All of those factors are still in place with the “magic magazine” but one. Just sayin’.
I play video games to escape reality, not because I want more reality.
Miss them? Why? Urban Terror is still around, still updated, and still freeware.
Reloading design has always been a ambiguous factor for me in videogames emulating a realistic aesthetic. Like regenerating health, infinite stamina, invincible teammates, uneralistic movement capabilities, instant competence with unfamiliar vehicles and so forth, it’s a matter of convenience. For the gamer, the programmers and designers as well as in terms of balance.
However, I think compromises are more promising, or at least more satisfying to me, than the black/white poles.
I could go on at length about what I think of those examples, but I’ll be merciful and constrain myself to the topic at hand. Magic Magazine, or Ammunition Pools, are unrealistic and immersion-breaking in otherwise realistic shooters. It might be fine in Serious Sam, but it shouldn’t be given a pass in Call of Duty. However, the immediately apparent alternative - ammunition micromanagement - also fails, since it would torpedo the immersion of a quick-paced shooter to shelter behind a crate for ten minutes to restock your magazines.
My compromise would be a dual-action reload function. Tapping the reload button would drop the magazine to the ground, dumping any leftover ammunition in it. Holding the reload button down would eject the magazine slowly, letting your character retain a partially depleted magazine. Long-term thinkers would be able to access more ammunition than their need-for-speed counterparts, but it wouldn’t be a time-trap for those who need to reload quickly.
As for re-loading with partially depleted magazines, I suggest that the fullest magazines be loaded first, automatically. While a grunt under fire might not have the time to assess how much ammo is left in each magazine when reloading, I feel comfortable believing that he can at least stash them in certain places according to weight. To give such a system a technological handwave, one could install ammunition tracker displays on the primary weapon system.
In a lull, characters could be able to - quickly - restock their partially depleted magazines from each other, as a means to optimize efficiency.
That was probably me! And I agree, to an extent. I think COD4 handles it pretty well, unless there are cheats I’m unaware of. I think that if you decide to reload before your clip is empty, knowing it’s getting low before you head into Situation X, then that partial clip is discarded forever and your ammo supply is thus depleted.
Am I getting something wrong here with how it’s supposed to work?
It seems strange to me, a rare gamer and no fan of FPSs, that there isn’t simply a option in the game settings on all these games. The programming is simple and it seems that you can have your cake and eat it too. Give the players their choice on the degree of realism they prefer.
In CoD4, if you shoot 1 bullet and reload, your reserves go down by 1 bullet. As in, 44:100 becomes 45:99. SenorBeef wants it to be per-clip such that 44:100 becomes 45:55.
Options like this don’t really work in multiplayer games, where you want everyone to be equal. People think if they make the game real enough, they’ll stop going 2 - 20. It isn’t really about ammo, it’s about not getting stomped by twitch gamers.
I know, my point was that the reloading process should be more of a decision, with incentives and drawbacks. I suggest only tweaking the most blatantly unrealistic one to alter those incentives to be something less silly.
Ideally, I’d like some other changes like some random variability in magazine time changes so that you couldn’t know precisely to the millisecond how fast you’d reload, in general the process should take a bit longer than most games model it. I’d like games to account for whether or not there’s a round in the chamber, which affects the duration of the reload (and animation).
But those are just tweaks. The magical magazine issue is something that’s entirely divorced from reality - it makes about as much sense for your grenades to shoot out confetti instead of shrapnel, and does about as much damage (to me) to the realism aesthetic.
Yes. The rounds in the magazine you’re unloading aren’t lost.
Essentially, what the game models is that you have 1 magazine, and a bag of loose rounds. When you hit the reload key, the magazine (that’s in the gun) is removed and you take as many loose rounds from this bag as you need to fill that magazine back up to its capacity, and then you load it in. All in the span of 1.5 seconds.
Having it be random would piss off a lot of gamers, particularly though heavy into the tournament scene (I myself don’t mind random elements, when they make sense).
However, have you played Gears of War? It actually has a very smart reload system that pretty much does what you want. It’s essentially a skill-based micro-game. That is, you tap the ‘reload’ button once to start the reloading process, then ‘tap’ it again a second or so later to complete it. If you time it just right, you get a ‘perfect’ reload and your bullets inflict more damage, time it wrong and it takes longer. Or even worse, screw up entirely and your gun jams, costing you a lot of time.
Ooh, y’know what I hate, guys? Y’know what I hate more than anything ever?!
Movies that let you hear guns/ships moving in space.
That’s so unrealistic! You can’t hear anything in space because it’s SPACE! These sections of film should be totally silent so I can have my ultra-realistic simulation experience.
I simply can’t abide the idea that anyone might want something a touch more fanciful that’s actually convenient for fun or storytelling.
When people play multi-player they agree on a certain set of ground rules for the particular game they are joining. All these games have various options already and when you a picking a match you join you just pick the one that matches the style in which you want to play. It’s not like you have to have players using unlimited ammo and others with short supply playing together. Hell, they already have difficultly settings and the ammo management could be part of the “hard” setting.
I find it funny that the OP is outraged about the unrealistic method of weapon reloading, but has no outrage over the fact that weapon damage is completely unrealistic. As in, in real life, one shot to you and you are either dead or out of action, in most cases.
Now that’s an aspect of realism that would REALLY make the game fun, eh? :rolleyes:
Most FPS games are so unrealistic at pretty much everything that I’m not really bothered by this one. The whole damage system is ridiculous in nearly every game (COD4 singleplayer is the worst), movement, weapons…
I see most games not as a simulation of reality, but a artificial set of rules to play in that happens to have a theme from real life. But as long as it’s a game and not a simulation (and even more realistic games like Operation Flashpoint are far from that) it breaks reality everywhere. A simulation would be boring. You’d run out of the landing craft and get shot. Game over ;). You want a game, and that means there will be changes in the rules to keep the player happy. From that perspective (even more in multiplayer), magic reloading makes sense, it’s a simple and reasonable way to solve the problem.
Actually that sort of discribes the first few rainbox six games, allmost all damage was deadly, or at least slowing down your speed and making targeting very hard
one of the many things that made that game great…
Ghost Recon also had pretty deadly damage.
I think the Marathon series handled reloading the same way series-wide; I only played Marathon 2.
In Marathon, reloading happens automatically when the current magazine runs out. However, reloading happens only when the current magazine runs out. And reload time varies by weapon: It takes very little time to reload the single-barrel combat shotgun (even when double-wielding the shotguns, leaving no hands free to reload ammo), but changing power packs on the fusion pistol is a bad idea in a free-fire situation.
So the general tactic is to shoot off the last bit of ammo from a nearly-empty mag right before going into the next Room of Many Hostile Creatures.
Left 4 Dead gives one tiny nod to reloading accuracy: if you wait to reload until you’ve completely emptied your weapon, the reload animation includes chambering the first round, costing you a little extra time before you’re ready to shoot again. So, if you’re smart, you’ll reload before you’re completely empty, which plays right into the OP’s problem.
This isn’t completely an aesthetic choice, it affects functionality. It’s not “storytelling”, it’s not watching a movie - it’s a multiplayer game.
Yeah, because choosing one thing to criticize implies that you have no criticism for anything else relating to that subject. If you think a politician said a stupid thing, and post about it, and you don’t post every other flaw that politician has at the same time, you must approve of the other 99.9% of the things he has said and done!
That’s a nice touch, and similarly, loading a rifle should take longer if there’s no round in the chamber - you need to pull the charging handle or release a hold open device.
L4D is among the sillier games though - you can reload shotguns at superhuman speeds (stuffing 7 rounds into the tube in like 2) while at the same time using your weapon to beat zombies away from you, do cartwheels, and spin pizza dough.
Which hurts the game quite a bit - in a team game where you’re overwhelmed by the undead, the decision as to when to reload should be important. You should feel vulnerable while doing it. Instead, you just spam reload while safely keeping zombies at bay by spamming a melee attack - the tension is gone, and there’s not too much of a decision. When your teammate says “reloading!” you should really feel like you need to keep an eye out for your them, but instead you pretty much tune it out because it barely matters.
I don’t have a problem with reloading before you’re empty, but rather reloading after shooting maybe 10-20% of your magazine capacity every single time, and never being punished in any way for it.
Um, I’m not sure this is true.
I agree with the sentiment, that the in game character wouldn’t be operating at 100% efficiency anymore, but one shot kills are rare. If it’s not to the heart or head, it could take hours.
A discovery channel program on law enforcement said that officers are taught to shoot until they are out of ammo for the simple reason that if they aren’t good enough to kill in one shot, it takes a lot of holes to lower blood pressure, which takes away blood from the brain and causes them to pass out.
As to the OP, I agree that it can take away from realism. I try not to do that but I know I do. I at least try and wait until I am at less than 30% capacity or so.
For myself, sometimes “realism” is not what I want. Far Cry 2 allows for jams, guns getting dirty and blowing up. The problem then, is that I haven’t found a way to clean my gun or otherwise reduce those chances of happening. Then, what started out as “realism” and was neat ends up a penalty for me over the life of the game, which isn’t fun.
vislor
I’ve never played the game, but I suspect it overdoes it. Usually when games introduce new or unique features, they overdo them in order to shove it in your face - HEY, LOOK AT THIS FANCY FEATURE WE DID! LOOK!!!
For example, when bloom graphical effects came out, every game had EXTREEEEEME BLOOM SO BRIGHT YOU CAN’T SEE!!!
Call of duty 4 wants you to know they model bullet penetration through materials, so they give you EXTREEEEME BULLET PENETRATION where you can shoot a machine gun on one side of a concrete wall and kill someone 100 yards away on the other side.
So I’m guessing far cry 2 gives you EXTREEEEME GUN JAMMING REALISM where gun failure rates are at least an order of magnitude greater than their real counterparts.