"Ready or Not, but you are the tango" - some bloke on the discord
"It's like going back to classic PAYDAY 2 gameplay, but then keep going even further" - DR01D_Qs
"Waiting for NQR to steal gunplay from it kappa" - nikita
"Just make your own game at this point" - splish
What is NQR?
NQR is a big work-in-progress overhaul mod, which aims for a vastly more grounded, "hollywood realism"-flavoured gameplay experience, even more so than the classic PAYDAY 2 was back in the day.
The primary focus is common-sense-driven gunplay with a bunch of brand-new stats and mechanics, reworked handling, new reloading systems, global dynamic bullet penetration, and generally things to think of when choosing the tools and mastering them.
A never-achieved-before level of freedom in weapon customizability allows you to have control over almost every single weapon part, in some cases being able to essentially build one existing gun into another of its family. A ton of weapon mods, including many exclusive ones, are made to be compatible with more guns, but there are also many more limiting rules, so it's almost a little game within a game to dive deep into. At the same time though, the "Rifle is fine" principle is present in its full glory!
All to achieve a unique kind of decision-making process for choosing the right tool for the job, according to roughly how one would actually perform in comparison to others - if you were put in a similar scenario.
To make it work, basically everything had to be overhauled:
- A player that is no longer a supersonic war machine - generally slower, more vulnerable, easier to incapacitate. You will need to adapt to not getting yourself into huge troubles. Armor is no longer guaranteed to protect you from everything. No ways of getting health aside from nerfed healing items, or global passive regen, which is slow and kicks in after quite a delay. The process of refilling ammo is more deliberate rather than passive vacuuming.
- Heavily de-emphasized RPG-elements, with no magical crap that makes a player invulnerable, deal more damage, fly around, reload in 1 nanosecond. [WIP: skills/perks currently just aren't there at all yet, that's how much less important they are. Still a high priority though, more on that down below]
- Enemies that are significantly lesser in quantities, but deadlier than ever, including the lowest difficulty. Even a single swat could take you down at the wrong time if you're not careful enough. On the other hand, them too being way easier to incapacitate, rewards caution, precision, and situational awareness.
- Significantly more detailed (compared to almost none?) enemy armor and damage system, representing what they actually wear, with different tiers of protection of each body part, even with different sides those parts could be hit from! HP values though are all roughly the same (yes, even Bulldozer's), on any difficulty. A couple of enemies to deal with now actually feels like a fight, not like countless targets to plink.
- Progression and economics reworks, where money matters for way longer, leveling up doesn't feel like a speedrun, and the levels and costs of guns actually had some thought put into them, according to their new balance. Continental coins can no longer buy you weapon mods, but your cash can, and installation is always free. XP comes primarily from kills. You start with actually shitty guns, fighting easier enemies on lower difficulties, slowly working your way up as you upgrade. [all of this is a big WIP, much more to come]
- Only 4 difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard, Overkill), with pretty subtle but clear-cut distinctions. The aim is for you to actually have to go through all of them while progressing, and for lower ones to still be viable late-game. The entire progression path is way more flattened out.
There is just SO much stuff to list here. A more detailed doc on all the changes is in the works. Until then, you can visit the YouTube channel from the video above to learn some more details.
[even this modpage is work-in-progress]
The mod being an overhaul, obviously uses a different matchmaking key (can only play with other NQR players), blocks achievements, and uses a dedicated save file.
As with any overhaul of this scale, it is HEAVILY ADVISED to setup an entirely new modlist for NQR from scratch, adding more mods carefully. This includes mod_overrides mods.
What is not there yet? AKA Roadmap:
Skills
This should be big, but kinda in an opposite sense. Same as with everything in NQR, driven primarily by common sense, skills should only affect stuff that could actually depend on a person's abilities. Those could include a character's fitness, specific motor training, dexterity/proficiency with a certain whatever, advanced knowledge (which would allow to use/adopt/tweak more efficient pieces of gear), just general training - anything to still be a strong RPG-element, but affecting the gameplay WAY LESS drastically.
A rough picture of the entire set of skilltrees (which would be roughly 90% new skills) has already been done for a while. That's the easy part though, only have to code in all the new skills, playtest the heck out of it, probably rebalance the whole game for this overall difficulty shift...
One more important thing I want is to have an incentive to not be able to easily switch between skill sets, or to fully respec, which leads to having 50 builds for each heist (or mood) - this is to further de-emphasize the reliance on fantasy RPG mechanics, but at the same time emphasizing the Role Playing aspect of the Game. There are a number of ideas to achieve that, some of which are going to take quite a bit of work.
"Perk decks"
The vanilla Perk decks system is essentially just a second tree of preset skills. That idea has always felt weird to me, so everything related to a character's abilities and bonuses - I think should stay in Skills.
What I currently have in mind about reworking Perk decks is to use Copycat's interface to have some sort of a loadout-tuner where you control some of its aspects, like the amount of primary or secondary spare ammo, amount of throwables, maybe deployable charges, maybe even additional heist gear? Every option would obviously be a compromise of some pros vs some cons, so you adapt it to your playstyle and to the rest of your current gear. Leveling up could be involved, gradually allowing you to tune new things. Different sets of "perk decks" in such a system would just be presets of the same stuff.
Melee weapons
Gotta overhaul all the melee weapons using the same basic principles as with guns - estimating their actual potential effectiveness compared to each other, common sense first. The big-ish thing will be making Weapon Butt attack always usable, making Fists always available using a new possibility to unequip a current weapon, and making all dedicated melee weapons reside in a new third weapon slot (not as a press-to-use thing), also being optional to equip.
Exotic weapons/throwables
The mod is focused on sensible weaponry, so all your flamethrowers, bows, poison bullets, vapes, whiskey flasks, and such, had to be temporarily cut out, as they will require quite a bit of work to adapt to new systems and to develop new ones just for those. Most of them will return, but you probably will not really want to use them anyway.
VR compatibility
I'm really, REALLY excited to have all of this in VR. I haven't tried it yet (on purpose, to not get distracted...) - it might already be working fine technically, but the actual gameplay of the VR version will need probably even more of a rework than the desktop, to reflect the goal of NQR and all the new features, mechanically speaking. And even without NQR itself in mind, there are still quite a few things that I would want to rework in PAYDAY 2 VR in terms of just general VR-side of gameplay.
Stealth
Honestly, not many fully developed ideas here, because I care so little about it. But I know many players do, and it's a big part of the game as a whole, so I have to bring it back. I also just can't think of many issues with vanilla stealth, but there are surely a few aspects to just generally improve.
Assets edits
NQR does not really add fully new content, but does edit some of the existing, mostly related to guns/parts. I need a lot more of that.
GUI stuff
None of the now-swappable weapon parts (of which there are just holy moly) have inventory icons, same for skills and "perk decks". All the menus are mostly vanilla, which does not/will not work insanely well with new systems. A few features wouldn't mind having some pretty HUD elements.
But the overall visual style of all this will still remain truthful to vanilla.
And, of course, improving existing systems
What else to expect? AKA Roadmap with no roads:
Recommended mods:
Some small but awesome mods that complement the idea of NQR and play nicely with it, I highly recommend you install them. Those are the ones that I chose not to reimplement inside of NQR myself, or didn't have time to do so.
- Ragdoll Sounds, that one is HUGE
- Stamina Circle Standalone, or any stamina indicator of your choice, until I probably make something similar to this one
- AutoGibbon's Messy Package SuperBLT
- Multiple Weapon Mod Rows (crashes with Proving Grounds' weapon desks)
- Weapon Holsters
- Throwables In Team Loadout
Incompatible mods:
NQR refactors a lot of stuff in the game and is not made to be compatible with many vanilla systems or with mods that rely on them. Frankly, it's not designed to be played with gameplay-changing mods at all, it mainly is its own thing, so these are not even gonna be covered here. Not-directly-gameplay-changing mods though may still be incompatible.
As with any overhaul of this scale, it is HEAVILY ADVISED to setup an entirely new modlist for NQR from scratch, adding more mods carefully. This includes mod_overrides mods.
KNOWN incompatibilities:
- The Fixes (messes with a lot of stuff)
- WeaponLib (messes with a lot of stuff)
- Perfect View Model (more involved system)
- More Weapon Stats (stats are very different)
- Auto Fire Sound Fix (different approach)
- ADS zoom mods (different approach)
- Tactical Reloading (boy where do I begin)
- Slides & Bolts Lock Back (more involved)
- Drop my Mag (implemented, a bit different approach)
- Faster Bullet Impact Queues (different approach)
- Visual Fixes (partially), and just generally anything that touches weapon or enemy models, units, animations, may break things severely, possibly even affecting gameplay
Known issues:
Kinda serious:
- I barely touched or playtested bots (team AI). I know there was a bug where sometimes they get stuck in a looped reload animation. Besides that, they are probably at least just imbalanced as hell, I'd suggest to not use them for now.
- I believe this one is a child of some recent vanilla updates, but in multiplayer (even if you are host), cops' hurt animations are being funny, kinda queuing themselves, playing more times than needed? What is not funny is NQR's reliance on those animations to be a major part of the combat flow and the sheer frequency of them compared to vanilla.
Minor:
- Scrolling through the weapon customization menu and installing weapon mods can be very laggy for some weapons, depending on the number of available options, amount of them installed, and the amount of clusterfuckery they have in their code. That is because in PAYDAY 2 every breath in those menus seems to be causing a nested reload of everything related to it. Very likely might be optimized.
- The weapon sway system needs more work, some weapons act weird when using an angled sight.
- Some default weapon parts (ones that are an option for other guns) can be seen in the available mods list. You are able to try to detach them, but it will do nothing.
- Sometimes, detaching a weapon mod does not warn you that this will cause another mod to also detach, I suppose this is a vanilla bug.
- Some weapon parts have broken lighting, some can be seen through walls.
- The way weapon mods stats are being displayed needs more work.
- Some text strings might be missing.
Whatever:
- Reloading segments do not perfectly correlate to what is happening in the animation. Sorry, but I care more about stats and internal timings here, and cannot afford to "properly" reanimate the entire PAYDAY 2 arsenal (if only...).
- There is a "desync" between some empty reload animations and the state of a gun after it has been fired without a magazine - since the bolt/slide shouldn't lock back, but we don't have an empty reload animation variant with fully racking the bolt/slide. Theoretically could be solved though, without custom animations.
- The wallpush system doesn't detect some rare geometry that is solid to a player, but completely transparent to bullets and laser sights.
Potential:
- Well, anything lol. A lot of stuff is not fully complete, some is in prototype stage, and everything is being written by a monkey (me) that doesn't know what they're doing. Quite a bit of NQR code is based on an older vanilla code. Some important systems have been heavily messed with. I have been playtesting all of this monstrosity 99% alone and the rest 1% is with no more than one teammate... What I'm saying is, bigger issues may arise, but this is my passion project which I can't see myself abandoning in the distant future, so I will be there to try to fix shit.
Thanks to:
TheTankDivision for being an actual (unlike me) programmer that taught me the basics of PAYDAY 2 lua modding, pretty much firestarting this project's development, and for being there with me for the whole time to help with some in-depth coding problems. Without him, probably none of this would have ever happened, or at least would take like 5 more years.
splish for being an insanely knowledgeable nerd and a real old-school heister that shared quite a bit of his experience of tinkering with PAYDAY 2 assets, and helped with conceptualizing many of the core ideas of the mod. NQR would not have some of its very important features without his close-to-priceless input.
nikita and James for a few code tips, some obscure sources, and for generally being there with the project and sharing some of their modding experience (despite them both being into their own versions of the game lol).
James for their Houston's HOXwarming Party mod, which helped with figuring out customizing difficulties set and a way of messing with crimenetmanager.
Sora for their Drop My Mag mod, from which I took a fix of a dropped magazine's bullet_objects.
Hoppip and krimzin for suggesting ways to debug raycasts.
Hoppip for their Streamlined Heisting mod, from which I've learned a way to manipulate Bulldozer armor pieces HP without touching sequence managers, also allowing me to research a similar solution for door handles.
cristianux for their Marshal Shield Shotgun Swap mod, from which I learned a neat way of swapping enemy weapons.
DMC for their No Perma-Gadget Rails mod, from which I've learned how to manipulate the visibility of weapon parts' parts.
Zdann for their Arm and Leg Hitboxes mod, from which I only took the assets part with some additions, minus the script part.
return for their Better Weapon Animations mod, from which I learned a basic method of lerping a stance change.
TRANS RIGHTS for their Payday 2 Spread Fix mod, from which I took the scary vector math.
And everyone who has been there with me along the way, watching my livestreams, being in the discord, leaving comments on the videos, showing their interest, sharing ideas, even helping solve some problems.
THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!
Where to find more?
I'm not quite sure if it's ok to link personal shit, but you can proceed to the YouTube channel from the video above where I make some progress devlogs, from there you could also find my Twitch, and from there even a Discord server, which is not very international-friendly atm, but we will see how it goes.
