Video Game Gun Gripes

[MT2008]

I think this isn't something worth griping about. There's stuff you can gripe about with guns in movies and TV shows, too, that you might as well just not do. The fact is, if entertainment were exactly like real life, nobody would enjoy it.

Having been on various mod dev teams as a teenager, I can say that I've seen lots of people who claim that they want to make the guns as realistic as possible. Then they find that they can't do it without affecting the gameplay in some way, and they have to make compromises on the weapons' realism that they didn't set out to make. I worked on a mod where we found that we needed to make the M4 into one of those 7.62x39mm models that could share ammo with the AK-47, because we realized that due to the nature of the levels and the enemies we were trying to portray, M4 ammo would be way too scarce to last the entire length of each level if we chambered the gun for 5.56x45mm (if anyone's ever played "Soldier of Fortune II", you might recall the AK-74 also fires the same ammo as the M4; I'm guessing it's for almost the same reason). We also had to make the H&K USP Tactical and the Walther PPK share ammo with the Makarov and CZ-75, for pretty much the same reason. Not to mention that because the USP had a suppressor, the CZ-75 needed to be a machine pistol.

Another problem comes whenever you have members of a dev team (or even the entire team) being from a country where guns aren't allowed. I've worked with Britons, Germans, South Africans, and Koreans who had never seen a real gun in their lives. Some of them had no idea that the slant compensator on an AKM changes the shape of the muzzle flash when fired, or that you can chamber the next round in an AR by slapping the bolt catch rather than using the charging handle. That, too, can affect how realistically guns are portrayed, if you've got a team full of guys whose knowledge of guns is solely based on how they're portrayed in the movies, or other games.