1. This was both. Over time, we have received feedback that our gameplay loop can feel stale quickly because it was the same path to the high tier weapons. So you begin a game, work yourself up to your final tier, and then you're done. A lot of our weapons have good feel but we can't bring them all to the final waves. Along with players requests, we introduced the Upgrade System as a way to promote a better gameplay diversification and add something fresh to the game loop. It also let's us expand out weapon gameplay depending on what we choose to upgrade on them, and we do have plans to add more knobs other than damage, heal recharge rate, and weight.



2. At one point, it was thought to be something just for Endless because it made sense having a system that can promote weapons alongside the high influx of dosh you can potentially receive with Endless. It also works alongside the increased difficulty. That was the initial design, but once we got to implementing it, we wanted to try incorporating it into Survival as well as a way to broaden the weapon gameplay for it too. We playtested it here and found it to be a neat way to expand weapon loadouts, so we decided to keep it for all game modes.



3/ 4. We were thinking about new range gameplay they could bring to add new challenges for players to confront. Robots / Evil DARs were chosen to go along with some lore not yet revealed.



5. We started looking into ways to address it because it was creating a lot of uninteded affects. It became too difficult to balance around and gauge it's influence, so we decided to remove it. Initially we left it because some players liked it but over time we started to see how much it was being used and how much it negated features and normal balance. We are still looking at options at how to best handle it.



6. There is always more we want to do and improve upon!