I mean if the enemies' guns in video games were realistic then the games would be a lot less fun too. Every game would be like Escape From Tarkov and you'd just be constantly dying instantly for no clear reason as some dot in the distance shoots you.
Oh yeah, there's a reason certain guns are nerfed for gameplay, and I don't think it should change. It just gives people this impression that shotguns aren't effective from more than like 30 feet away, so they're surprised to find out they can actually be effective from over a football field away, depending on the gun and type of ammunition used.
The problem is that while other weapons have plenty of use cases in real life.. their use cases are in terrain that would be boring to have in a video game. Like, in a wide open field you wouldn't really want to bring a shotgun, but players would not find a wide open field that you had to spend hours to walk across before finding the enemy very interesting.. video games always try to have "interesting" terrain or are fighting in urban settings where there are constant line of sight blockers everywhere, but there's plenty of boring terrain in the real world.
Yeah, like I'm Canadian and don't have all that much experience with guns-- but I've shot skeet a few times, and that was with a shotgun that seemed pretty damn accurate hitting a tiny clay disk far as hell away from me.
That's because ranges in video games outside of something like ARMA or Squad are artificially squashed because fast movement and actually seeing your enemy just works better for 90% of FPS titles. Like yeah, a shotgun can wreck someone at 50 yards, but when an open field engagement happens at about five times that range it begins to be a bit of a liability. Shit, a lot of games don't even render character models that far out.
It's one of the bigger misconceptions of modern combat from everything I've read from soldier testimonials - that scenario of marines aggressively pushing through and clearing a building is generally something that's avoided at all costs, especially when the option of "pull back to the vehicles and hurl six dozen Mk. 19 rounds at where we think the bad guys are" is available.
And then America made even better shotguns that bypassed the whole ‘this gun will hurt you but it’s inhumane because it will take fucking forever to die’ and somehow this warcrimes violation was okay’d because it just killed people super dead.
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u/D1gininja Sep 16 '26
Yeah shotguns just do that