I saw this tweet just now and it made me wonder about how these types of gun variants could be included in the campaign. I think it would be really cool to see Outsiders/Stranded roaming around with distinct loadout variants. Especially since Gears 5 had tried to go for a more open-world approach, this could add a lot of diversity to those segments.
Plus it just looks really sick.
What are your guys’ thoughts on this and/or other ideas?
I feel like it would be difficult to tell the skin unless it’s on the characters back, similar to the one we had in 4.
At least for me since I play pvp only, sometimes I don’t notice those skins since they look close to the default one.
No skins have been replacing my pink phantom skins for a while now.
I’ll personally be able to distinguish between the fluorescent blue Cog Lancer and the dull-looking Stranded lancer, but it’s fine if you can’t. It doesn’t need to be overly noticeable to matter, because it would just be one of those finer details that add up when traversing through the world.
Though, I think a neat functionality quirk would be if these guns are more prone to jamming, like making active reloads harder to do or the gun just randomly stops firing at moments. Or the fire rate could be unstable and vary while shooting the gun. This gun will not be intended for multiplayer use lol, but I think stuff like this would improve the perceived power of the Cog lancer and make your contribution as a Cog soldier more impactful.
Not every Stranded/Outsider would need to have such a broken gun, however, but instead, the occasional grunt/wanderer could carry this.
That’s how I’d go about it. 
Agreed. Almost like how the GL’s reload timer is different & also the retro.
Maybe a different sound when it shoots. Of course, the more skins there are, the merrier.
Yeah, like a more “rusty”/metallic sound would be really neat