I want to immediately hope someone doesn’t strike down this thread as trolling or whatever, but I want to say it; I’m quite content with the design change of the Rocket Launcher for Guardians.
Now, I know why people aren’t happy with it. I mean, the classic Halo rocket launcher is pretty iconic in it’s design, and it has a lot of fond memories associated with it. Truth be told, I am glad that it’s coming back in the capacity of a legendary weapon (whatever that means), but I want to explain why I like the new design.
Now, from a first-look perspective, it does look a bit like a cheap redesign. Without using it, it does just look like your typical SMAW coming out of the US Army from a side view perspective. But really, getting to use it and seeing how it handles, it’s what made the difference for me.
So, gameplay wise, I’m absolutely not bothered with the change. It still handles like the good ol’ rocket launcher, didn’t feel like using a different weapon. So my issue isn’t even remotely here. But most of my liking for this design comes from a realism standpoint.
First, the old design, as cool as it did, strikes me with a few hypothetical guesses about the dangers of operating it. The rotating barrels alone lead me to speculate about two serious safety risks it could pose. The first being soldiers operating it possibly getting their hands caught in the rotating barrels as they moved, potentially causing severe harm to the operator. The second issue being jamming and misfiring. With the reliance on switching the barrel like that to fire again, a barrel jam could lead to a catastrophic backfire. And with the ordnance it fires, a catastrophic backfire could very seriously be lethal to the operator. And the final nitpick, aside from all that, is ammo efficiency. You reload this thing by pulling the rear tubes and replacing them, much like (ironically, considering my past mention) reloading a SMAW. And the replacement tubes are huge too, given the ammo pickups we saw in CE and H2 nearly being 2-3 feet tall.
As for this new design, it does come off as a bit generic in some places. But the few things I want to highlight is as follows:
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The magazine-based reloading, while already making me think of the Borderlands rocket launchers for how that works, is already infinitely more logical than the classic design. Twin rocket packs contained in a magazine at under half the size would not only be efficient for faster reloading, but also for easier carrying.
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The single-barrel design, although it doesn’t look as cool, would logically mean far less chance for jamming or misfires compared to the rotating twin barrel design of the old rocket launcher.
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The scope. I can’t express how much I liked the scope. Even with SmartScope opening the possibility for a holographic interface for the classic rocket launcher, I like this new design, and I’ve always liked hard scopes on rocket launchers. The interface looked clean and serviceable, so in my mind, it does win some style points.
Now, I want to express this strongly: I don’t condemn the old rocket launcher design in favor of the new one. I’ll still love the old one too, as I even said I’m glad it’s getting special treatment and coming back in some capacity. But I want to establish from a logical/functional perspective as to why I think this design works, even if some of the examples I gave aren’t things we haven’t experienced in the game. If you love the old design and don’t like the new one, that’s cool, I just wanted to give my feedback on something that’s been getting a lot of negative attention.