The goal of the changes I’m going to suggest is to improve the realistic look and feeling of soldiers’ movements in game, without making movement a chore from a player’s perspective.
1) ADDING INERTIA - MOMENTUM TO SOLDIERS
Currently, soldiers move with an unnatural lack of inertia, as if weightless. This is especially noticeable in bots, whose erratic movements and sudden, instantaneous zig-zags make them look more like goldfishes than humans. It’s not rare for them to invert direction quicker than a bullet fired at them, which is frankly nonsense.
Proposed change: add some form of inertia/momentum to soldiers, both player-controlled and bots, so that they properly move like men whose body + gear weight is about 100 kg, instead of moving like goldfishes or gnats.
It does NOT mean that they should slide before coming to a stop, nor that they should be slower, just that it should take some FRACTION of a second for them both to accelerate when starting, and to come to a stop / invert their direction when running, even more when sprinting. It’s not meant to make movement tedious and clumsy, but rather to improve the experience of engaging moving targets with BA rifles and such.
Also, add back the animation of soldiers properly leaning left or right when steering while running. I don’t know for what reason it was removed, but it looked so much better.
2) SLOWER STANDING UP FROM PRONE
“Faster pose change perk” or not, a man can’t just stand up from prone position instantly and without even the need to use his arms. Yet that’s what regularly happens in game, also detrimental to the feeling of realism (and prone to abuse - no pun intended).
Proposed change: leave crouching and laying down as they are, but add a mandatory animation (taking between 1 and 2 seconds) when leaving prone position, be it to stand or to crouch. In the meantime, the soldier can’t use the weapon, since he’s using his arms to help lift himself off the ground, at least for the time it takes to go from prone to crouched. The dedicated perk can speed up the transition time, but not eliminate it.
3) GUN HANDLING INERTIA (POTENTIALLY MAJOR GAMEPLAY CHANGE - DISCUSSION REQUIRED)
As someone pointed out, another aspect that makes soldiers in game look unnatural is that everyone’s gun and head are constantly aligned, except when sprinting.
Proposed change (TO BE DISCUSSED): the simplest way to put it down is, treat soldiers’ gun handling like turret aiming in tanks. The cursor can still rotate the visual (where soldiers look) at full speed, but some inertia is applied to the gun, so that it takes a SLIGHT delay to realign with the visual. The heavier the gun, the more noticeable the delay:
- Pistols would have next to no inertia.
- Rifles, shotguns and and SMGs would have light-medium inertia. For balance reasons, they all should be more or less on the same level, or else one the quickest class will become CQC king and all the others will be at disadvantage.
- MGs and AT weapons (except sturmpistole) should have higher inertia, according to their increased weight.
Again, this is NOT meant to make aiming a clumsy matter, like, even turning an MG should still be a relatively quick affair, but in an hypothetical duel starting back to back, the soldier with a rifle/SMG should make a 180° turn faster than the one with an MG. Playing in the field of fractions of a second, where reflexes matter but gun weight should also matter.
This could, by the way, create the conditions for the removal or rework of arbitrary RNG dispersion.
Soldier stats and perks could improve the ability to handle the gun faster, as long as this doesn’t end up being overdone and stepping into unreasonable advantage / P2W territory.
4) CRITICAL ACCURACY MALUS WHEN FIRING WHILE JUMPING / FREE FALLING
Self-explanatory.