People love collecting items, and prestige makes it even more. Currently only spaceship and their body parts have rarity, so why don’t main weapons and satellites have too? It also encourage players to explore the map more.
"What will rarity affect to weapons?"
Good question, we don’t want to make higher rarity equal to better performance overall. It will force everyone to go for the better rarity than the common one, and it will be forgotten. So I have 3 approach to do this:
-
Visual only change, this is the basic one, but still effective. Proof is people still buying skin from games that absolutely has no purpose other than cosmetic. Best example here, you can get legacy weapons, but with current performance. Green Ion Blaster and Swirly Neutron Gun can give nostalgic effect to players, especially veteran. Another example could be Utensil Poker shoots knife set instead of forks.
-
Behavior change, but has less or zero effect to gameplay, it’s better to just give examples. Photon Swarm, instead of wiggling-ish movement, they move like a helix. Or maybe Hypergun with different spread pattern. Or even a more straight-moving Positron Stream, in case you don’t like its weird shape. It’s similar to visual change, but has a little effect there.
-
Behavior change, with balancing, the most complicated one, and require efforts to implement. It’s the same weapon, but has slight different behavior, and it should be balanced or else it will overshadow the other one. I don’t have ideal example (because they haven’t been all balanced) but let’s assume a Lightning Fryer always links to 1 target per bolt (I know, it doesn’t! It’s just an example) and link damage is 80% (of initial damage). The rarer version could link up to 2 targets, but damage distribution is 60% and 20% respectively. In paper, it does the same damage, but the common one is more concentrated while the rarer one is more mass-oriented. It could create A LOT of diversity in gameplay preference if it’s done right. Another simpler example is the rarer version has higher damage output but overheats faster than the common, but the damage before overheating is relatively same. The difference between the common and rare must be noticable, but not too far so that they look like totally different weapon.
Satellites however, are even more difficult to add behavior variety (because they’re not even balanced at all!) but I’ll give it a shot (to give them variety, not a balance program, sorry).
- Microgun
- More ammo, less damage
- More damage, less ammo
- More damage, less accuracy
- Double firerate, but has same total ammo
- Faster initial charge, slight less damage
- Barbequer
- Blue flame (cosmetic only)
- Longer range, less fuel
- Shorter range, high damage
- Wider range, less fuel
- More fuel, less damage
- Faster initial charge, slight less ammo
- ICBM and Bird Flu Gun
- Faster travel speed, less damage
- Higher damage, less ammo
- More ammo, less damage
- Wider radius, less ammo
- Higher damage, less radius
Etc. etc. etc.
Some behaviors and cosmetics may be applied together, but that means higher rarity as it becomes more unique.