I must admit that the main point of your criticism is completely understandable. But I feel I should explain why I designed the shotguns (and really, any weapon in the mod) the way they behave in the mod: you see, I didn't want the player to be able to use any weapon of their choosing in all possible combat scenarios. That is to say, the weapons are intentionally situational. The Rifle, as you figured, is chiefly intended for long-range work alongside the Argent Rifle. The shotguns, on the other hand, are meant for dealing with enemies at closer proximity, hence their limited range. And as disappointing as I know this will most likely sound, that's unlikely to change at this point. If I make any changes to the behavior of any weapons, they're only going to be minor tweaks. Buffing the shotguns to the point where you can snipe an enemy across the map with them isn't included in my plans.Someone64 wrote:So I played some of this mod and I have to say that I'm as shocked with the design decisions with normal weapon use as Somagu is. The biggest issue here is that Doom maps were not designed for them to work like this. The way you made weapon range work in itself is totally fine... if the maps were designed with these weapon mechanics in mind (though personally this kind of range system irks me regardless). The problem is that a ton of Doom maps were designed with the fact that you can use Doom's vanilla weapons with their effective range just like the vanilla game and the ammo, monster placement, weapon placement, etc are balanced with this fact. This is an issue with almost all mods to varying degrees but most mods make an effort to make things playable despite their design differences. Unfortunately, playing SGD can be impossible in some circumstances because your idea of weapon roles being forced into the design is entirely incompatible with many megawads.
A major example of this is the shotgun and SSG. In vanilla Doom you can literally use the shotgun to snipe enemies at pretty long ranges due to the low spread. The SSG can be used for crowd control of zombies at decent range. Both of these functions are rendered impossible due to SGD's range limitations. Another example is the chaingun. I understand the pistol replacement is meant to work as the sniper but often times, a map will just provide you with a chaingun to tap fire with which in vanilla, works fine as a sniper but just like the shotguns it has bafflingly short range.
There's a good reason games in general don't implement range the way this game does, too. There's a difference between making a weapon ineffective to use at range and making it literally impossible to use at range and making it impossible by making your hitscans vanish beyond a certain point is frustrating and really contrived. That's why shot spread exists as a mechanic and you can just make a weapon function badly at range by increasing its spread appropriately.
Sorry to sound harsh about my criticism but I really do like the idea of this mod. It's just that at the moment it can be borderline unplayable except in very specific circumstances where the map just so happens to fit it perfectly. Even if you made maps specifically for this mod it's still too frustrating to play.
Lastly, I have a minor issue with the feat based upgrade system which is that the mod is not transparent about this mechanic in terms of what enemies to kill, how many you already have killed, and how close you are to getting an upgrade. You should probably put this in the HUD or delegate this to a bind that brings up a screen that shows this.
Secondly, the reason the mod hasn't been transparent about the kill counts required for the upgrades thus far is because in a sense, I want to keep the player in suspense. Telling the player explicitly which upgrade they're likely to acquire next and how far they are from acquiring it would ruin the surprise. I've been contemplating adding a couple of help screens to sort of document the weapons and the upgrades available for each of them, though, which would be a v2.0 addition if it were to happen. But an in-game screen to display progress towards the upgrades is unfortunately unlikely, because once again, I want to retain at least that element of surprise.
With all that said, I do appreciate you giving SGD a spin. And I hope my explanations behind some of the design decisions I made are satisfactory.
