So here's a novel idea, how about making the d-pad useful? I don't mind the dancing and pointing gestures but I think it would be much more useful while playing if the buttons had a real effect while shooting alien scum.
I have two ideas:
1- Let us assign a consumable to each spot, heavy ammo synthesis or ether seeds for example. It's amazing to me how slowly the menu pops up. It's so cumbersome during a fight to get into the menu, switch tabs, then choose your consumable.
2- Make each direction cycle through one of the weapon types. 'UP', for example, could cycle through the primary weapons your character is carrying. The problem I see with this is the different ammo types/clip sizes. It would be terrible if you had two machine guns with a rocket launcher in the middle - 200 bullets to 6 rockets to 6 bullets would make this change useless. I would propose having a standard ammo reserve for each ammo type (200 machine gun bullets which would be usable by any machine gun, and 6 rockets usable by any rocket launcher). Something like that maybe, but I don't know, I'm not a game designer/coder.
I know this change would take a lot of time and effort by the dev team, but I do think it would have a positive impact on the game. Hopefully my ramblings make sense to someone out there.
Edit:
3- Implement the d-pad switching into the ghost menu. This would be a more "realistic" way of fast switching/using consumables since your ghost materializes stuff for you to use (ie the sparrow). It would be faster than going to the full menu but would keep a delay in weapon swapping.
As far as the ammo issue, I think it could be mitigated by having ammo tied to the specific weapon instead of the universal ammo used now.
End of edit.
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Love it. The idea has been around for a while but not considered