Custom weapons are really cool. The one thing I always feel TF2 needs when I play it is more weapons. But the thing is, usually they are designed to be able to fit with the animations for each class already in-game. Scout usually gets scatterguns and beverages. Heavy usually gets miniguns, shotguns, or consumables. Pyro gets flamethrowers, flare guns, yada yada they only do so because that's what the game has animations for, and that's what sucks. The lack of unique animations for weapons really limits what custom weapons can possibly be put in-game. I think it'd be pretty interesting if Scout could have a SMG or Sniper a sniper rifle that ISN'T bolt action, or hell even just a regular rifle. Maybe Spy could have a shotgun. Not saying he should, but he could.

I have seen examples of being able to play with "custom" weapons with custom animations. By that I mean there is this community that hosts a Freak Fortress 2 Boss vs Boss server which has characters from other games whose weapon viewmodels actually look like those in the games they're from, some examples being Serious Sam and Gordon Freeman. They have full world models and animations of these characters too. That isn't exactly pertaining to TF2 though and may be done through a different method of giving custom models. A better example is the work of the UberUpgrades developer Mr. L, if you check the mod's group's announcements page you can see a bunch of images showing some of the classes holding weapons they can't normally hold with the correct animations, in-world too. There's even a video of Mr. L playing Engineer and picking up non-Engineer weapons, holding them with the correct animations (but not hands/arms, I recall this having to do with viewmodels being swapped to c_hands or w_hands or something, forget which one doesn't align with your playermodel). Though we haven't seen any big announcements from Mr. L about that whole project in the past 3 years, he is still working on it as evidenced by this message. [imgur.com]This sort of thing is what I think would be a really cool addition to Custom Weapons, that is if it's actually possible for you guys to do.

Of course though, there comes the issue of balancing, which likely may cause weapons with custom animations to not actually be put into the servers or let alone even be considered, because a whole new type of weapon can cause all sorts of balancing issues, especially if the new weapon type is pretty major (like if you gave Soldier a revolver, he'd be able to pick off enemies at range more easily which is a huge problem for a class like Pyro).


The TF2 example is more so allowing one class's weapon animations onto another class than it is custom animations, but it gets my point across.

Just something I had in mind that I thought might be good for discussion. Arguably this could go in the Suggestions for New Weapons topic but it felt big enough to deserve its own topic.
TL;DR Adding new custom weapons with different animations than what each class already has for themselves/adding in new weapon types (that utilize other classes' weapon animations) for each class could be really cool and has shown to be possible, but properly balancing them may be pretty tricky.