I hope the team considers some of these balancing ideas for the update. This would stop them from being so OP that players can see an entire outpost/wreck from 3 floors away. However the goggles would still be overpowered in wrecks and ruins for the same reasons above. This would stop the goggles from being 360° and stop players from using them at all times.
Make the goggles use the old diving-mask vision ‘mask’. However the tension of wrecks and ruins would still be lost because the players will always use them to spot all the enemies in a location before they enter. This would force players to only use the item when they know they need it. Make the goggles require batteries that run out approximately as fast as oxygen tanks. Special mention needs to go to the round that opens this video as according to Criken they only played 20 minutes and somehow managed to all die before they even left the dock. allowing you to see enemies in the complete darkness outside the sub with ease, just like real thermal vision would. When Criken and his friends play Barotrauma things usually spiral into hilarious failure. The item would still be very useful as it would follow the progression of the flashlight. Players always had the option of playing with LOS off, but this item does more harm than good on most servers and campaigns that prefer LOS because of how it affects atmosphere. The “thermal goggles” don’t actually function like thermal goggles - more like psychic goggles, or x-ray. Everyone will know when the traitor is hanging out in the ballast growing raptor eggs or etc… If captains and crew can effectively see everyone at all times like they were playing with LOS turned off, then there is simply no way to hide or be sneaky while completing a traitor objective. Players know exactly where every single enemy on the wreck/ruin/outpost is, even ones 3 floors below them…Īnother subtle thing to consider is multiplayer, particularly traitor missions: (You can see a very good example of this in the last Twitch stream Criken did)īut now players have an extremely easy to acquire item that kills the tension and makes these missions a chore. And that tension is essentially the entire fun-factor behind these missions. It used to be the case that players only had audio cues to warn them of what is on the other side of a wall. The best part of Wrecks, Ruins, and Abandoned Outposts is cutting through doors and walls, while being afraid of what is waiting on the other side. Thermal goggles being able to completely negate LOS on servers that have it enabled feels very much like cheating - like turning on debug draw while clearing a wreck. I’d like to start a thread on what I think is an extremely broken item that ruins multiplayer and singleplayer gameplay the thermal goggles… There hasn’t been much discussion surrounding the balancing of items introduced with this update.