As we all know, there’s an ongoing Weapon Balance Program. Its purpose is to make weapons equally useful while keeping their (or giving them new) unique traits. So they’d work better on different waves.
In my opinion, having a tier requirement for balanced weapons would be a bad thing. There’s literally no reason for it to exist if all weapons are just fine.
I assume IA added them in the beginning because weapons weren’t equally strong, but I’m not the biggest supporter of that. It makes earlier weapons useless.
Not necessarily. Neutron Gun is available from the start, while Riddler requires tier 7. Utensil requires tier 10 (which is the highest so far), but that’s probably because of the “super secret fork weapon” thing, not because it was the strongest.
I assume this was done so that new players wouldn’t be overwhelmed with over a dozen weapons to choose from, but I’m just speculating.
I’ll re-categorize my post to Ideas because I have a suggestion.
If IA wants to keep weapon tier requirements, it’d be a much better idea to instead let players unlock weapon groups every few tiers (for example 5). Tier 5 would unlock, for example, machine guns (Vulcan Boron Hypergun Riddler[?]). Tier 10 would unlock beams (Plasmer Positron Lightning)… And so on.
I believe Galbatorix proposed something similar, although it was more like “Simple, Intermediate and Advanced weapon groups”. That could also work.
I’ll let him (perhaps also GgWw) talk about these groups in greater detail, assuming all changes from WBP make it into the game.
It’s just a way to gradually present ‘new’ content to the player. It’s not a way to restrict access to advanced weapons. The first few tiers go by very fast, so maybe it’s a difference of 2-3 hours of play time in total.