Body part system

[IvanChen300]

MOTIVATION:
Imagine you are a cyborg with three sets of bionic limbs, wielding three katanas like a certain pirate. Or you mutated an heads from a little much radiation, and you realize you don't care about all those eldritch monsters now because only one of your multiple heads is insane at a time. Or like the madman you are, you grafted on several pairs of legs onto your torso, and now you are a human centipede moving at several tiles a turn speed blitzing zombies.

Players like customizing their vehicles in Cataclysm, and many people enjoy kitting out there mobile deathmobile with superalloy plating, rams, lasers, etc. It stands then to reason that players would like to customize their character's bodies even more.

All this and more require Cataclysm to implement a proper body part system capable of handling this insanity.

POSITIVES:
Player Customizability: Cataclysm has always offered a remarkable amount of agency for the players to create their perfect survivor, and this moves even further in that direction.

Fun: The main drawing point here, such a system would offer a large breath of new content for the player to explore, as well as further fleshing out several current systems like bionics and mutations.

Realism: Although this isn't CDDA and I know realism isn't necessarily the target for BN, I think the key point here is that this realism is intrinsically tied to a FUN mechanic, as both the choice and use of more body parts would offer interaction player experiences. The body part system would intrinsically make the game more detailed in its simulation of an apocalyptic world, and offer new challenges for the player to overcome such as injuries to body parts to provide unique effects like eye injuries resulting in blindness, concussions to the brain leading to decreased intelligence, a strain in the arm reducing melee effectiveness, etc. These also drive the player to engage more with other systems, such as mutations, bionics, clothing/armor, and weapons.

NEGATIVES:
Coding: The main drawback is that since the character is tied so intrinsically with the rest of the game, a reworked body part system would affect nearly everything else in the codebase from bionics, mutations, clothes, armor, inventory, actions, etc.

Complexity: Cataclysm in general is already a fairly complex game, and some portions of the player base would probably consider it a chore to figure out which part of piece of armor is covering which limb, and realizing that the reason they died is because the zombie hulk just happened to target their heart or liver might be infuriating to some people who just want to play Cataclysm as they remember it.

IMPLEMENTATION:
N/A

FINAL:
These are just some of my current thoughts, so if anyone has more ideas please feel free to join the discussion, and I might update this log depending on what the community thinks.