I hate counterstrike style reloading

The Game Room
1

I doubt counterstrike was the first game to use this style of reloading, but it’s a massively popular game, people for some reason seem to think it’s realism focused, and so it gives credibility to this stupid design so I’m going to blame it.

In games of this type (most modern shooters), you get a certain amount of rounds of a given ammo type. When you press the reload key, an animation of you sticking in a new magazine plays, your gun is topped off to its full capacity, and the number of rounds it needed to reload is deducted from your total.

IOW, you have a gun with a 30 round magazine, and 100 rounds in reserve. You fire off 12 rounds, and hit reload. The reload animation happens, your gun now has 30 rounds again, and you have 88 rounds in reserve.

This is magical. You effectively have one magazine which you can top off with as many bullets as you’d like in a 2 second span.

It’s so stupid and blatantly unreal that it immediately makes me dislike any game that features it. Unfortunately, most games do, even ones that attempt to give the appearance of realism like CS or cod4.

It leads to the annoying, distracting playstyle where people spam the reload button as soon and as often as possible. You have a rifle with 30 rounds in it and you just used 1 round to shoot someone? BETTER SPAM THAT RELOAD KEY!

It takes me right out of the game and reminds me of how silly it is. I do get enourmous satisfaction when I’m fighting someone, and my teammate comes around the corner and the enemy shoots him, and then I come around the corner and find my enemy in the process of reloading because he spent a few rounds, and I shoot him in the face as he can’t do anything to stop me.

It’s not really much more technically difficult to implement a realistic magazine system, so I assume the fact that most games cater to this is just because it’s what the common idiot likes. But it’s so much more satisfying when it’s modelled properly, like in the first 3 rainbow six games, ghost recon, operation flashpoint, ARMA, red orchestra, etc.

2

Game designers learned that realism is harsh and boring a long time ago. Arcade gameplay with a realism-aesthetic is what people want. That’s why CS and CoD4 sold a brazilian copies and only sadists played ArmA or Rainbow Six.

I’m surprised more games haven’t flat out removed reserve ammo.

3

I designed the first Rainbow Six and the first Ghost Recon. Thank you. :smiley:

I suspect I know why most shooters have gone this route. If you do it the “real” way you need to deal with the case of players who swap clips before the clip is exhausted. That means you need to track how many shots remain in each individual clip.

The problem comes when a player who is carrying several partial clips and several full clips does another reload. What do you swap in? One of the partial ones, or one of the full ones? If you always do a full one then the player will eventually wind up with a bunch of clips with only a few shots in them. If you always do a partial one then the player may reload to find himself in a situation with only a few shots. And if you let the player pick, you’ve added another step in the reload process that can really slow it down.

In the real world a real soldier can do things a game player can’t. He can stow a partial clip in a particular pocket, or judge how many shots are in a clip by weight, or pause and consolidate several partial clips. Part of game design is simplifying some aspects of an experience so that you can retain its essence without making the interface complicated and clunky. The “big pool of ammo” approach to reloading preserves the window of vulnerability that reloading creates without bogging the player down in an unrealistic ammo management interface.

4

No, thank you. I have so many great memories of playing the first GR co-op with my buddy. Good times.

5

Cool, what did you do on them? They were good games. GR in particular is a favorite of mine.

Red Orchestra has IMO the best implementation of this. You cycle through the magazines one by one (so if you’re carrying 4 mags, your first 3 reloads will always be a full mag) and then repeat the cycle. When you load it, it informs you “magazine is light/medium/heavy” to give you a rough idea of how many rounds are in it.

I suppose if you wanted to work more user choice into it, you could have it pop up a radial menu where you select which of your magazines you load in.

Either way, IMO vastly preferable to the current magic magazine reload spamming gameplay of today’s shooters.

6

Lead designer. I was also lead engineer on Rainbow Six until we realized that two lead positions was too much for one person to handle.

7

That’s really cool. You should do a “ask the lead designer” thread :stuck_out_tongue:

Are you still in the industry? What are you working on now?

8

I’m working for PlayStation these days. I’ve been providing design support to third-party PSN titles, most recently Fat Princess.

9

Fat Princess is awesome!

10

I thought there were two video game designers on the board with suspiciously similar resumes until I looked at your profile and realized you used to be called Pochacco

11

It’s really a bit bizarre. There’s so many arcade shooters using the same skins of modern weaponry and virtually identical gameplay that you’d think the market would be oversaturated, yet here they continue to sell. Even the brand name that created the niche of more realistic play (the Rainbow Six series) got watered down once Ubisoft snapped it up, and it’s only slid backwards since into just another one of the horde. There was so much potential in evolution lined up after Rogue Spear, too.

As for the topic under discussion - the arcade reloading gets even worse when the game’s characters didn’t get the design memo about reloading not actually being an important event. Left 4 Dead’s survivors are constantly screaming about how they’re reloading, even though it takes all of about two seconds and is done roughly every 3 steps :smiley:

12

Playability v Realism…hmm

I think “Urban Terror”, a Mod from Quake3, had the balance pretty good.
Allowed only a couple weapons and a side arm with a few clips for each. Plus you had options of extra clips or grenades if you opted to just use one gun.

If you reloaded a new clip, the old clip was tossed no matter if it was empty or not. They did tell you how many bullets you had left in a clip, for simplicity purposes. So, you needed to think before you rushed in with a clip holding 3 bullets in it.

Gee, I miss them days…:frowning:

13

Action Half-Life (and probably Action Quake 2, though I never played it) had a similar setup. When you reloaded, you simply discarded the current clip. One of the items you could have (everyone got to choose one) was an ammo vest that gave you more clips for all of your weapons. The players who survived to the end of the round would often end up relying on their sidearms or fisticuffs.

Truly a great mod in its day.

14

I prefer the more arcadey reloading system. It’d be a fucking hassle the other way. Besides, I’m relatively sure that it’d just get changed in custom game options anyways.

15

Yeah, it’s a shame - there aren’t really any thoughtful shooters on the market right now except ARMA II. And that game has some control issues (particularly the mouse lag issue is nearly a dealbreaker for me) that make it far from perfect. Everything has become a generic run and gun with realistic-looking weapons to give it an aesthetic of realism without the content.

… that said, I’ll still be buying MW2 because they do it so damn well.

Operation Flashpoint 2 will be released soon. It’s not a true successor to the original, since it’s a different dev team - but based on the videos I saw they are trying to make it a similar game in scope and realism. I’m hopeful about it.

That’s the thing. It’s barely a decision now. People spam reload like crazy. I was playing COD4 yesterday and I saw a guy fire 1 round out of a p90 and kill someone with a headshot. He now has 49/50 rounds in his magazine still. But he still immediately reloads. That just completely ruins the immersion of the experience for me.

I’d like reloading to be something that has to be a decision and has some real drawbacks, so that you think about how you time it.

16

I definitely remember playing a PC game where if you hit reload when your weapon was already loaded, the magazine was discarded and replaced by a new one (i.e. you lost the ammo, instead of it just going back into your “reserve” ammo). That was significant, because ammunition in this game was in pretty short supply. I just can’t remember exactly what game it was, but I want to say it was Mafia. It was definitely something from five or so years ago, not a current game, and definitely for PC.

17

It already is. If you reload, you’re not killing people. Generally, “before the next guy shows up” is the best time to reload. Spamming reload is the best decision generally, but not always. Dickishly limiting ammo isn’t going to do anything but annoy good players who don’t die frequently enough to rearm.

18

1.5 second reloads with a magical magazine aren’t much of a decision. The fact that you’re saying spamming reloading is usually the best decision shows it’s not really much of a choice.

Then again, you probably think bunnyhopping adds to games. Your opinions are usually the opposite of whatever I think would be fun gaming.

19

I don’t see how your system changes the decision any. You’d still want to go into the next fight with as much ammunition as possible. You just run into a scenario where you’ve only half clips left and you’re likely to lose simply because you ran out of ammo. If you want people to be careful and pick their shots, you’ve just turned a fun game into a slow camp off.

For example, Day of Defeat uses the per-clip ammo system. However, you have so many reserve clips that you couldn’t realistically run out of them. Everyone just hits reload immediately unless it’s a 2 v 1.

It doesn’t change anything. It’s just an annoyance.

20

It’s not really meaningful if you track the magazines but then each person has a practically infinite number - then it’s just back to magic magazine.

As far as the decision to reload, it’s a decision with many facets. How likely are you to be seen while vulnerable? How much cover do you have? How many rounds do you have remaining in the magazine? How long is the reload going to take?

If you have some reasonable loadout, like 6 magazines worth of ammo, eventually the decision to fire 3 rounds, reload, fire 2 rounds, reload, fire 8 rounds, reload will have some (albeit minor) consequences and it tilts the decision slightly more in favor of not being a retarded spam monkey.

For that matter, I’d like them to tweak the reload times to discourage that behavior. It just totally ruins the aesthetics of the game - it’s a lot like bunny hopping or dolphin diving in that regard. It’s not something that couldn’t possibly be done, but it’s silly and ruins any immersion.