Oh lordy yes this would be awesome. We have to remember though that this entails a complete overhaul of the whole weapon system if it includes all current weapons.

A more realistic approach would be to introduce T3 weapons that can be modified just as strategic cruisers in eve. It can then be decided if it is something every gun should have.

Edit for awesome

Well, the one thing I would say is this: why have non-modular weapons at all?

If you can have a customization that deep, but still have pre-assembled models available in the market for people who are either new to the game or prefer just buying something that works, you've effectively got the same setup, but with less total assets in the game, less art assets that have to be made, and less possible in-engine assets to have to render in a fight.

For example, EVE ships use skins that are 1024x1024 pixels.

Tech-III ships in EVE use subsystems that are each 512x512. This allows them to have a high level of visual fidelity without making them too much of a resource hog to render.

With Dust, if we're going to use the numbers I listed as a reference, you can make each "subsystem" the equivalent of 256x256 in order to allow weapons to look great without being too much of a resource hog.

All of this is true and i'd love to see this just as you do. If they can manage the overhead, both in terms of development and system performance, by all means do it CCP.

The pessimistic part of me tells me though that development resources are limited and all current weapon designs and code bases would have to be scrapped or largely rewritten even when we add pre-assambled versions that look identical to our current weapons unless we want to have two systems to maintain in parallel (which is possible but again costly).

I fully support this idea if CCP can handle the increased complexity without significantly delaying content releases or worsen overall balance (another aspect that gets exponentionally more intricate when adding so many variables)

Another possibilty would be making only new weapons customizable at first. This would limit the amount of extra work and allow for the system to be built first and then adopted by the rest of them when all design and programming quirks are dealt with.

CCP said something about T3 level customization for all weapons coming Later(TM).
At this rate it's more like Never(EVER(ever(TM)))

Weapon customization would be sweet and is a popular request...

I would like to see weapon customization, but I think they need to add in the base weapons and vehicles before worrying about customization. How can we know what we want our weapon to do if we don't even have all the options to play with yet?

Interesting how the thing called search works. Type whatever you want in, and you get whatever you want. It seems as though nobodyuses it. Oh well..... but just to let you know, it's called rigging.

I absolutely love this idea! It just would be tottally awesome. I imagine this is what they mean when they talk about tech 3 equipment. Giving players the ability to actually effect the stats of thier weapons would be really cool. Let them tweak the range, power, ammo count, dispersion and other stuff by useing different pieces. As well as putting attachments on.

Honestly if they did this it would be a bit of a relief to me. Making everyone wait until they reach that far up the skill tree would **** people off. Players love customizing. Let people unlock and buy attachments for their weapons right from the get go. Save the fancy modular weapons for when they get to tech 3 stuff.

That's kind of the neat thing, though.

I know people roll their eyes when I go off about MechWarrior: Living Legends, but one of the key aspects of how we designed our mod was to implement variants pulled from the tabletop game manuals and balance those against each other. We never managed to get around to implementing a "mech lab" before we eventually decided to halt the project after what was effectively 6 years of self-induced slave labor, but the idea was to achieve mech and weapon balance via a set of diverse and useful assets, and then use that to allow for a balanced full-customization system.

With all the metrics that CCP has shown that they're gathering right now, they could do the same thing.

As far as the idea of Tech-III weapons is concerned, I can see that too easily making our current weapons into the equivalent of the current Basic Frames. If they were to be their own set of weapons, suddenly they become required to be competitive, and anyone that hasn't been playing as long as us Beta guys again ends up shafted.

I'm not sure if i can properly follow your first point here so let and try paraphrase that.

You are saying that the large amount of customization, while not making every possible combination equally strong, will still leave all or most guns with some combinations that are at least viable thus create an effectively self balancing system where single sub-modules can then be tweaked around without having to fear breaking anything as most unintended effects will be mitigated by players simply adapting through the wide range of options available to them?

That's an interesting thought. If this works (and if i understand you correctly) it could solve or lessen some of the balance issues on top of dripping with awesome. It seems to me though that it would require quite a substantial amount of options that are at least within a reasonable range of general balance. And there's still the issue that potential outliers are harder to pin down by virtue of the options alone. The system could defeat it's own purpose if it turns out that every weapon has only one or two usable combinations after all.

The second part is true but not impossible to manage. T3 in EVE is somewhat nicely balanced by generally not being as strong in any role as the respective T2 specialized vessel. This is a tradeoff for being that versatile (and oh god the SP penalty ).

I'm split on this issue as i would love having full customization on all weapons preferably by last week but i'm trying to maintain a level of realism that allows me to figure out an efficient and feasible way to pull this off for CCP.