The loadouts changes are quite possibly the worst thing ever to come to this game, all loadouts are identical and a lot unique roles removed such as electrical engineer, different security guns, repair/crafting mechanic, etc. They sucked the life out of the jobs and roles.
External link →We had a feeling the overall reduction of resources and supplies and the probably most drastic balance chances we've done so far would be controversial changes. And we know there is still a lot more adjustments to be done on the balance front, so any feedback on it is really valuable to us.
However, I do want to argue that the loadout changes aren't as bad as you're making them out to be. The motivation behind many of the changes in this update was to improve the sense of progression in the campaign (you should not have access to everything right off the bat, but slowly gain more resources and better equipment) and to make resources overall more scarce. This was the case with the loadouts as well: now the classes start with a bare minimum of items instead of every character getting a free set of valuable gear (every time they respawn, even!).
While I can understand the argument that it makes the roles "identical", I don't really agree with that argument. In my opinion the loadouts really aren't what define your job and role on board the sub - they're just a handful of items that are easy to get from elsewhere too, and not having them from the start only makes a difference for the first round or few at most (and often not even that long). In my opinion, what kind of gear you get your hands on after the starting equipment, the talent system, how you develop your character and in general what kind of a role you take up as a part of the crew are what defines your role, not whether you happened to have a revolver or an SMG in your inventory at the beginning of the campaign.
That being said, the current state of the game's economy and balance is not final; further adjustments need to be made, and it is possible that we'll do some more changes to the loadouts in future as well.
In any case, thank you for all the feedback, we'll take it into consideration on future balance work!
Can you comment on the change to how radio/local voice chat buttons work? To me it seems like a step backwards in usability, and I couldn't seem to find a way to revert to the old system (there's a "legacy" option in keybinds but it didn't seem to work)
Basically our intention with the change was to make the chat (both text and voice) a little more intuitive and make both the text and voice work with the same logic. E.g. in voice activation mode you would still need to use the push-to-talk keys to use the local chat, and there was no indication which one you're using, and different keys were used to use the different modes of communication for text and voice.
We didn't actually anticipate that so many people actually liked the sort of "hybrid voice activation / push-to-talk" method of communicating, but since we've gotten so much feedback about it, we are planning on reintroducing the separate push-to-talk keys as a legacy option.
devtrackers.gg