Bring back the rifles!

[Sito]

Dear Hinterland,

I love you guys and the game experience that you've put your heart in to for the last 10 years. But someone has corrupted your thinking. Apostate reasoning has entered from somewhere. I wish you would repent of your erroneous decision to reduce the number of rifles. Searching for and finding a rifle in every region is the reason for existence. It  is why I risk breaking every bone in my body to go check that slope that looks like it might have something up there. It's the reason I lose condition in the cold just to check one more spot before I have to run back to shelter. It is the reason I haul all my stuff back to Quonset and display the 20 rifles like a prized trophy. It is the reason why I yell out "BOOYAH!" and scare heck out of my wife when I find one. (Her response after punching my arm 3 times is to say "found a stupid rifle didn't you!" Punch.)

Please, please, please, bring back the rifles and leave the revolvers to just a few. Although they are nice to find too but not so golden as the rifle.

I know you will repent because you are good people.

[Vhalkyrie]

Gosh, I miss the rifles.  The new variants are great, don’t get me wrong.  But yeah, I used to be driven, scouring every map looking for the rifle prize.  Of course I’d look for clothes and food, but finding a rifle was like the top prize to haul across five maps.  Every map used to be guaranteed to have 1.  Maybe I’m weird, but even though I have the new variants, I’d still love to find the old ones.  

[conanjaguar]

Yes, please! I miss the vanilla rifle.

Perhaps they were removed in part to facilitate the adding of some other weapon, like a shotgun?

[codyh]

In any case I think it's better to control rifle availability through its associated resources, that being ammunition and rifle cleaning kits.

In the apocalypse, the actual weapons would be fairly available, battered by use (almost all found well under <50% condition by stalker) and discarded by the former owners as soon as they ran out of ammunition. Of course a rifle with no ammo is merely a weight debuff.

By stalker difficulty, ammo boxes should be extremely rare and absolutely never found near a weapon. These would have been used long ago. Your best bet for ammo boxes would be pristine areas (aurora mine one example). Most ammunition found would be single rounds, rolled accidentally under a sofa and forgotten. Even so such ammo should be limited.

Even more common should be spent ammo, lying sometimes on front porches, sometimes in trash cans, sometimes  3-5 stashed by a previous user in a workbench.

When a stalker does find a rifle they should need to look for a cleaning kit, and to scour carefully for precious ammo. The limited availability of ammo and plentiful spent casings will give them a strong reason to craft more ammo as well. They might even craft a bow as an alternative. It will open some interesting choices!

When you give the player a powerful tool, make them work for it, make choices (do I conserve? Do I craft ammo? Make a bow instead?). Make it a journey. The reward will be all the sweeter

Edited January 9, 2023 by codyh

[hozz1235]

Methinks this would be good feedback for the TFTFT thread.  After all, this is the result of the loot refresh.

[Kranium]

Really? There's plenty of rifles, including the old regular ones. Y'all just a buncha hoarders? haha

[Vhalkyrie]

I've only found the new variants.  I haven't found any of the old ones at all.

[RegentRelic]

19 hours ago, hozz1235 said:

Methinks this would be good feedback for the TFTFT thread.  After all, this is the result of the loot refresh.

The current version of the game is the TFTFT part one update. Wether or not you own the dlc. The TFTFT sub forum refers to the DLC. So, unless the rest of the forums is for the Perilous Constraint version this is where it belongs.