16 years of gaming says I will gladly talk shop about video game shotguns.
The question to ask with a good video game shotgun is: "Can I dance with this gun?" Those shotguns that show they're heft with lengthy recoils and pumping or reloading animations are inelegant and overcompensating devices. It is a fact that at proper range the shotgun will kill in one shot, to not do so means the game designers did not have the courage to meet the challenge of how the shotgun will operate in their game yet at the same time to overemphasize the power of the shotgun by giving it a slow graceless nature makes it clumsy and frustrating. The best shotguns will allows movement with a magnificent flow of steps between targets: ironsights or no; shoot, move/pump, repeat till reload. The flow of these actions should only be disrupted by the player being conquered by the constructs of the game meant to stop them, never by the functions of the shotgun. The system of the weapon should be easily understood and seen as a challenge not a limitation. From perhaps even the first blasting of an enemy the player should understand the range of the shotgun's one shot killzone. Soon after they should understand the time it takes to pump the actions and the reload time from empty to full. These should all feel naturally complementary to the flow of gameplay so the shotgun does not feel like a hindrance.
Now I have a special place in my heart for the Half-Life 2 shotgun, which I am ashamed that no ones brought up. It is the most marvelous example of how I've described video game shotguns above and is further complimented by game design that encourages the player to have the shotgun as they're mainstay. That said I am completely willing to disregard it because after a stint of obsession I realized how overrated HL2 is. So lets say the first shotgun in Battlefield 3. That gun rocks. The Bioshock 1 shotgun is probably worse than I think it is but darn was that a game where you needed it.
The Wolfenstein: The New Order shotgun though, that's a bad shotgun. It's boxy design gives it a machine like nature so different from the tubular designs of the greats of shotguns that its appearance seems ill fitting. It is appropriately semi-automatic and entirely disrupture of the flow of the shotgun because of it. Furthermore its power level is not conducive to good work as only the lowliest of enemies will take its shot and fall in one hit. Lastly its reload it annoyingly long and cumbersome.
Outside of player wielded shotguns, I love the shotgun wielding mercenaries of Infamous 2. Fighting all the crazies with superpowers and then this inconsequential looking mercenary slides up at great speed on a trail of ice and blasts Cole McGrath's face full of buckshot and knocks him to the ground. By the time your fighting those guys the blow only takes an only slightly more than minimal bit of health, when your health is low you'll curse one of those jerks offing you. But when you can take its blow you'll find yourself saying "dang, that was appropriately punchy. That single attack did wonders to disrupt the spree of lightning violence I was on there. Well done guy with a shotgun. I must kill you now though."
And I have somehow just first drafted my thesis on video game shotguns and would gladly further this conversation. Someone ask me about video game dual-barrel shotguns.
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