Can We Actually Make Exotic Weapons... Exotic? | Semi-Ramblomatic

Was waiting for painkiller the whole video...

You can hate the writing all you want but I personally find the variety of exotic guns in the Borderlands games a lot of fun. I've found more than a few of them that manage to make me laugh and be satisfying to use.

The circular boomerang blade in the Turok games was a fun exotic weapon, and had a fairly unique balance, and a fun mechanic. I always liked when it would miss an enemy only to get them from behind on the return. One cheap-but-effective way to encourage playing a shooter for reasons other than maximal efficiency is a scoring system that rewards novelty, giving you more points for environmental or exotic-weapon kills. It's always been a little surprising how few shooter since, like, Serious Sam seem to take the pure-arcade approach. The last one I can remember is probably Bulletstorm, which was fun but didn't exactly set the world on fire.

Armed and Dangerous (an enjoyable daft shooter from decades ago) had some fun stuff on this line - like the landshark gun, which fired a burrowing landshark that would burst out under people and eat them. Or the anti-grav tool which just reversed gravity and made all nearby enemies fly off into the sky as you desperately clung to the ground. Were they the most efficient? Prolly not, but they were weird and creative enough to be goos fun, especially for something I got for a fiver in a Game discount bin.

Shout out for the guns in Resistance Fall of Man. Game 3 had what yatzee called the Jimi Hendrix Gun back in ZP days. I mostly played game 1, and on the higher difficulty, you had to use every weapon to the fullest, partly cause you didn’t have enough ammo otherwise!

What about a gun that fires shurikens and lightning? Or a gun in the exotic weapon category that shoots viruses or worms, and do lots of damage to bio-engineered horrors using other bio-engineered horrors as ammo?

The Electropylon Driver from Returnal is probably my favorite exotic. It fires metal stakes into anything and when it's in range of another one they have an electrical arc between them and you can very quickly build a web of electricity that can be a devastating obstacle. What makes it useful across situations though is that when you stake an enemy they receive damage from the pylons it connects to, so you can put one stake in a mobile enemy and make a huge chain of tethers or for a very strong enemy it lets you add damage and set up traps from safety. Also it looks, sounds, and feels very satisfying and chonky.

Yahtzee I think you're stepping on your own point about pets when you pretty much immediately then say ~I really like making the enemies fight for me~ that's just pet mechanics with more steps. - Overall I think this is just a symptom of approaching a game with the intention of experiencing a broad sample as quickly as possible so you can review it instead of playing it to enjoy the activity; optimizing for done instead of fun. Now I need to go watch that video about Yahtzee doesn't know how to have fun anymore because this is my sentiment here.

Yahtzee spoke about exotic weapons in videogames but never mentioned the Ratchet And Clank because they're the epitome of unique exotic weaponry in videogames.

I don't know why, but for some reason my mind jumped to the Unreal Tournament Bio-Rifle. It was functionally a kind of shotgun, but if the goo missed your target, it would leave behind a damaging puddle that enemies can walk into. Which of course brings to mind that the video focused mostly on a specific 3 factors of a gun while ignoring other kinds of functionality. Things like debuffing enemies, buffing yourself, creating traps/hazards/walls, distractions, or even mobility (the Rocket jump being an example even from Quake)

Perhaps worth exploring the same concept, but in RPGs. Like cyberpunk or fallout where you build additional bonuses apart from player skill

How does an indirect weapon like a grenade launcher fit in? I like it in half life except when I accidentally use while facing a wall....

I love how saying the acronym for WNJUAG has more syllables than just saying Why Not Just Use A Gun. Saves writing time but not speaking time. So Yahtz kind of played himself with having to say it a lot.

At least Half-Life 2 waited a while before giving you the Shotgun, letting you get used to the "Exotic" but actually useful Gravity gun beforehand, now granted I know that was more Valve showcasing their physics system by letting you basically use telekinesis with practically unlimited ammo provided there's enough objects laying around.

To me, "Why Not Use A Gun" is less a criticism of weapons, and more an observation on the stagnancy of the game mechanics for shooters. Mega Man has spent decades playing around with ways to make alternate weapons interesting and useful, with varying results.

I'd say the BFG-9000 succeeds because of the limited ammo - you're encouraged to only use it in specific scenarios, where you're given a big cathartic moment every time it happens. And while it's not a shooter, I always appreciated the Spider-Man mechanic where if an enemy was close to a wall, you could spam web shots and glue them to it permanently, creating an incentive to consider positioning during a battle.

This assumes all players want to maximize efficiency over novelty. In something like CoD multi-player I get that being the focus. But in Mouse PI, that is already heavy in the novelty of its setting, there will be players who don't care about what can kill something faster, when they can have cartoon shenanigans with the classic dropping of the piano. I'd say you could see this as an alternate argument to the eternal "Should Drak Souls have an easy mode". One of the best point to that argument is its a single player game (mostly), so if someone else is having fun, why should you care? If all devs went for efficiency above all as their focus, then games will be even more similar to each other then they currently are.