hatfieldcw

Yeah, I'd guess that 90% of my time in game has been with an ALICE pack on. For the record, the twelve-slot inventory we enjoy in DayZ is not normal in Arma2. Most units only have a 6-slot inventory, and some have only three. The survivor dude with the cargo pants and safari vest is using all those pockets as part of his normal 12-slot inventory. If you had a 3-slot inventory, then that 6-slot pack would be mighty handy, but it's just unnecessary in this mod, since you start out with max size basic inventory and an 8-slot pack. I say take out the vest pouch, make the Assault Pack and Czech Backpack more common in military and residential sites, respectively, and make the ALICE pack about as rare as the compass is. The Coyote pack is just about right, I think. I've only found one in all my adventures, not counting the ones I take from dead players or tents I discover.

A real-time feedback system that allows players to intentionally reward each other in the form of recommendations would be a neat feature, akin to "likes" or beans or humanity or whatever. It's obviously going to be tough to implement, since abuse of the system is likely. I'd like to see more discussion about how that could be done. As to a way to "finish" the game, I agree with you. It would be nice to be able to "retire" a character without just waiting for him to die. Whenever I get a fracture out in the woods and hit the "Respawn" button, I imagine my guy writing a little note with his next of kin and basic life story in it, then propping himself up under a tree and blowing his own head off, while sad music plays and the leaves rustle. If you could have him set off in a boat, not knowing what's waiting for him beyond the horizon, or even have your whole clan get on the helicopter with all the fuel and food they can carry and head out into the dark. You all get to spawn at the coast again, but you feel good about it. Maybe it unlocks a skin or something.

I'd say only let it work with packs up to the Czech Backpack, not with the ALICE or Coyote packs. That way, it's not just three free inventory slots to fill will canteens, it costs you a little something to have it. I'm looking forward to a backpack tradeoff besides rarity and visibility. If they influenced running speed or stealth or endurance in some way, that would really add depth to what is currently a no-brainer: Get the biggest pack around, wear it all the time. If we could only wear the Czech Vest pouch under a ghillie suit, or had to give up our watter bladder to gain some ammo storage space, or needed to decide whether to wear the pack while we sneak into that hangar, the game would gain a lot. Anyway, yeah, this is a good idea. I might even want it to go a step further and have the pack's water supply slowly drain while the player's hydration stays at 100%, so instead of three "drinks" that recharge you, it's more like just having a long time before you start getting thirsty, since you're sipping on that thing.

Meh, I prefer to have a little grey area when I meet people. I'd say it's about 100% kill on sight once you're geared, but it didn't use to be. When I get geared, my end game is to go to the coast, hit up cities and villages and look for new spawns. For a while there, when DayZ was really booming, I could meet people and give them some guns and medicine and have them help me raid a supermarket, hospital or fire house before we parted ways. That was a lot of fun. Sure, some would go at me with their Makarov or Enfield, but the risk brought excitement. Now, even the newest spawns are just jaded old DayZ players doing their routine hospital/ALICE pack run before hitting their tent cities to get guns and ammo. I give them an AKM and they shoot me every time to take... what? My Enfield/WInchester/AKu? Well, they win and I respawn and head into town. A lot of the time, if they didn't hide my body, I can rearm 100% because they didn't bother taking so much as a Pepsi off me, they're just farming that low humanity score. It's totally obnoxious, and it's been over a week, maybe ten hours of DayZ, since I had a positive interaction with a survivor who wasn't a buddy of mine outside the game. Are they all trying for bandit hats? Are they all terrified of me? Just today, I was outside the Elektro supermarket and I saw a guy go in there. I broadcast, "Hey, man, I see you in there, but I'm just gonna go around. Don't worry about me, I'm headed out of town." Then I went down the street and about a hundred meters later he was spraying AK fire at me. The game's a straight-up deathmatch now, and not even goodwill and commitment to pacifism can fix it. I guess I'll just start playing like they do, only trusting out-of-game allies and treating the entire DayZ community as hostile. Infuriating.

Absolutely. No zombies in the arctic, unless they're inside facilities. Out of doors the danger is the environment, which is too busy being cold to care whether you live or die.

I like to imagine that a secret government super-soldier project went awry, and the retrovirus that made people super strong and super fast with Wolverine-style regeneration mutated into the zombie plague. The test subjects themselves, of course, were deemed too unstable, too psychotic, too mentally unstable for deployment, and all the battle clones were cryogenically frozen on board a research vessel off the coast of Chernarus. When Day Z came and infrastructure failed, they started to thaw out, one by one, and wash ashore where their battle conditioning and survival instincts kicked in and the started roaming the countryside, gathering equipment and devouring the wildlife and beating the crap out of each other for no good reason. It explains how morphine heals broken bones and a steak regenerates all your blood and a bandage is enough to take care of a sucking chest wound, as well as covering why we can run forever and hydrate with Pepsi and don't think twice about murdering the crud out of each other whenever the opportunity arises.

Games like GTA IV and Just Cause 2 and Saint's Row 3 had large maps that scaled well whether you were on foot or flying a helicopter. They had short draw-in on units because they generally had a boatload of units around, civilians and highway traffic and stuff like that. In a game like DayZ, where your client is only dealing with a handful of players at a time (usually just you, actually) and maybe a dozen or so zombies, I think console hardware would be able to up the draw distance to a respectable km or so. Enough for sub-AS50 sniping and binocular use, anyway. Heck, outside of PvP, you rarely deal with anything more than a few hundred meters away, due to zombies not spawning farther out and most guns having a max effective range of under 300m. My PC isn't state-of-the-art anymore, and it runs DayZ at max settings and 8km visibility with a decent framerate, even in cities. I expect the next generation of consoles to more than match its capabilities, so I'm not worried about the technical aspect. Even with today's console hardware, as I noted above, a passable environment could be managed. It might not be as pretty close-up as Halo 5 or Modern Warfare 4 will be, but neither is ArmA2. My main worry is that console players won't embrace the game as it is, giving the DayZ team a choice between economic failure and compromising the integrity of the game's vision. If it comes to that, I hope they choose economic failure and live off the PC sales instead of making a lame game and driving a Bentley.

Realism's a dumb argument. Morphine won't heal a fractured limb, nobody can run forever at 25km/hour with a 40kg load on their shoulders, flashlights, NVG, GPS and rangefinders use batteries, pepsi and coke don't hydrate you and you can't repair a helicopter in eight seconds with some old car parts and a ratchet. Also you can't survive getting shot five times in the chest with a .45 ACP pistol any more than you can survive getting shot in the thigh with a .50 BMG rifle. Many of the guns do less damage than they should, and the game's wounding system depends on players being incapacitated and out of the fight long before they're actually dead. Sometimes I'll shoot a guy a couple times and then leg it without going over there to execute him. He probably lays there for a while, then gets up, bandages himself, eats a can of beans and heads out to find a cow to eat to get his health back. I don't care, I'm gone. That's fine. The ONLY reason that .50 rifles are important is that they can get a confirmed kill without a headshot before the target can Alt+F4. Alt+F4 is a dick move, and the guys who do it should be ashamed. I've had people Alt+F4 away from my Mk. 48, my M14, my Lee Enfield and even my 1911. It's lame, they're lame. Here's the thing: A guy who's shooting at someone from 1km away is no more entitled to a confirmed kill than a guy who's locked in CQC in a school, using a WInchester 1866 to fight for his life. If I can't get loot and credit when I'm bleeding and crawling after a battle, then why are you so special that you are entitled to it when you were laying in a bush giggling? Get a DMR and learn to make quick follow-up shots, or wait for a chance to get a headshot, or just accept the fact that sometimes you don't get a kill because some jackass bails when he takes damage. But whatever, the guy is out of your way and no longer a threat, so you've won half the battle anyway. If he sticks around to bleed out, that's great, and if he Alt+F4s his way out of the universe, that's fine, too. A quick question about Alt+F4: How do people deal with the bleeding and shock? Whenever I get shot, I go into shock the second a player's bullet hits me, even if it's just a Makarov. When I shoot a guy with an 8000 damage weapon, they fall on the ground and start spraying blood everywhere. Shortly thereafter, they disappear from the server. When they log back into the game, won't they be laying there for five minutes watching their blood drain out?

Needs more grue. Really, though, a lot of the "problem" with modern gaming is that games are well known and understood by players. Metagaming and exploitation have become part of the culture, and you can look at a new game and immediately spot ways to beat it. Sure, people "solved" Pac-Man and Berzerk and other old timey games, but nowadays, with easy ways to share tips and discoveries, you can become expert at many games just by reading online about them, so everyone can know what the experts know. I didn't know how mil dots worked until I read up on them, and I'd never have been able to be a dickhead with a DMR if I hadn't learned that. Similarly, people learn how to duplicate items and run scripts online, and they even download the scripts to run. Nothing to it. So improved communication has made it easier to be a douchebag, and that means that even the marginally competent douchebags can make their mark on the community's good time. Also, let's face it, gaming is more mainstream now, so a more diverse group of people are playing, and so we can no longer trust people to share our neckbearded solidarity when we meet them in a game. Gone are the days of nerdgames, now it's a world of punks and casuals. Alas!

Yeah, I hated OpFlash on the Xbox, too. Just not good. I'd say that the game as it exists today couldn't be effectively ported to consoles, but I am sure that a lot of the spirit of the game could be transferred. You'd lose a lot of controls, so maybe take out the lean and use the same button to bring up the watch/compass/GPS all at the same time, or just put them on the map screen. Inventory could be streamlined a bit, for sure. There was a fun Indie game a while back that was a shooting range simulator, an dit not only factored in wind and gravity, but it used the analog shoulder button on the XBox controller to analyze your trigger pull, so if you slapped the trigger it'd mess up your shot. I think snipers in DayZ could benefit from that. Throw in the integrated voice chat, the easy online implementation and the ease of use of the console, and I think you could have a good DayZ experience. The problem there would likely be the audience. Not to hurt anyone's feelings, but I think we can agree that the nerdiest, most hardcore gamers gravitate toward the PC, and those of us who had Arma before DayZ came out are the kind of dorks who play simulations and don't mind referring to an out-of-game hand-written spreadsheet or conversion table when we want to use mil dots or aim an artillery piece. Guys like us are rarer in the console community, and that mainstream audience might not embrace a game that's as technical and grueling as Arma. I think that the core experience of DayZ--the stealth, the scavenging, the loot roulette and the PvP--can be expressed on a console, though. It's just that not everyone is going to put down Gears or CoD or Madden to play it. I don't see it as a terribly lucrative market for Rocket, and I hope the PC version gets the primary focus.

No telling exactly when standalone DayZ will be available. I got DayZ maybe two months ago, and the two months I played it have been well worth the purchase price. So I'd say go ahead and pick it up, there's 30 bucks' worth of DayZ between now and when the standalone comes out. And I know you're mainly into DayZ, but Arma2 is worth a look, especially once you have it. If nothing else, fire up the armory and fly around in various helicopters and airplanes. It's a hoot, and driving in Arma, where stuff can be spawned at will, is the best way to practice for DayZ, where crashing costs you and your team hours of work. I made a custom multiplayer map one time that was just a Laser-sighting UAV and a few aircraft with laser-guided weapons on them. My buddies and I just fired it up for a couple minutes here or there and had a blast bombing the hell out of whatever the UAV guy pointed at.

More survival considerations is better in my mind. It's a little goofy that a heat pack takes up the same amount of space as a ghillie suit in your backpack, so maybe some kind of inventory revamp would be called for, but if stuff like heat packs and painkillers etc. were stacked with multiple uses, then it would become feasible to have a wider array of environmental hazards. I'd say go nuts with it, let us wear rain gear or sweaters, have people trying to stick in the shade on hot days or huddled around fires on freezing nights, make us dry out our clothes after a swim in cold climates or risk hypothermia. I remember playing the arctic maps in Clonk Planet, and having to kill a seal and make an anorak and treat it with blubber before I could go outside for more than a few minutes at a time. Crap like that would rule in DayZ.

That's not bad. ZedsDeadBaby, I think maybe you and I got off on the wrong foot. I mistook you for the sort of guy who plays the game in the most efficient possible way, using all available metagaming methods to maximum effect. Your story about losing a 42-day-old character, though, is exactly the sort of thing that I'm trying to encourage. The problem is that the current persistent storage system allows people to die ten times a day and never give a hoot about their character or his story. Instead, they can play the game like it's Diablo 3, where you die and then respawn with a slap on the wrist and full access to everything you've earned. It encourages people to do high-risk loot-gathering missions, because they can just throw everything in a tent then rush into the NWAF with an ax and an ALICE pack and come out with three nice guns and one mag for each of them, then dupe up a bunch of ammo and have an instantaneous full kit whenever they want it. If everyone wept at the death of their character, the game would be deeper and the personal interactions would be more important. At this point, if I see a guy with a big coyote pack and a DMR running into Cherno, I don't think it's an old player with a hurt friend who needs morphine to keep his team alive, I think it's a guy who just geared up at his tent and is heading for his favorite rooftop to chalk up some more kills. I'd guess that I'm right more often than not, and when I gun him down and take his stuff, I don't feel like I'm undoing hours of work in a moment, I feel like I'm harvesting a bottomless quarry of duped loot. If the rules encouraged your sort of play, and discouraged theirs, then that would make for a fun game. As it stands, you're voluntarily hobbling yourself by playing it "straight", preserving your character's life and working with buddies to legitimately obtain and expend resources. What you do in this game amounts to roleplay, because the game rules clearly support an easier, more efficient way to succeed. I want that roleplay to the the best play.

My point is that you can't have a hidden enemy. There won't be any sasquatch-type creatures that may or may not be present. If it's in the game, then there's a model and a unit ID and a rule for when it spawns, and that stuff will be in the client, so some basic data mining will be able to extract the files and tell us what the thing is, how it moves, what it looks like, how much HP it has, all that sort of stuff. Unless there's some new file type with a weird new encryption on it, people will use the Arma 3 tools to unpack the DayZ unit data and learn all the secrets right from the start.Not an argument against having Slenderman in the game, but it'll be a known quantity, not an urban legend.

Other people who use your tents can pitch their own tents and keep their stuff in them. There is no end-game in DayZ, unless you count dying and starting over. Permanent stockpiles of gear that persist for weeks or months after the owner is dead and duplicate their contents accidentally are not core gameplay. Dying, respawning and retaining 95% of your assets through the process is not core gameplay. When you die, it ceases to be your tent, and it ceases to be your stuff, and you cease to be you. You respawn as a new survivor, and it's unfortunate that you wash up on the beach with special knowledge of where a recently dead guy parked his car. What passes for an end-game in DayZ--The loot stockpiling, the barracks farming, the warring over helicopters and the newb griefing--all arise from the flawed mechanics of the current state of the mod. They are not sacred and need not be defended. I know it's fun to have infinite guns and food and ghillie suits and night vision goggles waiting for you when you spawn, and it's fun to be able to die and be back to 100% combat effectiveness in under an hour, but it's not the way the game is supposed to feel. You should care about staying alive, but people don't, because there's nothing to lose. You should lose your stuff when you die, even the stuff that you hid in the trunk of a car a mile north of Gvozdno. Persistent storage and the play styles that it enables are errors in the game, problems with the system. It's why people only go to high-value loot spawns to either deathmatch or to murder the newbs who don't know how to "win" at DayZ. It's why vehicles are just mobile camps. Fixing the item storage will go a long way to making DayZ into the kickass zombie survival roguelike that so many people want it to be. The problem is that the current state of the project has chased away the target audience for the finished project, and filled the community to bursting with FPS enthusiasts who like it best just the way it is. When the standalone game is in beta and DayZ players start offering feedback, there will be enormous pressure to build a game that continues to cater to the current mindset and style of play. The game is too easy for you, and it's easy because of persistent storage. Harden up, and leave your shantytown behind.

I'm with you right up until "Group Save". Ditch that. When you die, everything you built, including tents, despawns as soon as your body is hidden, either manually or after the timer runs out on it. That way, you can kill a guy at his camp and then take his stuff. Respawning at the coast should be a fresh start for you, not a footrace to get back to your stash of gear and rearm to exactly what you were before. Vehicles are trickier. When you die, vehicles that you owned or had saved should be teleported to the nearest valid vehicle spawn point. So if you've got a GAZ stashed off-map in the West woods, then your death will cause it to spawn--with all repairs and contents intact--in Zelenogorsk. If you have a team, they'll have ways to protect it, like having someone else save it before your body is hidden or even just using their knowledge that it'll be respawning to prompt a salvage mission to nearby likely sites. No more parking it in a bush 3km away from civilization and using it like a cabin in the woods, vehicles have to be with your team when you run the risk of losing the guy it's linked to, or you need a guy who doesn't take chances and just babysits the ride, or you need to deal with the inconvenience of actually starting fresh once in a while.

Standalone's going to be built on the Arma 3 engine, isn't it? Since that engine's almost completed, and the release date is so near, odds are there won't be many core changes. I'm guessing file types and structures will be discoverable to savvy investigators, and the wiki will shortly have all the weapon stats, loot tables and unit data posted for all to see.

I want to be able to set my FOV to 270 degrees, that'll help more with peripheral vision than 3rd person does. It would also be a little disorienting and the forward direction would be about two inches across on my monitor, so how about we just leave 3rd person in the game? As others have said, here and elsewhere, 3rd person is an imperfect fix for an imperfect simulation. For every time you say, "You can't see around corners without exposing any part of your body, someone can say, "Yeah, but I can see around corners without exposing 40% of my body, and I can look through a bush without taking a half-dozen lurching steps around until my eye level lines up with a gap in the branches, and I can lift my head up high enough to see over some grass without assuming a kneeling stance, and I can tell where my feet are without looking down at them, and I can do a thousand other things to gain situational awareness that the game cannot replicate as it currently exists." Third person might give too much information, but first person gives too little. The decision to use one or the other is best left to the server administrator and the end user.

Nice work. Enfield revenge is the sweetest revenge. Beans delivered. Alpo has the right of it. First person isn't more realistic. For one thing, I don't have a 60-degree cone of vision in real life, so even in third person it's like having blinders on when it comes to situational awareness. I could crouch behind a bush and part the leaves with my hand to peer out, but not in the game. I could raise my head just enough to see over grass or a rock, but not in the game. Inevitably in games, you find yourself piloting a robot that resembles a man, and it falls to the game's interface to pick up the slack. third person cameras, little bubbles on the edge of the screen, picture of a thermometer that changes colors, all these features are crutches, not for the player, but for the simulation.

Not at all. Chrome Hounds for the XBox 360 had a rich and innovative radio system, where you could maintain voice comms only while you were in your team's territory. Venturing out into the parts of the map that your control points did not command cut you off from your allies, so you lose the ability to report to them until you got back from your sortie, if you got back at all. Sometimes you'd come under fire and have to disengage and head for home because losing the fight wouldn't just cost your team a player, it would cost them all the knowledge that you and only you had learned. Tense stuff. When XBox Live introduced party chat, people would just party up their mates and use that instead, removing the disadvantages of Chrome Hounds' voice system. It's metagaming, and it definitely changed the game (for the worse, in my opinion, since a lot of strategy often revolved around gaining and denying intel), but nobody is going to voluntarily hobble themselves when there's an easy way to be stronger with no ill effects.They could have just had a conference call on their phones, or fired up their PC and used Teamspeak or Skype, but since those measures are inconvenient, they played it straight, using the game's rules. Here on the PC, the easier ways of voicechatting are so common and simple that most players are already using them. After all, who uses the in-game direct chat to talk to their team? Meeting strangers, sure, that's what the caps lock key is for, but as soon as I meet a newb and give him a Makarov and a can of beans, he's asking for my Steam ID or my Skype or inviting me to his Ventrilo server, because it takes twelve seconds to permanently eliminate all the problems that come with in-game chat. So it would be with the radio. Inevitably the server MOTD would include, "Tune to 103.7 for newbie help!" and then 103.7 would be a cacophony of voices--newbs wanting help, heroes looking to help them, bandits looking to exploit them and trolls doing what trolls do best. Anyone with the wherewithal and organization to pick a frequency and use it will find it easier and more powerful to have a Teamspeak server and use it.

Why don't we have an itemized list for this debate? Pro .50-cal: It's a fun gameplay style for some, removal would persecute these players It's the only way to ensure a positive kill on a player who will Alt+F4 at the drop of a hat Effective versus vehicles, specifically the helicopter Anti .50-cal: Duping makes them ubiquitous and trivial to acquire, flooding servers with instagib griefers who cannot be stopped, since they can rearm in minutes and resume their newb-slaying Not in keeping with the spirit of the zombie apocalypse setting Overpowered in DayZ due to balance issues I come down against the .50 sniper rifles. My responses to each point: Pros First: Sniper lifestyle: You can snipe with other rifles. It's tougher, and you'll likely miss some kills, but you can have the full sniper experience with an M24 or DMR. What you'll miss out on is the kill tally, but that's acceptable to me. Alt+F4: Invalid argument. Alt+F4 is used all the time, regardless of what weapon you have. If one-shot kills are the answer, I want my 1911 to deal 37000 damage, too. Effective versus vehicles: I can't really speak to this point, because I don't know how effective .50s are against flying helicopters compared to other weapons. It doesn't seem like something that comes up terribly often, except when helicopters wander into a sniper's area of influence and are targeted. As for the Cons: Duping/Hacking: Sure, dupers and hackers will have the toys they want as long as they're allowed to dupe and hack, so that's no more relevant to the specific weapon issue than the Alt+F4 side of the debate, but it's worth noting that nobody's hacking in a bunch of M110s and KSVKs and duping them. If the guns were removed from the game, they'd be easier to cull on the server side and less tempting to dupe, and that'll mean the pesky sniper on that hill will be using a more demanding rifle, and your death, while still pointless, will be a feat of skill. Not in keeping with the setting: There's plenty of reasons for the guns to be present in Chernarus, so that's not a problem. The only thing that seems out of place about these rifles are how common they are, and that's due to the problems from the previous point. Overpowered: Absolutely, and this is the key reason for me wanting them gone. Why are .50BMG rifles overpowered? They are too easy to succeed with. -Instakill power regardless of point of impact. -Superb optics. -Extraordinary precision. -Unmatched range. A sniper of even modest ability can rack up PvP kills with one of these without much effort. In contrast, the CZ550, DMR, M24 and SVD require a headshot for a clear kill, reducing the valid target area by something like 90%. How do you combat a sniper? 1. Find out where he is 2. Go someplace where your weapons can reach him 3. Kill him. P.S. - Do not let him kill you in the meantime This is hard. Finding him is hard because the effective range of the AS50 is over a kilometer, which is a big radius to search. Getting into position to kill him, while avoiding his eye and the rifle that he's looking through, can take several minutes, due to the distances and terrain concerns. Killing a sniper isn't any harder than killing anyone else, but they're generally well armed, with a backup assault rifle of some kind and a ghillie suit. Plus, they're not any more shy about Alt+F4 than the players they need those guns to kill, so unless you brought a .50 with you, you're going to enjoy a twenty-minute high-risk maneuvering session followed by a fight that's either quite difficult or interrupted by a logoffski, leaving you with no loot, no bandit kill and nothing to show for your herculean effort but some hunger, some thirst and some missing ammo. Not balanced, not fun, not fair. Lose the big guns.

Yep, that's me too.

+1 for DayZ announcer. Death messages should not give intel. Their very existence is a little offensive to me, but very few servers turn them off. You find out that somebody is dead by finding their body. If you want to know how they died, you should examine the corpse, although that doesn't currently work. I personally would like a whole forensic report in there. "This is Beez. He has been dead for about 12 hours. His body shows scratches and bite marks. His leg is broken. He apparently died of blood loss." Or, "This is Beez. He has been dead less than a minute. His head bears a large bullet hole. He was obviously killed by a gunshot to the head. You should not be kneeling right here."

Zombie variants are a good idea, beyond the walker/hopper/crawler we have now. I'd rather see something that's less like a "hero unit" and more variety in the general population. For instance, I like your idea of a blind zombie with acute hearing. Let different kinds of zombies use different detection mechanics to different degrees, so maybe some see really well but can't hear anything (as seems to be the case currently) while others are nearly blind but will react to sound. Bigger, more powerful zombies could also be cool. Just have some that do more damage or have a better chance to knock you down/fracture your bones. Another good one would be helmets. Have military zombies wear helmets that deflect any hit that does less than 2000 damage, so no more M9SD as you go hangar to hangar unless you're willing to pump a bunch of lead into the thing's torso or shoot it right in its face.

I kind of like it. I love the M203 flares, but a gun with a grenade launcher on it is so rare, I never get to use them in DayZ. I'm linking of two or three ways for this to work. One, it could be a single-use flare, like an emergency flare on a boat. Pop it open, pull the string, it shoots up in the air and illuminates briefly. Alternately, you could make it a12ga flare and allow it to be shot out of either a shotgun or a new "Flare Gun" sidearm that cannot load normal shotshells. Finally, perhaps the easiest way to do it would be to add in a flare gun sidearm that accepts 40mm flares and smoke, but not HE grenades. The notion is a little absurd, but it wouldn't require anything added except the item itself, since the M203 ammo already occurs in-game.