Enhance Arsenal with More Gun Variety, Class-Specific Weapons, and Community Feedback
This game is good. I like this game. There are many things about this game that I could go on and on praising, except for one; the Arsenal. There are many problems with this game's Arsenal that I will try to cover at least until Betahub's character limit stops me.
AMOUNT OF GUNS:
Compared to Battlefield, which had over 80-100 unique guns per game, Forefront has 21. Weapon types that should be common such as revolvers and carbines are notably absent, while at the same time we have guns that are nearly direct downgrades to each other, like the AWP versus the much superior C-Tac. Throughout the entirety of Early Access we only received 2 new mainline weapons, which is alarmingly few for a nearly 200 day period. If we are going to be waiting ~4 weeks inbetween updates, at least one gun per update would be heavily appreciated.
CLASS SPECIFIC PROBLEMS:
Recon has too few guns, Medic has too many guns that he has no uses for, and Engineer's guns all shoehorn him into being a close range class. The solution for Recon is simple: give him more guns. The last two guns added to the game have been for Recon, which is good progress, but he still has the smallest selection of guns out of every class. The solution is to simply increase the rate of guns added, as the devs are already on the right track. Medic has access to both SMGs and ARs, which doesn't seem like too much of a problem until you consider how much better ARs are in nearly every scenario compared to SMGs. The solution is to remove SMGs from Medic alltogether and replace them with a new weapon type entirely, Burst Rifles, which I will go over in more detail later. Engineer is exclusively locked to using close range guns, being SMGs and Shotguns. SMGs being weaker than ARs is necessary to keep him balanced as a class, but he shouldn't be forced to play close range because of that. The solution is instead of buffing SMGs to have more range, give Engineer access to a new weapon type, that being Carbines, which like Medic's Burst Rifles I will talk about in a lower section of this suggestion.
HYPOTHETICAL NEW GUN TYPES:
Each class ought to have their own unique weapon types. Assault and Recon already have theirs, being LMGs and Sniper Rifles respectively. For Medic and Engineer the solution is simple: remove SMGs from Medic, which would make them Engineer's exclusive type, while giving Medic Burst Rifles in exchange as his type. Naturally the new gun types would need to be balanced after the guns the classes already have, so Burst Rifles would be as good as ARs on Medic and Carbines would be as good as SMGs on Engineer. Speaking of Carbines, they would be a great double solution to Recon's lack of guns as well as Engineer's lack of range. In fact, allowing the two classes to share Carbines would alleviate both classes' range based weaknesses at the same time, letting Recon get up closer to enemies than he could with a Sniper Rifle while also allowing Engineer to stay farther back from the fight than he would be able to with an SMG. I've included multiple examples of Carbines (and DMRs to an extent) in this here suggestion [https://app.betahub.io/projects/pr-7682550116/feature_requests/3203] along with many other assorted guns that would be a nice fit for the game.
COMMUNITY INVOLVEMENT:
In the miracle scenario that we do start receiving new weapons, it would be nice for the community to get a say in what gets added. A little google forms vote in the discord server after every update to see what the masses' most wanted weapon is would give the devs a good idea of what the next gun could be, along with gathering feedback on what people do and don't like regarding the guns already in the game. The latter would also help avoid yet another Klav incident because wow that thing is still ridiculously strong at the time of me writing this despite 4(?) nerfs.
Anyways, thats all for this. If you have any questions please ask me in the discord server (@Tyrusing) and thanks for reading :)