In pretty much all the video games and PC games I’ve played, even the most realistic ones, the bad guys can keep shooting at you over and over again and never run out of ammunition. If you think about it, it doesn’t seem fair that the player can run out of bullets and the enemies have a limitless supply of clips. I have always thought this - ever since I was a little kid and first played FPSs. When I first played Half-Life, I thought that an enemy soldier had run out of ammo when he ran away from me and hid behind a wall, but it turned out he was just reloading. It’s true that things like running away and taking cover to reload add realism, but they still don’t address the issue of unlimited clips. Are there any games that do not conform to this standard?
On Quake III, the bots ran out of machine gun bullets and resorted to the Gauntlet. IIRC, the only way you could wield the Gauntlet was to be out of machine gun ammo.
I think Jagged Alliance gave the bad guys limited ammo. Haven’t played it in years and years, so I could be mis-remembering.
Well, if you’re playing against bots who simulate other humans in a multiplayer game, then those bots operate by the same rules you do…they pick up weapons, ammo, health, and such.
But if you’re talking about the single player portion of the game, the designer would have to consider what purpose the ammo limitation is suppose to serve. Does limiting ammo make the game more fun, or less fun? Fire discipline could add a lot of AI overhead or make the enemies do silly things.
I think in most cases having an enemy run out of ammo isn’t an interesting scenario unless it’s part of a puzzle…say, you have no way of killing a particular guard directly, so your goal is to make him expend his ammo so you can get past him. A guard that has to duck behind cover and reload is interesting, but a guard that uses up his last bullet and can be executed at leisure isn’t. Unless the guard has an interesting secondary weapon, or a way to get more ammo it just doesn’t add to the game experience to turn an opponent into a helpless target.
Yes and no. You couldn’t get to it with the scroll wheel, but you could bring it up, regardless of your ammunition situation, by hitting ‘1’ on the keyboard (though you’d seldom want to). And I’m not sure that the bots in an FPS arena really count for this thread, anyway… They’re more “computer-controlled players” than “bad guys”.
And, to be fair, most of the games where the bad guys don’t run out of ammo, you don’t, either.
Of all things, I’d say the ammo limit is low on the scale of unfairness. Closer to the top would have to be health. Most enemies can be dispatched with a half dozen rifle rounds. As the player we get more on the order of 20 or 30 usually, and that’s not even considering health packs.
Which is why I liked one premise of the Half-Life series: you’re wearing prototype body armor an order of magnitude better than any of your human opponents’ armor.
In Fallout, the enemy’s ammunition was often in their inventory. If you knew a fight was going to break out you could spend some time running around pickpocketing everyone so that they couldn’t reload after the first clip.
not quite the same thing, but in all of the Final Fantasy games, enemies (including bosses) can run out of Magic Points, and in some cases, it is a good strategy to put up MP-resisting armor/spells and let them run out before taking them on.
Not necessarily. In Hexen, for instance, the player has the same number of hit points as an ettin (the basic cannon-fodder critter of that game); most monsters had considerably more. On the other hand, most monsters’ attacks didn’t do near as much damage as yours.
It’s amazing how often “all of the Final Fantasy games” means “all of them except Final Fantasy”. In the original, spellcasting monsters would just cycle endlessly through the list of whatever spells they knew. You could sometimes time things so you were doing most of your fighting on the weak end of the cycle, but if you took a little too long on that, they were right back onto their powerful spells again. Player spells were, of course, strictly limited.
NPCs in Deus Ex can and will run out of ammo - for this eventuality, everybody carries a combat knife.
And to address Jayrot’s point: at least on “realistic” difficulty the player dies as easily as the NPCs in Deus Ex - a single handgun round to the head is all it takes.
In Medieval: Total War, ammunition depletion can be turned on or off, and applies equally to both sides.
In Master of Magic, all missile and magic troops on both sides were limited in ammo/spell points.
In Heroes of Might and Magic III (probably the others too, but that’s the only one I’ve played), missile troops on both sides are limited in ammo unless their side has an Ammo Cart (which can be wrecked, when all missile troops start counting down from fully-loaded) and heroes on both sides are limited in spell points. A few creatures have spell-like powers with limited uses.
In Manhunt, the enemies have unlimited ammo (unlike the player), but they do have to reload when they empty a clip. This leads to a strategy on the gunplay levels of attracting attention to draw fire from a distance, then lining up a headshot when they stop to reload.
Overall, the unfairness is in the player’s favor. You can easily kill an opponent with a single well-aimed shot, but the enemies never do. Plus there’s that whole issue of being able to see them in the dark, but they can’t see you, not even the Cerberus guards with night-vision goggles (at least they comment on it while they stalk you “I can’t see a thing through these stupid goggles. Why the hell are we wearing them, anyway?”).
I wonder of enemies run out of ammo in Operation Flashpoint? I played it to death but can’t recall. That game is very realistic in most aspects of squad combat, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the enemies had limited ammo.
In Arcanum, enemies and even shopkeepers keep a specific inventory. You buy something, or steal something? It’s gone. Goblin or elf runs out of arrows? They’ll come and attack you hand-to-hand, even if they don’t have a weapon. Or they’ll run. I don’t know how many times I’ve left a certain mine with piles and piles of goblin arrows lying all over the place- not worth the carrying capacity to go sell them. Amusingly, my gunsmiths in that game always learn how to make their own ammo, and I’m usually actually encumbered by my over-zealousness (carrying around, say, 2000 rounds for my rifle…)
In World of Warcraft, all spellcasters can run out of mana, and will eventually run up to you and smack you with a stick. One of the cool new (Blood Elf) abilities is to steal your opponent’s mana. It is possible to run out of arrows, but you really have to work at it–a quiver holds, like, 200, and a bad guy who’s out patrolling the ramparts is going to start with a full quiver, so I doubt they even check to see if they’re using up ammo–they’ll die long before they run out.
Nitpick: a single stack of ammo is 200, but a quiver can hold 10, 12, 14, or 16 stacks of ammo. I can go find a low-level archer and see how many shots he fires at my level 60 shaman – since I can heal myself and reduce damage taken from ranged attacks, I should be able to survive his attacks indefinitely. It’d be an interesting experiment… someday.
You’re right, though; there’s absolutely no reason for them to even keep track of enemy ammunition.
ha!!! this is exactly what I came in here to post. man, I loved that game.
On the old arcade standup Galaga, there was a way to exhaust enemy ammunition for the whole game. On the second screen (at least I think it was the second) shoot all the bees except the bottom left one. Avoid him and don’t shoot him, just let him pass indefinitely. After 15 minutes or so he’ll run out of ammo, and nobody will shoot for the rest of the game.
King’s Bounty, a somewhat interesting fantasy/puzzle game I won in a radio contest about 15 years ago (and occasionally still play), featured characters with long-distance attacks, be it elves or orcs shooting arrows, giants throwing rocks, archmages casting spells or what have you, and the number of times such attacks could be used was always finite.