Genuinely think the best option for SoT to keep the authentic realistic pirate experience but also have actual working gameplay is to implement hitscan like it is implement in Rust but slightly adapted for SoT.
For context in Rust when shooting a gun the bullet itself will not deal any damage and just exist as a visual for the first x meters but instead purely rely on hitscan to determine if damage was dealt or not, this I will refer to as the hitscan phase. Past x meters the bullet turns into a projectile turning into an entity in the game engine affect by the physics engine (currently how all of SoT works), I will refer this as the projectile phase.
Now there are pros and cons to both systems but definitely think that implementing the two will provide the most consistent and authentic experiences. The issue with projectile phase as we all know is hit registration, due to the bullet/weapon acting as an entity being thrown into an already overloaded physics engine we see a lot of problems with detecting proper collision between the entity and player resulting in the phenomenons known as hit reg and backtracks.
Hitscan though will of course lead to problems of its own where else than losing the authentic experience of bullet travel and such we can end up seeing visuals not aligning with actual damage. Where the visual of the bullet is seen clearly missing but damage is still dealt this is a disjoint. This problem will be significantly more likely at longer than shorter ranges.
For this reason the implementation of both systems together will provide the best mix of authenticity and consistency. Here is how I would do it.
Blunderbuss and sword will be strictly hitscan weapons. These are close range weapons which already move extremely fast meaning that we will rarely see disjoints between damage and visual. No more will these weapons ever hit reg or backtrack.
Pistol and EoR will implement a mixed system like in Rust but with each weapon having different ranges where they swap from hitscan to projectile. We will see this change for both weapons probably around where the bullet significantly starts to curve down so after a solid half to 0.75 seconds of travel time. This way long range shots will not be instant and still technically reactable by skilled played keeping the feeling authentic, but close range shots that were already not reactable in this game will never deal with hit reg again.
Want to hear peoples thoughts on this system, and to be clear this is not a post on weapon balancing! Once this system is implement balance changes will probably have to be made with sword probably deserving of a full rework. But discussing how to balance weapons without a proper system implemented is purely speculative and holds little value. Instead of pressuring Rare to rebalance weapons I hope this thread will pressure Rare to double down on development of hitscan so that we can then get the much wanted weapon rebalance + additional weapons/pvp features.
