Military Shooters and Weapons Diversity: Modern Guns just all feel too much alike.

[American Tanker]

Not that this is a criticism of the games themselves, but it just seems to me like practically every black composite 5.56mm carbine just all feel like the exact same gun after a while. I'm not the only one that thinks this, am I?

Don't get me wrong: World War II has been so overplayed it's not even funny. But at least back then, the guns at least felt pretty damned diverse. Just taking a few more well-known pieces of hardware...

The Thompson Gun, with its powerful .45 caliber round, was a hard-hitting beast with stiff recoil. Contrast against the MP-40, that's easier to control but requires more hits to keep an enemy down.

The bolt-action rifles all felt different, with the swift and smooth action of the Lee-Enfield contrasting against the more robust designs like the Mauser 98 or the Mosin-Nagant.

The semi-auto rifles, well, the M1 Garand used an 8-round "en bloc" clip and generally could only be reloaded when fully empty. The Gewehr 43 used a ten round external box that could be freely reloaded whenever.

And these are just the well-known guns.

Contrasting WWII against modern military games, well, can YOU tell me what functional differences all these 5.56mm rifles have? The M4A1, the SIG 550 series and the H&K G36 all just feel so similar that it gets hard to tell them apart by anything more than what they look like. They're effectively completely interchangeable, with only real gun nerds able to tell them apart.

And while I haven't played Battlefield 1 yet, I just feel like that game's going to have far more weapons diversity than your average "War on Terror"-era game. Maybe I ought to give it a shot...

Are there any "near-future" games that don't fall into having every gun just feel like yet another black composite carbine? I can't really see any, but maybe that's just because the later Call of Duty: Black Ops games hog up all the spotlight in that category.

 

[sneakypenguin]

Eh. I've not played much beyond CoD in the MM shooter types but its got vastly different handling of its guns from TTK and spread to handling but that helps cause its an arcade shooter and can get away with it.

Problem with videogaming and modern weapons is that at this point all guns are the same which is to say good. Any difference now is stuff that doesn't translate to videogaming. Triggers, mag releases, charging handles,mounts, grips, weight all those little things that make a gun vastly different in real life can't translate to videogames, so theres no real way to differentiate except that larger caliber guns have a bigger boom.

 

[American Tanker]

I've gotten tired of shooters largely because of issues like this. When I get more tactical diversity out of the guns in even the original Uncharted, that really says something.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

with only real gun nerds able to tell them apart.

That is pretty much true, there are actual handling and usage differences for a lot of these modern guns though you need to dive in to the stats and the feel in the real world to see them. Much of the distinguishing factor is lost because games have to be short range due to balance for the maps and levels you play in. And for most of these guns the differing factor is in performance over range, reliability, and comfort, the last of which is never implemented in games.

Developers need to try and scale down these differences and treat these guns realistically rather than go for what movies tell them to, because that is still the major influence in a gun's perception. The fact that the casual observer cannot tell the difference is why in some arbitrary gun power exists http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ArbitraryGunPower .

Its actually hilarious to see the different approaches some games take. In one game you can have an M4 be more powerful than an AK because old soviet crap vs new hotness, or others may actually take the approach of M4 is weak because common standard issue, while
I recommend trying out games like Insurgency or Rainbow Six Siege. Spend enough time with them and you will feel the subtle differences in each type of modern gun. Unless you chase simulators or simcades it will seem like same old same old with modern rifles. Which is a shame since when a game does introduce some subtleties that you can feel and use to pick your favorite weapon it is beautiful.

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

That's been one of my issues with modern-setting shooters for a longass time. There's only a very small handful of games that I've played where the nuances and handling are both realistic, yet noticably different (although even then it still gets pretty same-y).

My favorite shooters though tend to have sci-fi elements of some sort(Planetside 2), like you, are set in a particular time period where gun design wasn't quite so streamlined (Red Orchestra 2), or have a unique gameplay setup that in of itself is what I love about it (Stalker).

(Minor note, but in real world terms it's kind of amusing to note that for the most part, gun design has plateaued a bit in terms of design innovation. Until there's some sort of ridiculously huge advance or change in the technology involved, there's not really all that much to improve on.)

 

[Neverhoodian]

Agreed. It's part of the reason why I'm not all that interested in games that feature modern guns, and when I do play them I mod the weapons out for more interesting replacements if possible.

Take L4D2, for instance. I usually swap out its generic assault rifles, auto-shotties and deagles for more vintage stuff, such as SMGs, coach guns and revolvers (with the appropriate scripts to approximate their real world performance). I don't mind playing with bots if it means I get to blow zombies' heads off with a Browning M1900 [https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=716421706] instead of a generic modern gun you see in a million other games.

The problem is that arms manufacturers have figured out what tends to work best for gun design, hence the reason why so many firearms in modern military shooters are essentially knock-offs of the AK or M16.

If you ask me, we need more alternate history shooters like Wolfenstein: The New Order. That way devs can go wild with gun designs without being hamstrung by real-world sensibilities.

 

[American Tanker]

If you ask me, we need more alternate history shooters like Wolfenstein: The New Order. That way devs can go wild with gun designs without being hamstrung by real-world sensibilities.

Yeah; or if they go sci-fi like Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, they need to throw out anything that looks like a regular modern firearm and really go all out on creating truly unique futuristic weapon designs.

Not more black composite carbines like Titanfall and the later Black Ops games.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The last Medal of Honor (Warfighter) while having a shit campaign had a really really good MP. I don't know how accurate the guns were to realism as I don't know much about real guns at all; however, every gun did feel pretty different. The game had a higher TTK (5-6 bullets for a kill) than most MMSs so recoil mattered a lot more than the standard MMS. There were definite pros and cons to going with lower/higher recoil guns; you're TTK was noticeably lower with a high recoil gun, which allowed me to feel more rewarded for my aim and shooting ability to control the recoil. Most players just really hold down the trigger until dead (which is what you do in most shooters) whereas I know how to properly burst fire.

 

[SmugFrog]

Any difference now is stuff that doesn't translate to videogaming. Triggers, mag releases, charging handles,mounts, grips, weight all those little things that make a gun vastly different in real life can't translate to videogames

Well said. I like when a game will let me use the weapons I feel most comfortable with, because of look or knowing how that weapon feels without having arbitrary penalties for the sake of balance. I remember the M60 for Battlefield Vietnam and what a wonderful weapon that thing was. Having carried one myself and being familiar with it's operation, I loved it - unfortunately DICE nerfed the hell out of it because of complaints, giving it a wild spray pattern and making it almost useless. I believe a lot of the decision making based on firearm operation is due to gameplay balance. I think in some of my favorite games the differences are subtle enough and balanced that you can pick a weapon you like the look of and still be successful with it.

ALSO, one of my pet peeves is when you're playing a military or spec ops character and they take their sweet time reloading the weapon. As casual as they're on the firing range and they have all the time they need. How interesting would it be to have that for an inexperienced character (or the risk of dropping a magazine) as they learn how to use the weapon? Kind of adding a RPG element, but something that hasn't been done before.

 

[Squilookle]

I remember hearing once somewhere that the assault rifle, in someone's opinion, invalidated all the other guns in a modern shooter. Having never been a big user of shotguns myself, I find myself agreeing. At least with WW2 the SMGs trade power for fire rate, with the more powerful rifles on the other end of the spectrum. Maybe that's why I was so disappointed in BF1 for bringing the same old bullet spam we were already used to. A bigger focus on slower rifles could have been revolutionary for the Battlefield formula.

 

[Prime_Hunter_H01]

I remember hearing once somewhere that the assault rifle, in someone's opinion, invalidated all the other guns in a modern shooter.

It's basically true for military doctrine. When they were looking for a new weapon in the 50's and 60's the AR-15 later M-16 was to take on all roles using an intermediate cartridge, give every soldier controllable rapid fire with more power than a pistol bullet. Previous to this was the M-14 which showed why making the classic WWII rifles fully automatic was a not the best idea, straight stock and full auto with 7.62NATO was reported to be uncomfortable and I can see why.

Edit: In most cases I should say, there are still specialist roles that use other weapons.

 

[josemlopes]

For some fucking reason WW2 seems like the perfect match for video games, every weapon (if we dont go that deep with the lesser known ones) can have a very different purpose while being both visually and mechanically different between nations (and even within them).

Its also very easy to balance for gameplay.

In the end you can still have that with modern weapons if your selection is more limited. For example Counter Strike and COD4 do a very good job of making each weapon unique through recoil, fire rate, damage, etc...

The problem I think is that when you have too many weapons and the ones picked are very similar (do we really need 4 variants of AKs and 6 m4s?) then you end up with most of them playing out the same way.

BF3 and 4 had a lot of weapons but they all felt the same, I think that the weapons have to be picked to fullfill a role instead of just raising the weapon count.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

BF4 has like 100+ guns and people praise them for it, but that just leads to god guns, obviously shit guns, and clones of guns.

But at the same time, I guess it's cool that there's an aesthetic choice in what kind of gun you want to use.

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

On top of everything that has been stated, you should think about what a modern weapon has to do. You'll find that the criteria any military has is pretty similar to one another. It has to be within a certain weight range, fire around a certain rate, be accurate at a certain distance during sustained fire, use one of less than 10 approved cartridges, use certain common features such as grips, rails and controls, the list goes on. A worldwide market for materials tends to bring about standardization and you will experience this as you use a wider variety of weapons. Hell, Germany is replacing the G36 series with the HK417 series, basically an M4 with the internals of the G36 and both designs date back to the 1950s/1960s. After a certain point, you can tell what the designers used for reference when making their weapon.

Another brought it up, but gun design has hit a plateau. We have the best systems we can get out of a centre-fire cartridge and any new weapon is making the choice between existing designs. Most modern guns can be traced directly to the 1940s to 1960s. Most pistols are variations on designs from the 1900s, most notably the 1911 (adopted in 1911).

So from that, what kind of variation can you expect? This is why many weapons that are barely used or were failed attempts to replace current weapons keep popping up, such as in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter or the like. I remember when the ACR was supposed to be the next rifle of the US military, but that kind of just slipped quietly into the night. Before that it was the SCAR series.

This is why it's a bad idea to have so many weapons in your game such as COD or BF. It reveals this problem; most guns deliberately feel quite similar. It's typically when you switch out one weapon category for another that you feel the difference. That and you can accidentally create god guns by having so many weapons and variables (looking at you, UMP45 from MW2).

Its actually hilarious to see the different approaches some games take. In one game you can have an M4 be more powerful than an AK because old soviet crap vs new hotness, or others may actually take the approach of M4 is weak because common standard issue, while...

Yeah. Far Cry 3 and 4 do this. The AK is the starting weapon. It's slow, weak and inaccurate when firing automatically. It has strangely good iron sights, though. Amongst the best in the game. It's quickly outclassed by the next rifle you unlock, a SG556. Then the M4 fires faster, hits harder and is easier to control. No reason whatsoever to glance at the AK when you get the M4. Then it kinda goes full circle with the Galil ACE (Israeli AK by way of Finland) which is slower, harder to control but is very accurate and can down enemies real fast at a distance.

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

BF4 has like 100+ guns and people praise them for it, but that just leads to god guns, obviously shit guns, and clones of guns.

But at the same time, I guess it's cool that there's an aesthetic choice in what kind of gun you want to use.

I can agree with this. I just like the way the G36C looks. It's the SPAS-12 of rifles for me. It was my most used weapon in the Rainbow Six series, SOCOM Combined Assault and BF3 even though there were much better options in all three.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

"Modern Call of Warfare" style games have corporate sponsorship deals with modern arms manufacturers. So the games only has the weapons that the sponsors want in the games. Hence the lack of diversity.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Double posted.