Suggestion: recontextualize difficulty modes by adding player-facing options
There's no doubt that players have a lot of different opinions on what they want out of this game. What I'd like to see added to GRW or to a potential sequel is the ability to recontextualize the idea of a "difficulty mode" by adding a whole bunch of player-facing options that would, altogether, allow individual players to change the way the game functions to best suit their needs and playstyles.
The pitch: add a fifth difficulty mode called "custom" which allows you to adjust a huge host of settings. Challenges and rewards can still be locked to using one of the already available and curated difficulty modes, but Custom will allow the players to modify the GRW experience to really increase their engagement with the game. Hardcore players can be hardcore, casuals can be casual, or people who don't like labels can just enjoy the game the way they want, alone or with friends.
Having more options in a videogame is always a good thing, in my opinion.
The features:
Custom mode will allow players to tweak all kinds of settings (ideally using sliders for more granularity, but the probably easier path would be to basically select between the already-established four presets of arcade, normal, hard, and extreme -- basically being able to choose what "difficulty" level each aspect is set to individually; maybe I want Extreme enemy detection but only Normal enemy damage). This is by no means a full list of possible ideas, but I think it's important to provide functionality to really let us tweak and tailor the experience to our liking -- that can only allow more people to find more enjoyment with the game.
-Player damage
-Enemy damage (separated by faction)
-Enemy accuracy (separated by faction)
-Enemy detection radius (one for player on foot, one for ground vehicles, one for air vehicles) (separated by faction)
-Enemy detection speed (one for on foot, one for ground vehicles, one for air vehicles) (separated by faction)
-Alert times (how long enemies remain on alert, separate settings for each level of alertness) (separated by faction)
-Bullet speed/drop (to allow for "challenging" ballistics with shorter ranges and heavy drop or "realistic" ballistics with longer ranges and less drop)
-Time scale (dilating time to move quickly or to move more slowly, up to 1:1 scale)
. . . .
Additional optional features:
-Realistic reload on/off (a reworking of realistic reload would be nice, with magazines saved and just rotated through, like old SOCOM used to do: one button press, or a hold, stows the mag for cycling back to later, and then a double-tap of the reload button drops that mag entirely and loses the ammo)
-Limits to carried weapons (two primaries, one, or none for pistols only)
-Options to turn unlocked skills on/off, or to adjust them back down to previous levels
-Friendly fire on/off
-Permadeath on/off
-Suppression (from PvP) on/off
-Non-refilling health (from PvP) on/off
-Auto ammo pickup on/off
-Much more striated HUD features (separating enemy marks and ping, making marks only show up on the radar, adding a fading radar or other fading HUD elements that come back up when you ADS, making marks fade when you lose line of sight like in PvP, etc.)
. . . .
Super pipedream additional features:
-Detection speeds and radiuses adjusted for when players are in foliage or not (currently the game doesn't do a very great job of differentiating between being in concealment and not -- a helicopter can see you through bushes and leaves and stuff, and the game tells you that you have line of sight (brighter marker) on enemies you can't see because technically nothing physical (i.e., objects you wouldn't be able to walk through) is in the way)
-Stamina, sprint, and climb speed affected by "weight" (i.e., number of total equipped items and total ammo remaining)
. . . .
I know that some of these options might impact or even trivialize the current skills in the game, but... who cares? Who's being hurt if they do? I genuinely believe that by adding a super granular list of options Ubi could turn GRW into a big deal and draw a huge crowd -- more games need to abandon the old and archaic concepts of traditional difficulty and give players the options to play games their way. It really would turn a lot of heads and get a lot of people interested in this game, in my opinion. This feels like a win for everybody: players get to enjoy the game more, and it draws more players who can have their personal desires catered to, and Ubi gets good marketing/publicity for doing something few other games do.
What about you? Any ideas, community?
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