What if... leveling

Whilst browsing the forums I have seen people express annoyance in both the level cap and skills.
I have no way of knowing if this is the general general consensus, but I would still like to give my 2 cents on the leveling system.

To start off, I don’t hate it but it just feels sort of empty… like you only have so many skill points and to get what you want you need to spend them on filler. plus there is no way to improve your abilities except by spending the points on stat increasing skills. This means that it is possible to have a lvl 1 character with the same battle strength as a max level veteran which just doesn’t sit right with me.

Now I tend to prefer games where the player skill makes the difference in gameplay and I feel that effect to an extent in the component system of Generation Zero where you must shoot accurately to deal more damage but I understand not everyone wants that style of game. As such I’ve come up with what I’d like to think is a good compromise between the two types of play I see in game.

The first of which being a more methodical and strategic approach and the second being an arcadey sort of shooter with explosions and mayhem. This approach is a sort of mastery system(think skyrim) where the more you do something like shoot a type of weapon, the more accuracy or recoil control you have. These improvements would take place over time and be supplemented by a crafting system where you can find and dismantle weapons and each time a weapon is dismantled you gain exp or something akin to it towards that specific blueprint. As you level the blueprint up you can craft higher tier versions of the weapon.

Skill points would only be acquirable through the in game challenges like every x amount of prestige points and they would go towards the skill tree which has been condensed into basically just the specializations and associated perks. So for example the engineer perk would start with the ability to loot components, then the tree would split and you could either craft/loot ticks and make special variants like explosive ticks or an emp tick and this would evolve into upgrading the damage and lowering crafting costs. or you could go into hacking where you upgrade the chance to hack by like 5% and then there would be a new ability every few levels that unlocks a new utility like the ability to paint certain targets to attack or outright berserk a robot.

This is already getting long but this is just one of many concepts I’ve been thinking of, I dunno what you’d want this information for but I do want to hear your critiques of this idea or even ideas of your own. So please share in the replies!

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