On the plus side, it would clean up the lore. We see dogs in houses in the environmental storytelling a couple of times. Or rather, we find their “corpses”, but we never observe any enter a building (not counting the dodgy teleport). Having dogs enter would bring their actual behavior in line with the environmental storytelling. Also, hunter and dog currently occupy very similar roles, and if one could enter the houses and the other couldn’t, that give a better justification for having both.
That said, I think in terms of gameplay, it’s a solution in search of a problem.
This is irrelevant to co-op, as nothing’s scary in co-op past the first few levels.
In solo, if you have an easy matchup like, say, a FNIX tank, you just walk up and kick it over, because it’s much quicker and safer to not use cover. You only bother with a building (and the slow and dangerous defensive style it implies) when you’re at quite a disadvantage already; trying to add extra dog threat seems redundant at that point.
Also speaking for myself, I close doors behind me anyway so I won’t get shot, so it sounds like a lot of extra AI for something that probably won’t really happen a lot in actual gameplay.
Having had both dogs and hunters spawn in living rooms, it also bears noting that having one die in a doorway is annoying since you can’t then move it. That sort of thing would probably need addressing.
If we add the ability to beat down doors, I see this mostly as a bit harsh on the beginners who are outnumbered, outgunned, don’t know the strategies, and ran like hell to make it to a house. If every house is a deathtrap (rather than just the one level barns due to dodgy teleports), I fear beginners might get frustrated and leave. We’ve had people complain about the difficulty/learning curve as it is.
And if it’s realism we’re talking about, one of my major suspension of disbelief breakers is “machines have infinite ammo.” Like, consider the dogs. Where are they even putting it? I’d argue that if after shooting their load they had to return to a harvester to re-supply, it may make for interesting dynamics. (In the same vein, stealthily following a harvester to a re-supply point would then be an obvious self-guided activity. This strikes me as one of the missed opportunities in this game.) I can believe a tank bringing some MG rounds to a gunfight, but an endless supply of rockets? For that matter, why can’t we shoot out the windows of apartment buildings? Also I could swear we could crawl in the beta, what happened to that? Why is there no sleep function in safehouses that fast forwards 8 hours?
If we could randomly reallocate developer time in the name of “realism”, any of the above would seem more interesting to me, and I could probably think of another dozen. Like “why can’t we shoot out the lighthouses?”, “What’s with the lights in some houses that can’t be disabled?”, or the big, really obvious first question of co-op realism, “What about friendly fire?” etc.
So that’s a “No, probable misallocation of resources” from me.
