[DEVBLOG#306] Vanilla Weapons Expanded Remake

Welcome to a new development blog! This time, we're excited to showcase our progress on the remake of Vanilla Weapons Expanded.

We've been keeping this project relatively quiet because balancing it has been a significant challenge. However, I now believe the balance is in a good place and ready for a reveal.

As one of our oldest mods, among the first three I ever released, Vanilla Weapons Expanded has fallen behind. While it received a couple of balance patches, these were mostly "band-aid" solutions to mitigate issues caused by game updates introducing differently balanced vanilla weapons. Furthermore, as we've released many other weapons in the Vanilla Expanded collection, my overall balancing approach has evolved and improved. Yet, our flagship mod, Vanilla Weapons Expanded, never received a comprehensive overhaul to match these improvements.

It's about time we fully rebalance it and bring it up to the standard of the rest of the game and our other mods. For this remake, I had several specific objectives I wanted to address:

Remove unnecessary research projects: the mod adds 12 research projects, some unlocking just 1 weapon. I believe that to be unnecessary considering how many projects in total Vanilla Expanded adds. Trimming research bloat is very important. Where it makes sense, weapons need to be moved to already existing research projects.

Balance the weapons to be on par with base game weapons: A lot of our guns were simply ‘better’. Now, better is good, if it comes at a cost, but some of our weapons cost just as much as base game weapons when it comes to commitment and resources needed, and were simply better. Now this just won’t do. Vanilla Expanded is about adding more content so you have a bigger selection. Not eclipsing base game weapons forcing you to use modded content because it’s simply better. We cherish the content offering of the base game, not try to stomp on it.

Remove some weapons and change others: Now, we rarely remove content, unless it’s heavily underused and would require a lot of work to get working right. As such, some items have to be removed - fire extinguishers and whips will be better suited in a designated tool mod, for example.

Add some content: As always, we look for every opportunity to add new content. I found a niche that previously wasn’t filled and I’ve decided to add a trench gun to the arsenal.

Add support for Unique Weapons and Alpha Armory: That’s right, we want our weapons to also appear as uniques. It does sadly require making A LOT of extra art, but I think it’s worth it, so that the players can enjoy our content as quest rewards with some cool weapon effects.

Improve visuals: Some weapons didn’t look great, some were old, some were imperfect. All of the art has been remade, some weapons completely change their looks, while others only a little bit. Art is very important to me, and I think I should ensure my older mods still look excellent nowadays.

All in all, I have created a huge spreadsheet that helps me evaluate the power level of each weapon. I inserted base game weapons into it to get a baseline, and rebalanced all of the new weapons according to the percieved power level - which is a very complex formula that evaluates nearly every stat of the weapon, including resource costs!

I have analyzed the graphs, consulted the star charts, spoke to my local shaman and I think the final balancing should be immaculate and will not require further changing. Each weapon now sits comfortably alongside other weapons in the game, and if I apply that method going forward, balancing of weapons will never be a problem.

Of course, I can’t account for Combat Extended, so if you’re using combat extended, completely disregard whatever I just wrote.

We plan to apply the same method to some other Vanilla Weapons Expanded modules. Notably, we’re looking to tackle Quickdraw and Laser in the near future, as they are the two biggest outliers balancing-wise, with Quickdraw being very strong, and Laser being very weak.

This remake is something I am genuinely excited about, and I hope it provides a much-needed fresh experience for everyone who enjoys the original mod. Thank you for following our development journey, and we look forward to bring Vanilla Weapons Expanded 2 to your game very soon!