Video Game Gun Gripes

[MattyDienhoff]

Originally Posted by MT2008

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.

It's true that balance is always a concern, but I think the biggest gripes people like us have with games are about things that are unrealistic for no good reason. There are many instances where the developers get something wrong either out of ignorance or on purpose because they think it 'looks cool'. Errors, inaccuracies, or simply 'artistic' decisions that aren't realistic. Examples:

* An MP5 spitting out bottlenecked 5.56 casings, that's an obvious mistake.

* Stocked weapons that always have the stock folded or removed entirely, that's presumably done because they think these weapons look cooler with no stock. But things like machine pistols and semi-auto shotguns have stocks for a reason.

* And, perhaps worst of all, mirrored weapon models. Ejection ports on the left side so you see casings flying across the screen whenever you fire, apparently they do this because it looks cool.

None of that stuff has no effect on game difficulty, so it's not justifiable in the name of balance.

When all's said and done, you're right. Even in a game focused on realistic combat, devs should never try to make everything as realistic as possible, because in the end, even a tactical shooter is still a game, and if you made it so realistic that if you died you could never play again, it wouldn't be much fun. So, I agree with you, I'm just saying a lot of the unrealistic things people gripe about are unnecessary and avoidable.