comes in handy (natural defenses are handled as armor, and therefore susceptible), but I also don't want people to choose something that is only useful a small amount of the time–and in a strictly numerical way.

Even if I keep the quality, I can subtly influence people away from it; not including it in the gear examples, for instance, makes players less likely to select it because they're likely looking at the examples before they go back, so I include known "good qualities", even if the less interesting qualities have an important role.