G3n0c1de

That's the thing Wise, it doesn't make sense. The thing is that I liked how the weapons worked in the first game. They had a different feel than most other games, not having to reload and all. And they had a pretty cool explanation for that in the lore. Now it feels like we are taking a step backwards. They just wanted to make their guns behave like everyone else's, and in doing so, screwed up their pre-established lore.

We'll have to see more weapons in action before I can confirm my theory, but I actually do think that BioWare has changed how all the mass accelerator weapons work, so now they have ammo counters and magazines that need to be reloaded. VIGG: from what I've seen I don't think they've kept the option to let the weapon cool down over time. Why else would they use an ammo counter? If you let it cool down over time, would the ammo count rise back up to 50 in the case of the SMG? And that doesn't even explain why it would come with 'spare ammo'. And how those shots ger recycled when reloading. Bullet counters wouldn't be necessary in a heat sink system. I know how the guns are supposed to work in the lore, they are designed so that you shouldn't have to reload in a fight. Ever. All you needed to know was heat management. I just looked at the Engineer and Adept videos. The old pistol, which we all know works so that it doesn't reload, also has an ammo counter. It holds 12 shots per 'heat sink'. The funny thing is that BioWare is still trying to act as if they are actually heat sinks, so whenever the player 'reloads', what appears to be a superheated metal object falls out of the gun. This is stupid because they aren't letting the guns cool down anymore, you can only 'reload' to set the heat back to 0. It's not an instant cooldown, its the only way to let you fire more shots. So now heat sinks are so crappy that they don't cool down anymore? They can only fier a certain ammount of shots? And how does that even work with the spare ammo? How does unused shots get recycled into the ammo pool?

There is one problem with this 'solution'. I've seen some of the recent gameplay videos, and the HUD definitely has ammo counters. So what, heat sinks can only fire a certain number of shots before needing to be 'ejected'? If it truly is a heat sink, then can't it just cool down normally like heat sinks from the first game? Like in the sentinel gamplay video, Shepard was using some sort of SMG, and the HUD said that each 'heat sink' could fire 50 shots, and he had a total of 500 shots in his inventory. Since when do heat sinks become unusable after a specific number of shots, and have no chance of recovery? And when the counter gets low, it advises the player to 'Reload', not 'Change Heat Sink'. Hell, this system even recycles the unused shots from each 'heat sink' back into the total ammo pool, like how every other FPS does. Mass Effect's heat sinks don't work like that. Let's just face it, we are firing bullets from a magazine, no matter what the 'official' explanation is. I propose a system that is a hybrid of old and 'new'. First of all, get rid of the ammo counters, and put something similar to the old heat bar back in. Now when the gun shoots, it generates heat that will be dissipated after a short amount of time. But if you need more shots NOW, you can eject the spent heat sink. They wanted 50 shots per clip, and 500 total ammo? Fine, make the SMG's overheat point at 50 shots and give the player 10 heat sinks. Of course, some players could play the game in a similar fashion to the first, never 'relaoding', so we'd need balance, making the player need to reload more often. Perhaps the heat dissipation rate could be lowered accross the board. While I hate having to 'downgrade' existing mechanics, it seems like a feasible solution. Perhaps out of combat it will cool down much faster. So in combat it would be a choice of either having to wait for the gun to cool down, wasting time, or to change their heat sink, of which they only get so many. Another thing that could be changed is that when gun actually 'overheats', the heat sink breaks, and will have to be changed in order for the player to fire again. But if the player does not pass this threshold, the heat sink will recover. This seems a like a fair compromise, but I think it breaks lore, as the guns in the first game had no such problem. The exception of course would be the heavy weapons. As they won't operate like mass accelerators, they'll need finite ammo counts.