the way of the gun: part 2 of building a better shooter
So! Last year, I wrote a thread on social media talking about how much I missed a specific style of first person shooter — they just don’t make ’em like they used to. This year, I replayed Bulletstorm. Then I played Max Payne 2, which is a third person shooter, not first person, but still, I was itching for something. I played Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (that’s the reboot, not the original) and Black Ops 6 chasing that fix (both were, notably, some of the series’ worst entries).
I’ve also started Gunman Chronicles, Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath, and Soldier of Fortune, played through Goldeneye Reloaded, Halo, Halo 2, and Halo 3, and just began another playthrough of Halo 3: ODST. Oh yeah, and last year, I started working up the pitches for two first person shooters and a third person shooter. If you want to build them with me, well, my bluesky DMs are open.
My brain is percolating on something, and when it does that, I find it best to listen.
So I wrote an article about this whole shooter thing, and, thankfully, a lot of you seemed to like what I had to say. If you haven’t read that piece, I’d recommend you do so now, because this is part 2, and I’m going to write this with the assumption that you’re reading these in order.
That said, if you did already read it, here’s a quick refresher: there are roughly three major types of commercial first person shooter: boomer shooters, open world shooters, and the vanishingly rare linear campaign shooter, which is the kind of shooter I was lamenting the loss of.
First, there’s boomer shooters, which are a catch-all term for Wolfenstein 3D style, Doom style, Quake style, and Duke Nukem 3D style first person shooters, which are all slightly different permutations on the 1997-and-earlier first person shooters.
Wolfenstein 3D is a glorified maze, Doom adds some depth and height to it, Quake is actually 3D, and Duke Nukem 3D attempts environments that seem somewhat familiar.
We get lots of those these days. If you don’t particularly care what kind of shooter you’re playing, then you’re gonna be fine; you got plenty of options to choose from. Some are good, some not so good, and hardly any are actually authentic, but sometimes you don’t need authentic. Sometimes, instead of a genuine pizza baked in a wood-fired oven, Italian style, you just want to order some Domino’s. Other times, the inventiveness pays off, like Cultic, which blends a little Resident Evil 4 into Blood in a very cool way.
Cultic’s an easy recommend, check it out.
I mentioned this in the previous piece, but years ago, I encouraged a friend to make a Quake-like game because of my fascination with the crunchy pixels of the era. He’d been considering quitting making games, so I suggested that he make a Quake-like, since Unity could do that sort of thing, and walking sims weren’t doing so well. The next nostalgia bait, I figured, would be Quake era shooters.
That was almost a decade ago. It worked, and as the explosion of boomer shooters has shown us, there’s a big audience for that style of game. But I had another reason for suggesting this style of game to my friend.
At that point, shooters were in a glut of mostly-linear set-piece style shooters. Go too far this way or that way, and you’ll get a nasty-looking notification screaming at you to return to the battle zone. One game — I want to say one of the Battlefields — killed me because it ordered me to sneak up and backstab an enemy soldier, but when I crouched, the universally understood game mechanic for sneaking, and tried to stab the guy, the game failed me. So I started testing to see what different methods would fail the game while trying to figure out how I was supposed to win.
Turns out it wanted me to just walk up to the guy and stab him. Being in any other state would result in an instant fail. Couldn’t shoot him with a silenced weapon, couldn’t stab from a crouch, couldn’t just knife him. No. I had to walk up and hit the prompt, even if the dialogue was telling me “stab that guy” and I’m thinking “well, I have a knife, so I guess I equip it and have to knife him?”
As I argued in the last article, shooters are games about movement, and it’s hard to move around when you have to read the game designer’s mind or instantly fail the game.
Sid Meier, of Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Sid Meier’s Civilization fame, once said that a video game is a series of interesting decisions, and I think that’s definitely the case for shooters.
At its core, a first person shooter is a game about occupying a 3D space that we must navigate. We face obstacles that can damage us and move on their own (enemies) and obstacles in the environment itself (a bottomless pit, for instance). There are also incentives, like weapons, ammunition, and big rewards (In Halo 3, for instance, you can rip a highly destructive mounted weapon off its base and carry it around, dealing lots of damage for a few minutes).
So, breaking the shooter down, it’s a genre that goes like this:
I move, and I have a series of tools that I use to help me move or impact my decision making regarding movement.
Whether it’s “get to that vantage point to shoot that guy,” or “go behind cover to avoid enemy,” or “I see some ammunition hidden behind a barrier; let’s find out how to get to it,” it’s all about movement.
And that makes sense — a weapon is something you fire maybe 20–30% of your total time in a first person shooter. You spend most of your time walking around, looking around, thinking about where to go. With a few exceptions, like the switch to third person perspective when you carry a turret in Halo or climb a ladder in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, all of your time in a first person shooter is spent in first person.
So everything must be designed, first and foremost, in the context of movement and space. Before we get to the guns, we have to think about movement.
Guns can impact our decision-making when it comes to movement (“I want to physically move over to the ammo or weapon I need to pick it up,” “I need to get this close to or far from the enemy,” and so on), so it’s important to discuss them, but the camera perspective is where you live! So focus on that.
When we had these ultra-linear AAA games, movement was being taken off the table, bit by bit. It started reasonably enough — as tech improved (higher resolutions, better graphics) and controls started to coalesce into a standard format — we got mechanics like “now you can actually aim down the sights of your gun instead of hip firing them.”
Aiming down sights makes sense in a more realistic game with dense brush or high levels of environmental detail designed to make a space feel realistic. With a Doom-style game, you can build the environment as a combat space first and foremost. The architecture can be scaled as unrealistically as you want because it doesn’t have to look like anything specific. That means you know how big enemies are going to be on a screen, what danger they can pose to the player, and so on.
In Doom, when an imp shows up, he gets close enough to throw a fireball, and you can watch the fireball move at a specific rate. He’s visually distinct from the environment, both because of the colors used in his design and the environment’s, and because the actual environmental detail isn’t all that high, so he’s not getting lost in visual noise. This means that when you point a gun at an imp, you’re likely going to be able to hit him.
With something attempting more verisimilitude, like Black Ops 6, you are trying to give your audience a sense of being there, but that means enemies are at more realistic-seeming distances (I say “seeming” because realistic combat distances would involve things like “in the real world, buckshot is still lethal at 40+ yards”), which means that you’re now doing combat with enemies designed to contrast with the environment so they’re easy to see, you’re having guy who is hard to spot and basically a dot on your HD, 4k display, firing at you with rounds that are too fast to dodge.
So aiming down your sights is a good way to make him bigger in the screen, making him easier to shoot at these longer distances.
Now, we’re gonna do an entire piece on enemy design in a first person shooter after this one, but all of this stuff is interlinked. I decided to go with guns first because I decided to think about this series like “first, there’s you, the player. Second, there’s the tool you have. Finally, there’s the obstacles you use the tools on.” We’re on the “tool you have” stage, which is the weaponry, but we gotta set this up right.
So we’ve got realistic graphics, and to match that, we’ve got more attempts at realism like “when you move, your gun is less accurate like it would be in the real world,” and “you have to aim down the sights which narrows your field of view a bit” (shooters will often adjust the optics of the player’s camera to do that), and “when aiming down sights, your gun’s more accurate, bullet spread is reduced, and enemies are now bigger in the frame.”
A lot of this was done not just because of realism, but also because shooters were moving to controllers, and when a player aims down the sights, the gun can snap aim — which is really strong in games like Goldeneye Reloaded— making it easier to aim at enemies since a controller lacks the finesse of an input like a mouse.
In most modern AAA shooters, you are focusing at enemies operating at ranges that are often approaching verisimilitude with reality.
When you’re making a game inspired by an action movie like Black Hawk Down, like Call of Duty 4 is, the fantasy is about taking cover from the enemy, popping out, laying down covering fire or trying to pop a guy really far away that’s giving you trouble, ducking through houses to sneak up on a sniper, stuff like that. It’s a very specific fantasy, and when done well, it’s fantastic.
But since Call of Duty 4 sold so well, we were in danger of everyone making piss-poor clones (Sturgeon’s law, baby! 90% of everything is crap! Including people trying to copy Call of Duty and failing).
Developers were doing things like “slowing down vertical aiming because controllers aren’t so good at that, which flattened level design,” or “removing jumping entirely and just focusing on aiming” (like in Bulletstorm, a game that’s otherwise excellent), they were slowing down movement and turning fights into pop-up galleries.
Now, there’s a good reason for this: on controllers, aiming isn’t as accurate as it is with a mouse and keyboard, so devs tried various forms of auto-aiming, particularly snap-aiming (hit the trigger, your aim snaps to a guy and magnetizes to him), as a means of emulating the experience of being good at aiming at things.
This meant that the actual act of aiming wasn’t quite so skill-focused anymore, and because enemies were firing hitscan weapons (without getting too far into the technical side of this, think of hitscan weapons like ‘the bullet is moving too fast for me to dodge’ except there’s no actual bullet, just a beam from the gun to you that determines if the gunfire hit) more often than projectiles (slower moving, something you can anticipate and dodge) the skill was shifted more to knowing your cover and sight lines.
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What do you do to bring a bit of challenge back to the experience, when there’s no health packs to run and pick up and staying in cover is the best way to get back to full health?
You turn the game into a shooting gallery version of chicken. The enemies pop up from cover and shoot you, you pop up from cover and shoot them. The skill is in making sure your reflexes are fast enough to hit the right guy — it’s about tracking where enemies are behind cover when you can’t see them, as opposed to “how do I move through this 3D space in order to optimally eliminate my enemies?”
Movement was being replaced in the modern AAA game with shooting galleries. Go here, go there, shoot some enemies as they approach you, chase them out of cover if you had to, maybe do some flanking… but that’s about it. The genre was getting stale.
Let’s talk a bit more about regenerating health: it incentivizes limiting your movement and taking cover. It encourages behavior like you’re a character in a movie like Saving Private Ryan or Black Hawk Down, which is very cool, and it means you don’t end up in a situation where you’re softlocked because a quicksave left you with 5 health under enemy fire.
That said, picking up health kits incentivizes making a mad dash to move around the map to get healing — it wants you moving, and that’s where shooters are, I think, at their most fun, and regenerating health loses that.
All of this was about slowing the player down; you walk into an encounter, and you can’t jump, you can’t really dodge enemy fire because the bullets are way faster than an imp’s fireball, it’s better to stop in cover and wait for your health to regenerate, and most enemies are just popping in and out of cover like a shooting gallery.
And then came the open world shooter.
The best one is STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, which had a series of smallish open worlds connected by loading zones. While STALKER, particularly with the AMK mod, is one of the greatest video games ever made, though, it’d be a real shame if everyone started doing that.
Buuuuuut… they did. Far Cry 2 wasn’t particularly well loved when it released, and understandably so, but its reputation was rehabilitated over the years, particularly by the Idle Thumbs podcast, which got a lot of people arguing about how amazing it was because of things like “when you looked at the map, it was represented by a physical object in the world” and “you could set things on fire and the fire would spread, and if it spread to certain things like “ammunition crates,” they would explode. And that was true — it had interesting ideas worth considering.
…but the bland story, weirdly fast dialogue, and shallow, repetitive systems didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Yes, people have tried to rehabilitate its reputation, but at the time? It did not do well critically, and those reasons were understandable even if you like it removed from that context (the way I like Kane & Lynch 2 removed from its release context).
Far Cry 3 was where it really took off.
Far Cry 3 played well, had some memorable characters and a more interesting plot (even if it wasn’t exactly the best-written game of all time), plenty of stuff to do, and really pushed further into the mechanical depth that Far Cry 2 had attempted. It was so polished, so enjoyable at its basic moment-to-moment gameplay, that it cemented the idea of the open world shooter as a viable, fun way to play games.
Series that had previously been linear, like Halo and Metro, followed suit with Halo Infinite and Metro Exodus.
It made sense — people would complain that a 4–6 hour game for $60 wasn’t exactly great value for the money. A 40+ hour long open world game for the same price was a lot more attractive. Like I mentioned in the last piece, Bungie felt the same way, making Destiny a game where you would “go back through the environment a lot” according to an early GDC talk that its creative directors gave.
And it’s true! I get it! I have over 1,000 hours in Destiny, and I’ve probably played Halo 3’s campaign 6–7 times, which is closer to a mere 30 hours of playtime. Purely from an hours played standpoint, Destiny has provided more value for my money.
But I like Halo 3 more, and a thousand hours in Destiny (and even more in Destiny 2) doesn’t change that. I’ve eaten way more Doritos than steaks in my life, but I still prefer steak.
First person shooters are ridiculously expensive to make — not as much as an MMO, but closer to an MMO than, say, a side scrolling platformer — because of the sheer detail players expect them to have, and because you’ve got an extra dimension. It’s one thing to program a little guy who walks left or right and damages you when he touches you; it’s another to have a person with accurate physics on them who can make decisions about navigating a 3D space to try and shoot you or press you into cover, you know?
That’s why we’ve got more indie side scrollers or walking sims than we do indie first person shooters, and why most boomer shooters to this day still have fairly simplistic enemy intelligence and aren’t exactly pushing graphical limits. This shit is expensive.
So of course we ended up with open world games, where the designers could take common elements and reconfigure them, rather than making a custom encounter every couple of minutes.
Instead of going “okay, the player walks into this entirely bespoke room, and then enemies jump through the windows and attack, but the fight is interrupted when a boss monster drops through the ceiling,” or something like that, we got… enemy encampments.
In an open world game, you usually have a map, and you clear the map to progress the game by visiting and clearing various enemy encampments. These locations often have the same basic objects — a few buildings you’ve seen elsewhere, some fences, watchtowers, maybe an alarm system you have to disable to prevent reinforcements from arriving, stuff like that.
In some games, you’ll have to, say, “blow up all the oil barrels so the enemies lose the base,” or “kill the squad commander” or something. Because the buildings are rarely custom to the location, you have a pretty good idea of how they’ll play out, because you’ve seen that building before or that guard tower or what have you; that means you’re almost always just observing a location, figuring out how many dudes there are, then killing them all.
The overall experience gets flattened because the designers are trying to maximize the number of encounters, rather than the variety of encounters, and while you, the player, technically have a lot of options, most players have a tendency to optimize the fun out of the experience because they can bring in their preferred loadout and it’ll work in nearly every scenario.
Put another way, open world designers went wide rather than deep, because to make a game as detailed as Halo 3 and as big as Far Cry 6 would be an impossible undertaking. And, listen, both of these approaches are valid — if you want 70 hours of game instead of 7 for your $70, I totally understand! But at some point, the lack of depth feels like eating McDonald’s every day. It’s mass-produced, so it feels like it’s missing something.
I remember someone writing an article called “how to have fun with Far Cry 2,” which argued that you wanted one gun for basic combat, an explosive weapon like the M79 to start fires or do area of effect (AOE) damage, and one long range weapon to clear off as many enemies as you can before entering combat. That’s more or less what the game lets you carry anyways, but at the time, lot of people would usually forgo the sniper for something with less range. They’d walk up to the base, get killed, and get frustrated.
That’s how most people play these games these days. It’s not exactly fun to grab a bunch of close range weapons and walk up to a base, get seen — an alarm being raised feels like failing (Just Cause solved this problem by incentivizing chaos — the goal is to be as destructive as possible, not sneak). Plus, when an alarm is raised, you face more enemy reinforcements, increasing the duration of the fight. Since there isn’t a lot of variety (due to the aforementioned “repeating assets and enemies” problem), having to fight more guys is a bad thing, not an opportunity for more fun.
…and that’s weird, right? I mean, this is a first-person shooter, but given the relative tedium of clearing enemy encampments, doing more of the shooting is a bad thing!!!
Should it be that way in a first person shooter? Shooting is the icing on the movement cake, so why the fuck is ‘more shooting’ feeling like a penalty? Well, that’s because the goal of the open world shooter is more about clearing areas of the map — and you’ve got a lot to clear — than it is, y’know, having a good time basking in the wonderful glow of combat.
Ubisoft’s tried to resolve this with Far Cry: New Dawn (which was originally pitched to me as Far Cry 6 back in a meeting I had in 2017 as a direct sequel to Far Cry 5) and Far Cry 6 (which was not pitched to me back then), where enemies have a bunch of hard counters (that is, if you’re using the wrong gear, the gameplay becomes a slog; the game wants you to stop, change gear for whatever the optimal scenario is, and act accordingly.
To this end, they’ll give you different enemy types in different bases, but it still breaks down to a moderately samey experience; it’s just that you might need to swap to armor piercing rounds for some enemies or flame rounds for another type. It’s not actually doing much to change how you play, except on paper.
I think this is bad design; a good shooter allows players to make plans on the fly, quickly switching weapons depending on the enemy team composition and the physical nature of the space the player is in. You wouldn’t want to use your grenade launcher in a bunch of tight corridors, for instance — you might accidentally damage yourself or even die. A sniper rifle would be great for a long range encounter, but maybe you’ve got to switch to a shotgun quickly when an enemy sneaks up on you.
If you’re having to stop and swap your gear before you enter a base because enemies are just too specific to be fun without the right gear, and you find yourself sneaking around to avoid getting into a fun, hectic firefight ’cause you don’t want reinforcements, then… even though the game might be fun, the relative repetiveness of the experience will start to chafe.
This isn’t to say open world shooters are bad any more than boomer shooters are bad, but both subgenres skew very far in one direction or the other, and that’s what brings us to the kind of shooter I wrote about missing so much last time:
The linear campaign shooter, games like Halo. That’s what the article last time was about.
Broadly, my sense of the current shooter market is that you’ve either got boomer shooters, which are mostly copying the aesthetics and speed of early 90s FPSes (but very few of them have enemy AI or weapons that are as sophisticated as those older games, so I think very few actually hold up to the classics), or you’ve got open world shooters, which are trying so hard to spread everything thin that nothing is distinct about their encounter or weapon variety.
Sure, there are also other subgenres like Serious Sam (which is about juggling weapons and managing huge amounts of enemies, like a musou approach to first person shooters), or milsims like Arma (which is more about attempting as much realism as possible) that we could discuss, but those are very specific subgenres — too narrow to really discuss here in the context of mass market first person shooter games.
Basically, the way I see it, neither subgenre (nor the ultra-linear, stripping-back-the-mechanics-in-favor-of-attempted cinematic style shooters) really pushes the boundaries of what a shooter can do.
I think the ideal shooter — and when I say ideal, again, think of this like pizza; sometimes, you just want a slice from the gas station or a chain because it’s not perfection or even ideal — is one that emphasizes player movement, and I think that most open world shooters cannot achieve that. The ideal shooter also is one that situates you in an actual space, giving you a sense of being the person who’s actually there, and the arcadey “shoot lots of guys in the thin context and not-that-believable spaces” boomer shooters can’t really pull that one off due to the nature of the visuals and level design.
These subgenres do what they do well, but I want to be Gordon Freeman, Master Chief, and Cate Archer, you know? I want to feel like this is an adventure I’m having while the technical gameplay elements still feels fantastic. I want to run and jump and shoot; I want to be pushed to be creative with what I’m choosing to do in combat, but still feel like I’ve got a fun narrative context for doing what I’m doing. I definitely don’t want the start-stop-change-the-gear style of the more recent Ubisoft games.
I think the linear shooters made between about 1998 and 2011 or so did a great job of that, when they weren’t being the ultra-linear Call of Duty-likes.
So, years ago, when I told my friend that Quake was due for a comeback, part of what I was thinking about was movement — no more of this “mostly stationary kill waves of dudes in cover so we can watch a cinematic play” stuff. And, sure enough, shortly after, Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2 reminded us just how fucking fun these games could be.
(and then Doom Eternal went so far into the realm of arcadey bullshit and Saturday morning cartoon fantasy that Bethesda saw fit to send one of their community managers to beg me to change my review from negative to positive, lmao)
I beat the game, FalcoYamaoka! I did so begrudgingly because I’d paid money for it and damned if I wasn’t at least going to finish the game. I’m not touching that shit again. It has a great level in Super Gore Nest and nothing else. Also, come on, look at this bad copywriting here! What are you doing?
Anyways, I get the expense issue of the linear shooter, and while I myself would like to make a few, I get why it’s fallen by the wayside. What I want to do in these pieces is highlight why I think these mechanics are good, even crucial, to good shooter design, in the same way that one might passionately argue for cupped pepperoni on a pizza.
The last piece introduced the idea: movement is king.
Now we’re gonna talk about guns.
the fallacy
People hear “first person shooter” and their brain goes to the “shooter” part. They think a first person shooter is a game in which one points at an enemy, clicks on it, and deletes the enemy. If the enemy is challenging, maybe it has a bit more health. If the player is skilled, maybe they can do more damage to the enemy by hitting a weak point, like shooting it in the head.
All of that is true, but remember, you spend way more time ‘first person’ than you do ‘shooting,’ and when you are shooting, much of what you’re actually thinking about is still movement. How do I close the distance to hit this guy with a shotgun? How can I get away from this guy when he’s too close and all I’ve got’s a sniper?
The generic shooter set of weapons generally follows the Doom model: you’ve got a pistol, where you click once and fire one bullet. You’ve got the shotgun, where you click once and fire a spread of pellets. Then there’s the automatic weapon, where you hold down the trigger and fire a lot of bullets (in Doom, that’s both the plasma rifle and the chain gun), and, of course, a high damage weapon that does damage in an area, like a rocket launcher.
As shooters moved to more 3D, longer ranged environments, we also started seeing single-shot semi-automatic rifles (like the M1 Garand in Call of Duty) and long-range single-shot weapons that require you to zoom (like the crossbow in Half-Life or any sniper rifle).
You’ll notice I’m breaking the guns down by behavior; I think a good shooter has weapons that are orthogonal to each other.
What’s “orthogonal?” Think of it like this: every gun serves a distinct niche. Depending on the scenarios you can get into, based on level design, environmental hazards, enemy types, and so on, different guns will be ideal depending on what you’re playing.
A lot of people took the pistol and went “this is your basic weapon. You want to ‘upgrade’ away from it,” so a lot of pistols suck. It’s the generic weapon you have when the real weapons aren’t all that useful. Bungie did something beautiful with pistols in Destiny, calling them “hand cannons,” and making them big, Trigun/Gungrave-style slab-sided revolvers.
So if a pistol is “shoot once, fuck a guy up, but accurate enough to be used at some range,” a shotgun is “shoot once, fuck a guy up up close.” Real shotguns actually have impressive range — a shotgun slug can kill you at 100 yards — but with video game logic, the idea is that you’re breaking someone when he gets real close to you.
A rocket launcher is for groups of enemies, but it’s balanced by having a slower projectile speed. An automatic weapon is for mowing down lots of guys while you strafe around — less about aiming, more about firing until everything is dead. If your shooter has enemies that will try to avoid fire or can be stunned with sustained fire, an automatic weapon is great for that.
Snipers and semi-automatic rifles are great for using a bit more range — I’m a sucker for Destiny’s Hung Jury SR4, in particular (NOT Destiny 2's), which is my favorite gun in a video game aside from maybe the WSTE-M shotgun from Marathon (because of the pure joy of flipping the shotgun over and over as you reload like you’re Arnold in Terminator 2).
Now, there’s nothing that says the guns have to be… any of these things. You don’t have to have a shotgun, a pistol, whatever. Those are just convenient categories for what the guns are actually doing: they are all mechanically distinct things to fit the different combat roles you’re occupying.
When I’m picking up a game like any of the Call of Duties, or Far Cry 3, Blood Dragon, 4, 5, New Dawn, or 6, and I’ve got one of 17 different automatic rifles to pick from, it just comes down to aesthetics. In a game like Destiny, there are really distinct types of guns — the light, rapid-fire pulse rifle, or the heavier-hitting four-burst pulse rifle, like a Go Figure, and since you’re putting thousands of hours into a game like Destiny, you expect to have some overlap, and it’s mostly down to preferred gun feel and aesthetics.
I think the Badlander looks better than the Threat Level, for instance, so I tended to focus on the Badlander, even though they’re both rapid fire frame shotguns. Similar gun feel, but that’s about it.
I generally like the slower firing, harder hitting weapons in Destiny, so I avoid sidearms (lighter, faster firing pistols that sound bad, in my opinion) and SMGs (really fast assault rifles with bad range). I like to be deliberate, targeting an enemy, hitting him with a great headshot, watching him stagger back. Hitting him with a spray of bullets just doesn’t feel the same.
The one exception for me is the shotguns — my favorite shotgun in Destiny is the Badlander, which fires quick enough to feel good, and hits hard enough to feel right, and I had over 6,000 kills on my second Badlander alone (I had one with even more kills, but the newer one had better stats; I don’t remember how many I have total. Fun fact, an exec at Ubisoft once told me that the average player kills about 2,000 people total in a Far Cry game, in case you were wondering how much fun I have with Badlander alone).
Too slow, and you’re feeling like you should be hitting an enemy while you wait for a reload. Too fast, and the gun just doesn’t feel like it has much power. Getting that nice, sweet balance between “this feels fuckin awesome” and “I don’t have to wait forever to fire the gun” is where I like my guns.
Now, hey, with something as slow and powerful as a rocket launcher in Halo, I’m likely firing once with the rocket, then immediately swapping to something else to mop up whatever enemies are left.
A gun doesn’t have to follow an existing archetype — for instance, some shooters like Darkest of Days and Titanfall 2 have guns that lock on to a bunch of targets, then fire tracking projectiles in a burst. The flak cannon in Unreal Tournament behaves like a shotgun, but the projectiles bounce off surfaces, and the gun has an alternate fire that lobs a frag grenade (with more bouncing projectiles).
There are games like Ratchet & Clank or Dead Space that, while not first person shooters, have inventive takes on guns that you could put in a first person shooter, no problem. There’s nothing stopping you from taking the Gears of War Torque Bow — a weapon that charges as you hold down the trigger, which affects both its trajectory and the number of enemies it can pierce through — and putting it in a first person shooter.
(I won’t be writing about bullet penetration at length, but if you’re designing an FPS, one thing to consider: do your bullets stop when they hit an enemy, or do they keep going? another weapon that goes through enemies is the cannon from the Serious Sam series)
The core difference between first and third person shooters is the camera and level design, but gun design can be transferred between them with some ease. There’s no reason to avoid looking at third person shooters for weapon design inspiration.
There’s a lot of stuff you can do with a gun in an FPS, but at its core, you are holding a device in your hand that — when you press a button — sends some source of damage at a target you are choosing (a bullet, a lightning bolt, a rocket, and so on), either by aiming at or locking onto said target.
When the source of damage collides with the target, the target is either wounded or dies (or the damage bounces off harmlessly because a mean designer has gotten involved and wants you to do some Special Thing to Unlock The Damage Window).
How the target you are firing at affects your decision making will be discussed in the next piece; how the weapon you are firing impacts you is what we’re discussing today.
gun anatomy: an introduction
Technically, we’re discussing any ranged weapon in a first person shooter — that means a crossbow, a mage staff, you name it. They’re all “guns,” in the loose sense, so anywhere you hear me mentioning a gun, you can think about all the things that aren’t guns but still do the “device that you aim and fire to send damage at the enemies” thing.
This is not the same thing as a gadget, like a grenade or a knife that you might throw, nor is it the same thing as a melee weapon, which involves the same buttons (like in Dishonored, you use the right click to both fire your gun and swing your sword). I do not have plans to write about gadgets at this time. Just don’t have any essay in my brain about that specific subject right now.
When discussing guns, we could also include abilities or magic spells, like casting magic in Avowed or plasmids in Bioshock, where you don’t really have a device other than, like, your hands. I generally find that games with first person magic don’t quite feel the same as shooting, because of how we expect hands to work and how guns behave, but some lessons may be transferrable, so if you’re making a game purely about casting magic from your hands, this might get you 60% of the way there, not 100% of the way there, but 60% is better than 0.
This is not actual gun design, to be clear; yes, I know how to shoot firearms and I personally fucking love going to the range and shooting some skeet with a good 12 gauge shotgun, buuuuuuuuuut I’m going to focus on the game side of the thing, in the same way that if I were discussing a game like Devil May Cry, I might not spend all my time telling you about the mechanics of a real-world sword.
At its base level, the gun has:
- the source of damage, which can be anything from a bullet to a grenade to a burst of plasma to a lightning strike, you name it. this is the thing that crosses the distance between you and the target.
- the trigger mechanism, which is usually a literal trigger the player character will pull
- an ammunition reservoir that’s usually loaded into the weapon in the form of a magazine or tube or something of that nature
- an ammunition pool for the ammo that isn’t carried in the gun (games like Doom simply have an ammunition pool)
- perks, which are modifiers to the behavior of the weapon that may have nothing to do with the physical mechanics
So, the source of damage is whatever you’re shooting. Maybe it’s a bullet, and you’re using a hitscan weapon, so you’re pulling the trigger and bam, the bullet instantly hits its target. On the extreme opposite end, you’ve got something like the Bio Rifle from Unreal Tournament, which shoots a blob of goo (you can hold the trigger down to make the blob really big to do more damage) that moves really really slowly and will leave goo behind that enemies can take damage from when they accidentally touch it.
(another aside here: the bio rifle can be used to set ‘traps,’ which is basically ‘leave this thing here and when an enemy runs into it, the enemy will take damage. the problem is, you’re not getting the immediate aural feedback of “hearing the gun hit the enemy” or even seeing the enemy respond to hit feedback. it’s a core issue with trapper classes in games — they don’t feel good to play because the entire idea behind them is that you aren’t around when they do damage. is this a solvable problem? maybe, but when destiny changed the tripmine grenade to be purely a trap grenade and not a grenade that hilariously stuck to enemies and fired a blast through their friends, people stopped using the grenade as much cause it just wasn’t fun)
Is it a projectile — something that actually travels between the player and the target? Is it hitscan — something that detects whether it should hit because you clicked while aiming?
How does this projectile behave?
Does it track enemies, like Unreal Tournament 2004’s AVRiL? Does it bounce around like the LPs you shoot at enemies in Sunset Overdrive? Can you steer it, like the sniper rifle in Singularity?
When it hits the target, what does it do? Does it do increased damage to enemy shields (like the energy shields in Halo), puncture enemies to hit multiple targets, cause a status effect (like catching the enemy on fire so it takes damage continuously after the source of damage connects with the target), knock the enemy back? Does it pin enemies to the wall when it hits them, like the S-HV Penetrator in FEAR? There are a million possibilities.
On top of that, we’ve got spread, which determines how far off your reticle (that thing at the center of the screen that shows you where the bullets go) the bullets might deviate. In a shotgun, the reticle is often a big circle and the shots are distributed in a cone from the point at the tip of your barrel to the enemy you hit.
Last article, I mentioned shotgun spread in early games like Doom, but I didn’t go into exactly how that behavior works — Doom’s projectiles don’t actually spread vertically, just horizontally, because up-down aiming isn’t really a thing in Doom. Doom 2’s where you get a firing cone.
How does the spread work? When you aim down sights, does that reduce spread? Does that change the weapon’s behavior in another way?
On and on we could go to talk about all the ways that projectiles work. Bulletstorm has one where you can shoot a drill at an enemy, then point your gun elsewhere, click a button, and the drill, which is also a rocket, will blast the enemy towards that surface, killing them. It’s very cool.
And that’s just the source of the damage we’ve been talking about so far. What’s next?
Well, we’ve got the trigger mechanism.
A) In some shooters, you’ve got two — a primary fire and an alternate fire. These launch two different kinds of damage at the enemy, like the primary fire sending bullets downrange and the alternate fire launching a grenade.
B) In other shooters, you’ve got a primary fire-mode, but the second trigger press allows you to aim down sights (making, as we discussed earlier, a much easier job out of aiming at distant enemies or helping focus your fire in guns where the projectiles spread).
C) In some games, like Death Stranding 2 or Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, you have a button to change what kind of projectile you’re firing. This is a compromise between A and B. You can aim down sights and also fire different projectiles, at the cost of slight awkwardness (it’s more intuitive to tap the alternate fire button than hold down a button and watch an animation play as you change ammunition types).
D) There’s also stuff like STALKER and System Shock, which let you change ammunition types rather than having alternate fire modes. A shotgun may still fire one shot per trigger pull, but maybe instead of the spread of a pellet, you’re swapping it out for a dart round that has way more range and accuracy, but does less individual damage. The projectile changes, but the general behavior — single fire, automatic fire — does not.
E) There’s also firing rate changes — maybe you fire a single shot per trigger pull, maybe you fire a burst of shots (usually 3 or 4, like Destiny’s pulse rifles) per trigger pull, or maybe the gun continuously fires until it’s out of ammunition as you keep the trigger depressed.
And then there’s weird shit. Like, in Gears of War 4 and 5, there’s a shotgun called the Overkill that fires one shell when you press the trigger, and fires a second when you let the trigger up, meaning a single tap to the trigger will fire two shots, not just one, so the player can go “blam — hold — blam” or “blamblam!” depending on how they hold the trigger.
This isn’t even an exhaustive list, and I’m sure I’m missing some memorable standouts, but you get the idea, right? A gun is more than just the projectile, it’s also the firing behavior that comes with pressing the trigger.
…and now we’ve got the ammo.
There are two major ways of thinking about this: you’ve got a total ammo pool, and all of your damage comes out of that. If I have a pistol, and I have 50 rounds, and I pull the trigger, I now have 49 rounds and the remainder has been fired downrange at my target. Great. Simple.
But some games have reloading, which splits up the pool of ammo in the gun — you can’t realistically put 50 rounds in a normal Glock without a drum mag, and if you carry more than that, it can seem extremely unrealistic. So, for certain games, you’ll want reloading, which means the player can carry more bullets than fits in the gun.
With me so far? Alright, so, reloading just means you press a button and the mag pops out and you slide the next mag in, right? Easy peasy.
Not so fast, hombre!
If this is a tactical shooter, and you shoot one bullet in your 50 round mag, and then you reload, you lose the other 49 bullets cause you tossed away the mag. In a lot of games, it’s not a problem — reloading is an animation you replay
Now, here’s a question: are you using segmented reloads or are you having the full animation play? That is, if the player starts to reload, then interrupts it (some games allow the player to sprint, which interrupts reloading; others stop reloads when you take fire or jump and so on), does the animation pick up where you left off (I dumped the magazine, so it’s still dumped, now to finish the rest of the animation) or does it start over from the beginning? Most games start over from the beginning; Titanfall 2 is the only game I can think of off the top of my head that has segmented reloads, but I know there’s a few more.
What about a shotgun?
A long time ago, I was working on a shooter with a guy who really, really, really wanted to be in charge, so he tried to take over a meeting one time and declared to everyone that I was a horrible game designer (someone told me he works at a no-name AI startup now lol). He, an intern who’d been fired by 343i (the makers of Halo after Bungie) decided he would ‘prove’ this by saying “all of our guns are bad” and trying to show us how bad they were in the game.
I responded with “but… you’re the one implementing the guns, and you ignored the on-paper design and implemented them how you wanted. So we aren’t looking at my guns here. We’re looking at yours.”
His reply? “Yes, well, I changed everything because your design was so bad. I couldn’t fix them.”
I asked for clarification. “Well, you’ve got the shotgun here, and it’s got 12 shells in the tube. Do you know how long that would take to reload?”
Here’s the fun fact about shotguns: they are functionally segmented reload weapons. You put in one shell at a time, and in most shooters — not all, but most — you can stop reloading to fire the gun even if the entire mag isn’t loaded, a fact this particular guy should’ve known, since Halo’s original shotgun has a 12-round tube and you can, in fact, break the reloads.
He really didn’t like me pointing that out.
Then I said “but also… that’s not my shotgun design. That’s the on-paper breakdown of the VK-12 from FEAR,” which is a shotgun that is widely considered to be one of the best video game shotguns in history, and the 12 in the VK-12 is, in fact, because it carries 12 rounds. He was looking at a writeup I’d done on how the VK-12 worked.
Humorous bullshit aside, does your shotgun load one shell at a time, or is the player forced to go through a boring, lengthy reload process? 12 rounds in a shotgun feels fuckin great. One of the complaints that my friends were making as we played Halo together recently was how bad the shotgun starts to feel once the magazine capacity gets reduced.
Game designers will try to tell you that it’s better on paper or whatever, but come on, man! The shotgun feels better when you don’t have to reload it all the time because you’re constantly running out of ammo. This is also why I enjoy the Badlander in Destiny so much — mine had the biggest magazine capacity possible and the one I sought had perks meant to reload pretty quickly.
That meant the rhythm of the gun was not “bap bap bap” *lengthy reload* “bap bap bap” it was “bap bap bap bap” *reload one shell* “bap bap” etc. That’s a good thing to have when you’re within punching distance of a dozen enemies; since a shotgun’s great at crowd control, firing uptime is important, and most games are way too slow for it to be fun. The number of enemies is too high, the reload is too slow, the number of rounds is too low so if you miss, it’s tedious. None of it makes the gun feel good. You gotta hit that sweet spot.
But, hey, there’s other ways to impact reloading. Ever played Gears of War? It’s not a first person shooter, but it implemented the “active reload system,” which looks like this:
Okay, so what’s happening here?
You’ve got a picture of the gun, called a Lancer, and beneath it, a number (how many bullets you have total) and then a series of vertical lines (how many you have in the magazine, before you reload).
But below that?
You’ve got a bar. When you press the reload button again, the vertical line in the middle of that bar starts at the left and slides to the right. If you tap the reload button again, and it’s in the black areas of the line, you ‘mess up’ the reload, and your character plays a frustrated animation while trying to force the gun to reload. He whacks it with a little percussive maintenance, and blam! Back in action.
If the player does not tap the reload button again, the reload proceeds normally.
But what happens if the player taps it in the little white area? You get bullets that do a bit more damage and the reload animation finishes early. If you tap it in the gray area, you get the animation finishing early, but not the extra-damage bullets (the vertical lines representing the bullets will flash regularly until you’ve used them up).
So that’s one thing you can do with a reload. The Borderlands games have guns from a manufacturer called “Tediore” that, starting with Borderlands 2, explode when reloaded. If you reload early — when there’s more bullets in the mag — they’ll explode with more force. Don’t worry — a new gun, identical to the old one, will appear in your hands. Other Tediore weapons turn into little robots that follow you around and shoot stuff, if I remember right.
I’m not a big Borderlands guy, so apologies if I’m misremembering some of the specifics.
Remember when we talked about changing ammunition types earlier? One way people do that in games is to hold down the reload button rather than tap it. If you tap, you’ll put the same ammunition type into the gun. If you hold, you’ll cycle to the next type. This can be an issue with more than three types of ammo, but, hey, that’s one of the things you can do — tap or hold the reload button, changing something about the gun in the process.
But, as you can see, there’s a million things can happen here just on a reload! It’s crazy, right? Guns are so much more than just “point at something and click on it until it dies.”
Now, I mentioned perks, so here goes: in a game like Destiny, you also have things called perks — say, Field Prep (which lets you carry more ammo and increases your reload speed, which is great when your weapon’s magazine doesn’t carry that much ammo) and Rampage (where killing lots enemies quickly grants increased damage, letting you kill more enemies).
Those two perks together mean that you’re spending a lot of time dumping damage on your enemies and very little wasting time on a reload; the perks help you really push into what makes it good. Of course, that works great for a loot-driven shooter; it doesn’t work so well for a linear campaign shooter where time spent on perks is not time spent actually running around shooting stuff.
But you can build a gun to have distinct perks — you could, say, make it so that the sole shotgun in your linear first person shooter explicitly does more damage the more you fire it. There’s nothing in the physical mechanics of a gun that would actually increase the damage the more you shoot, but you can just… you know, do that. Guns can have unique characteristics.
What makes Destiny’s system particularly good is that all guns have a specific number of perks. Usually you’ve got one or two that changes basic stats (slightly better recoil, range, reload speed, etc — basically, the physical mechanics of the gun) and then you’ve got others that do stuff that seems to have no bearing on those mechanics, like Rampge, which somehow increases damage the more you kill. Those are very ‘gamey’ things that have no basis in any kind of simulated reality, they’re just fun.
When I wrote about the Hung Jury SR4, a big part of the reason I said I liked it was because when you shoot an enemy in the head and the enemy dies, it explodes, because of the Firefly perk. It also had a perk called Triple Tap that meant that after three shots to their weakpoint (usually the head), one round would be added back into the mag magically.
This helps the gun lean into a specific style of play and rewards you for doing so. Great perks combinations are ones that help shape the gun’s use case — a shotgun that increases reload speed on kills and increases damage on kills would have a really fun perk synergy. An SMG that reloads itself when enemies take status effect damage and has a status effect perk benefits from the high rate of fire that SMGs are known for.
So! Wow! That’s… a lot! And that’s not even all of it, that’s just the basics (remember, these are introductory essays, 101 tier learning material, not stuff meant for 600+ tier lectures), but you get the idea, right?
My hope with this article is that it’s expanding your possibility space — I want you to come away from this going “oh man, what other crazy interesting things can I do with guns?”
And this is me just telling you what other people have done. There’s so much more you can do once you free yourself from the limitations of the basic “a gun is a thing that deletes enemies when you click on them.” There are a billion interesting ways to do that, and a good combat experience is one where you’re creatively making decisions in combat.
If you have a bunch of samey guns that don’t feel all that different, with enemies who all kinda seem like just dudes, the fun of the shooter is going to be limited to the kinds of encounters (geographical space and events that occur within it, like an army tank blasting through a wall and rolling toward you) the game provides.
If you have a game that forces you to change guns in an encounter, then you’re not being creative, you’re being reactive — that was Doom Eternal’s problem.
The sweet spot is going “I have these weapons, I see those enemies, and I know the level layout. I know what I’m going to do,” and then as you play, the depth of the enemy AI, the weapons that feel right for the moment, and the things that occur in the level will all sing.
In the ideal FPS, you want to find that proper balance between all three. Certain subgenres only give you one or two.
gun feel 101
I am not a gun feel expert. I have done some tuning for guns — how many rounds it should carry, how much damage it should do, the tightness of the cone, stuff like that — but I’m nothing like the wizards at Bungie (one of them went to Bethesda to help make Fallout 4’s shooting feel better, and I recall hearing that id Software helped Arkane make the gunfeel in Wolfenstein: Youngblood feel better). But, hey, this is an introductory piece.
Here are the basic components of gun feel:
- you pull the trigger
- the gun responds by sending a projectile at the enemy
- the gun animates, to let you know that it fired.
- the gun plays a sound, to let you know that it fired
- the bullet hits something, making an effect (sparks, blood)
- if it hits an enemy, the enemy responds (flinching, dying, flying away from you and ragdolling)
Then you’ve got stuff like fat bullets (the bullet’s invisible hitbox is actually bigger than the bullet itself), damage numbers (if your game has numbers that appear when you hit an enemy, letting you know that the enemy was hit), reticle indicators (some change color, shape, or do a specific animation to let you know when you hit an enemy), and stuff like that.
All of these little components hit that part of your lizard brain that goes “yes! I did a thing!”
If you click your mouse with your computer powered off, and it’s not a very clicky mouse, it feels bad. The clickier, the better. When your computer’s on, though, that’s where the real fun begins. Right click on your Windows desktop — if the menu doesn’t pop up right away and seems laggy, it feels bad. If it’s responsive, it feels better.
Now take that all the way into a video game — you want immediate, notable feedback to indicate that you did something, and if you don’t have all (or most, if you aren’t doing damage numbers) of the above, the game just isn’t gonna feel that good.
Take Bioshock, for instance. Go play the original. Now go play Destiny. Why does Destiny feel better than Bioshock? Well, part of it is because Bioshock’s reticle looks like this:
Fun fact, if you use a cross or a dot, your bullets will feel more accurate and precise, which is why a scope like this feels so good:
In fact, if we break this gif I recorded of the Hung Jury SR4 down, we’ve got a nice, tight reticle, we see a hit marker when the enemy dies (the four red bits that pop out), we’ve got damage numbers, and we’ve got the huge explosion that happens because of the unique nature of the Hung Jury. More on that later. Or earlier, if you already read the article on the Hung Jury.
You’ll also notice that while I hit that first Vex goblin near the weak point, my reticle isn’t exactly on it. That’s either bullet magnetism (the bullet going to where I’m trying to get it) or fat bullets or a combination of both; I’m not exactly sure how Destiny does it specifically.
You can see a similar effect here with a much lesser gun in Destiny 2, where I’m playing with mouse and keyboard instead of the DS4 on a PlayStation 4 like above (Destiny, tragically, was never available on PC).
Look at how GOOD those hit markers feel, the physics on the enemy, the precision of the reticle. It’s fuckin delicious is what it is.
But I can’t really sell you on the power of this without, uh, sound. In the video form of this essay (oooh) there will be sound, but in text form, you’ll just have to imagine it.
Because, you see, if I had one complaint about the Hung Jury SR4, it’s that it’s an Omolon rifle, and Omolon is a brand of rifles in Destiny that have a weird sound when you fire the bullets that doesn’t feel quite as thunderous as I’d like, not because the sound design for it is bad, but because the fantasy of the weapon is that it 3D prints bullets on the fly, and the sound they picked to illustrate that just doesn’t feel very good. Luckily, the explosions make up for that.
the funny thing about sound
Some people say “Doc, I bet you care about Half-Life more than Half-Life 2 because you played Half-Life at a formative time in your life, and Half-Life 2 at some time that was not formative for some reason.”
Well, I don’t know how to tell you this, but all times in your life are formative if you possess the willingness to perceive the splendor of the world around you!
However, and more importantly, I played Half-Life for the first time one week in 2007, and then I played Half-Life: Blue Shift, and then I played Half-Life: Opposing Force… and then, the next week, I played Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2. And at some point I played Portal, because it was the week the The Orange Box Released.
Yup. Played ’em all for the first time in one go, and let me tell you: Half-Life 2 doesn’t hold a fuckin’ candle to even Blue Shift. I should go back and replay Blue Shift to see if my opinion holds up, actually.
But!
And this is important:
I didn’t get to play any of those games with sound.
I was working at Friends University in Wichita at the time (in the business school; unless they’ve done remodeling, head in the main entrance, turn right, and look at the office. Yeah, I sat there, facing the door, answering questions for people who had them at 8 PM), and I wasn’t allowed to have speakers (due to monster noises) or headphones (due to not being able to listen to students or teachers), so I had to play the games silently.
And a funny thing happened: I used the pistol a lot. If you’ve heard Half-Life 2’s pistol, it sounds like a cap gun. Y’know, those little toy guns that sound pathetic when you fire them cause they barely have enough gunpowder to blow your fingers off? Yeah. It sounds like that. So it sucks.
BUUUUUUUT it’s actually really good, and when playing it on mute, it feels way better to use because the unpleasant sound is no longer a problem.
In fact, I actually have this theory that if you play Half-Life 2 on mute, you won’t fall in love with it the way you might otherwise, because the vocal performances carry it so much because Merle Dandridge fucking killed it as Alyx Vance. I think the shortcomings become more apparent without the sound design.
Good sound design can take a game from mediocre to great, which is also why Red Dead Redemption, which has some of the most dogshit controls ever (it’s true) gets so much love; without those amazing performances, the awful combat and mashing the A button to run and all the other shortcomings really, really become apparent.
They can change your perspective so much that they can trick you into thinking a gun is stronger than it actually is — take, for instance, Wolfenstein. One of the Wolfenstein games — I thought it was Wolfenstein 09, but I’ve also heard Enemy Territory, has this gun called the MP40.
Now, the MP40 is an old German gun from World War II, and you see it in most WWII games. Well, players didn’t want to use it all that much and said it felt weak compared to its contemporaries.
The designers, though? The data showed them that the gun was just as strong as it needed to be. The playtesters were simply wrong. And yet… players wouldn’t use the gun, even if they hadn’t heard from other people that it was weak. Something about it just made them feel like they didn’t want to use it.
Weird, right?
Well, the word from On High told the team to make the gun stronger, but that could fuck up the balance really badly! What to do?
Fellas,
they boosted the bass.
And with that, the problem was solved. The guns felt better than ever.
One shooter I don’t think is all that great in terms of gameplay — I played it again a year or two ago, in fact — is Black. A lot of people remember it fondly, talking about how great the guns felt… but it’s… not actually that good? It feels a bit janky to play, enemy deaths are unimpressive, there’s not really anything amazing about it…
EXCEPT, YOU GUESSED IT: SOME OF THE BEST-SOUNDING GUNS IN A VIDEO GAME
Battlefield: Bad Company 2? Great game. You know what made it even greater? DICE got to go record a bunch of real guns all over the place, including capturing sounds from the other side of a mountain. The end result was some of the crispest, breathtakingly badass gunfire you’ve ever heard.
If you’re going to make a shooter sound good, you best have the best fuckin gun sounds in the entire world. Hit that bass, make the whip-crack of sniper fire really crack, and yeah, make sure it echoes through the trees.
I’m not a sound designer, but you get the gist, right? Good gun sounds lead to people thinking your shooter’s amazing, regardless of level or encounter design, story, weapon design, enemy AI, you name it. If it sounds good, people will think it’s good. That’s how human brains work.
how many guns should you be able to carry?
So, for most of the first decade of first person shooter design, every gun you’d pick up, you’d get to use. You’d get a little bar like this at the top of your screen:
Press 2 and you get the pistol. Press 2 again and you get the revolver. Press a different button, like 4, and maybe click, like so:
…and you get a different gun.
The advantage to this is simple: you can select whatever tool you have for the job, picking your favorite weapons any time you want. In a game like Serious Sam, where enemy management is the entire name of the game, it’s particularly crucial to do this. There’s not a lot I can say here about this style of weapon management — the whole idea is that you can use whatever weapons you have ammunition for at any given moment.
It can be a little difficult to carry weapons this way — on the keyboard, you pick weapons with the number keys, which means you might have to reach all the way over to 8 or 9 on your keyboard to use certain weapons, which can inhibit your ability to reach those buttons quickly if you have a full-sized keyboard like me.
The solution? Weapon wheels. Here’s Wolfenstein: The Old Blood, a game where you can press a button to bring up the weapon wheel, then quickly move your mouse in the direction or what you want. This also has the advantage of working very well for joysticks on controllers.
As I recall — but I don’t have the time to reinstall the other Wolfensteins to check — the weapon wheel in one of the other games would also let you alternate gun types, so you could have a shotgun in one hand and a pistol in the other, if you wanted. Combining weapons is a bit awkward with this setup, but, hey, if you want to use multiple guns, this is how to do it.
Obviously, carrying multiple guns comes with its own problems — how do you aim down sights? Most games assign the second gun to the same trigger you used for aiming down sights (and, hey, which gun would you aim down when you’re holding two?), so for games where the encounters are happening at range, dual-wielding weapons might not be the way to go.
What about alternate fire? I believe Wolfenstein: The New Colossus approached this with option C from earlier in the article — you have to press a button to alt-fire, meaning you’re not getting an alt-fire as quickly as you might
How about reloading? I’ve seen it handled different ways. Often, the gun dips off screen and comes back when it’s been reloaded, because the idea of reloading two guns while wielding them both seems a little silly.
Lots of annoying things to consider here, unfortunately.
But! There is a place for “carry all the guns you want and use them whenever you want.” No question there. I actually prefer it, most of the time.
…most of the time.
It’s time to talk about churn.
With churn, the idea is that you can’t carry everything, so you have to think about what weapons you’re bringing with you. You get to pick what you carry — with Halo, it was two weapons, with Gears, it’s two main weapons and a smaller sidearm — and you generally don’t have enough ammo to stick with that weapon for the entire course of the game.
Churn also means you’re thinking about the interplay between the guns you’re carrying a bit more — hey, this encounter is in a big open space, so I probably want a ranged weapon. That encounter’s gonna have some enemies with energy shields, so I might want something to overload their shields. Churn means you have to do a little strategizing, and when you run out of ammo for the weapons you like using, maybe you have to try something you’re not entirely familiar with.
It also has a second, interesting benefit of — when you’re playing co-op, like in Halo — strategizing across the team. “I’ll take this, you take that.” You don’t really have that conversation when you’re both have access to the exact same arsenal, right?
That means you can have fun making some interesting, collaborative decisions.
It also means that dual-wielding is a bit easier, since instead of “when you pick up a gun, it goes directly into your inventory” is now “look at the gun, choose whether to dual-wield it or not, and continue.” Halo 3 is probably the best example of this style of choice-driven gameplay.
Gears (again, I know it’s a third person shooter, but there’s a lot of overlap with the design principles), interestingly, gives you so much ammo you rarely have to change — I remember a commenter on Kotaku years ago arguing with me because “I don’t have to use anything other than the Lancer, therefore Gears is bad.”
another aside: gears has this weird thing where the final bullet in the chamber does 25% extra damage. I recall Cliff Bleszinski, the former series boss, saying he told Randy Pitchford, Borderlands’ boss, to put that in Borderlands as a way to make shooting feel a little better. It feels bad to shoot a guy, NOT kill him, and have to reload before killing him, so putting a little edge near the end of the magazine helps you with a few of those encounters.
I, a player who enjoys changing things up for my own sense of variety, like a person who always tries to have a different meal every day so I don’t get bored, did not understand that argument.
Buuuuut… years later, I heard Civ IV designer Soren Johnson say that players will, given the chance, optimize the fun out of the game, and it clicked for me. People like that are playing to get an optimal outcome, and I’m playing to have the most fun experience I can.
When I play shooters, creativity and variety is the point. I will switch weapons and matchups to vary up my own experience, which is why I find games like Doom Eternal so repugnant — the whole “definitely do this to counter enemies” or “every encounter pushes you to use all the mechanics” is boring to me.
If every encounter uses every mechanic, then every encounter is the same, and that’s boring. So Gears kiiiiiiiinda errs on the side of “always have ammo for the gun you want, so you control your loadout,” instead of “expect to run out of ammo and have to change to something else.” It’s tuned just a little different from Halo because it has quasi-universal ammo, meaning any ammo pickup will help with your Lancer.
Now, I don’t love universal ammo as a concept, because there’s no… thought to it. In a game like Half-Life, if I run out of shotgun ammo, I’ll have to use guns that aren’t the shotgun. That will occasionally happen, and that can still enforce some variety on my experience without going into the Bad Design Territory of Forcing The Player To Change Things Against Their Will To Satisfy The Designer’s Urge To Make The Player Use Exactly What The Designer Wants.
Creativity is best where you have some impositions on your creativity (like enemies just not dropping the ammo you want cause you got unlucky, or running out of ammo cause you weren’t thinking about it) and occasionally have to move out of your comfort zone, but generally are where you want to be. I’d probably aim for — gut feeling, mind you — 70% ‘ time with the weapons you want to use’ and 30% ‘using the weapons that are available’ if I was going to start messing around with tuning churn in my stuff.
The player should generally have a good time playing with the stuff they like using, but should occasionally have some choice.
Additionally, universal ammo doesn’t mean you’re intentionally moving as you might be with specific ammo. In a game with specific ammo types, you might see The Ammo For The Gun You Want and have to go get it, whereas universal ammo means You Grab The Nearest Ammo And It Will Work.
Now, Destiny tried to come at it with a compromise — white ammo was for assault rifles and pistols and things, which were in your first slot. Tap the gun swap button, and you get to weapons that use green ammo — slightly rarer, but did way more damage (shotguns, snipers, and so on). Then you had purple weapons, which were the real big “fuck you” weapons. Rocket launchers and heavy machine guns go here. Hold the swap button instead of tap to access.
Destiny 2 fucked all this up by making slots 1 and 2 kinetic weapon slots. If your gun was in slot 1, it did kinetic damage, if it was in slot 2, it did elemental damage. So you had pistols and smgs and rifles in BOTH slots. Wanted to use a shotgun? Too bad, use purple ammo, loser (look, it’s been 9 years, I may be misremembering this, but I do believe shotguns were locked to the heavy slot).
Eventually, they pulled their heads out of their asses (because, i’m sorry, it was a headass move and is legitimately shocking that idea shipped at all; they had to fix it fast when the game shipped because literally no one liked it) and changed it around. I think eventually it was back to the whole “white ammo for rapid fire guns, elemental or no, green ammo for medium tier weapons, and purple tier for heavy weapons.” You could have medium or light weapons in both the first and second slots, meaning that a triple shotgun (there was a heavy shotgun in the game, Acrius) loadout was possible. A blessed combination.
So that’s a bunch of different ways to mix up what you’re carrying, and it’s kinda universal ammo, but sorted by type so “oh shit, a purple brick!” meant you could actually see “this is for my Big Gun” and go pick it up.
Destiny also avoided churn by letting you carry up to 30 weapons. Check this screenshot out (btw yeah that’s my fav ‘look’ in destiny minus the weird furry bits on my right leg). You’ll notice that I’ve got those three guns — white, green, and purple ammo types equipped, but do you see those faint little squares on the left of those columns?
You can store up to 9 weapons in those. Go into the menu, pick one, and swap it out with the 10th slot (the big one) in the weapon class. So, in my shotgun slot there, you see that the equipped gun is my beloved Badlander, and I’ve got six more guns to pick from. I can carry up to 3 more. I’ve only got one extra gun in my heavy slot.
Borderlands, on the other hand, gives you four slots (two of which, I think, you have to UNLOCK over TIME, which is dumb imo, but again, I’m not a huge Borderlands guy), and then you’ve got a backpack where you can carry whatever you like and just slip guns into your slots when you want. That’s fine, I guess, though the UI doesn’t make it quite as easy to sort as something like Destiny.
There’s a lot of ways to do this, is what I’m saying.
I haven’t been able to fully articulate it, but there’s something about Concretely Wanting Something Specific And Chasing After It Knowing It Will Have A Discrete Outcome rather than “yeah, there’s another ammo box. I’ll top off, I guess.” I think the more concrete your planning in a shooter, the more fun it feels. Thinking through the implications of every single decision you make with mere fractions of a second to think about what to do is exhilarating.
Gears has non-universal ammo for some weapons, as I recall (like the Torque Bow, I think?), but I haven’t played that series in a long while, so I may be misremembering it.
this is the end, my friend (for now)
I could probably write a better outro, but it’s time to end this for now.
I’ve been trying to put into words exactly what I like about shooters, and I think this is the best way I can describe it: working out how to solve the challenges facing you and then using your skill and creativity to win is what makes a shooter so compelling.
I have to think through 3D space, I have to anticipate the decisions an enemy will make. I need to dodge fire, prioritize the correct targets, use the right weapons, and manage my inventory all at once.
It’s not purely a reflex game, it’s something that engages all of my senses. I don’t need to remember complex button inputs to pull off combos — the actual act of aiming and shooting is simple. Instead, I’m thinking of the experience in kinetics — can I jump over this guy, throw a grenade at that group of enemies, hit those targets in the head, then spin around and get the first guy before he’s had a chance to react? Fucking around with trick shots and area control is just as important as knowing the right weapons.
Doing all of this, quickly, in real time is what’s fun to me. I am thinking about 3D space, and the more creative and interesting my tools — my guns — the more fun I’m having with the game.
So… now we’re done.
I have some thoughts on where to go next. Obviously, we need to talk about enemies, because how enemies work is super important to if a game is fun. Don’t believe me? Set up a quick FPS template in Unreal Engine 5 but make sure the enemy targets you shoot just stand there and tell me I’m wrong. The more interesting stuff they do, including some very counterintuitive stuff, the more fun the game is.
So we’re gonna talk about AI next, and that’ll probably be the end of this series. We’re not gonna talk about difficulty tuning because I do not know shit about that and different people have different ideas on what makes games fun — plus, your reflexes and my reflexes are different, and if I prefer to play on mouse and keyboard and you play on a controller, what’s set to ‘hard’ for you will feel more like ‘normal’ for me, not because of a skill gap between us, but because the more refined control of a mouse and keyboard lets me really push the limits of what I can do that a controller tends to inhibit.
PS: I like Rage. I think it’s better than people give it credit for. You should play it. There’s no real reason I’m mentioning it other than I realized I didn’t have an opportunity to do so in this series and I wanted to give it a shout out.
If you want to support the work I do, like this article about the biggest pitfall young writers face and how to get around it, then hey, hit up my tip jar.
I figure this kind of writing helps inexperienced writers the most — which means people who might not have the finances to afford my work if I kept it behind a paywall. A paywall would help me, obviously — I could guarantee a certain minimum that would ensure my ability to continue writing these articles — but the people who need my help the most cannot afford it. So I gotta rattle the tip jar. I know it’s not pleasant, but like… think of me like a busker. I’d rather play a song on the street and get a few coins in a hat than just run a gofundme or something.
I, personally, can only do this with your support; if I wasn’t doing this, I’d have to get a second job, and as disabled as I am, that’s really not great. I have to spend between $160 and up to an entire Nintendo Switch’s worth of my income on medical care every two weeks. That’s an extremely difficult burden for me.
So it’s either do this or get a second job, and a second job would not be ideal given my current disability. So when you send me a tip, you’re not just helping a disabled writer like me, you’re helping tons of students, disabled people, and others without access. Thank you.
paypal.me/stompsite (this is the best way to help me out right now)
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