Shotguns in games are always either useless or overpowered

>shotguns in games are always either useless or overpowered

why is this?

To not make them unfair, or to make them like a real shotgun

Because devs cannot into damage falloff. A shotgun should be primarily a close combat weapon for the sake of balance, but it shouldn't be incapable of dealing damage at range. Ironically, TF2, an arcadey shooter gets this right.

>escape from butcher bay's shotgun is a huge letdown

Man. I was hoping for a nice shotgun.

What are games with bad shotguns? I guess I've managed to avoid them.

The Shadow Warrior remake's shotgun is trash. REALLY underwhelming.

TF2 has a balanced shotgun.

DOOM 3
Quake

Timesplitters 2 shotguns were all hilariously terrible.

The one in Half-Life 2 is pretty bad. The damage is not too shabby but it feels so shitty and artificial

Because games may or may not have headshots, and the shotgun can have any amount of bullet spread.

Instakill headshots plus moderate spread is probably the most powerful a shotgun can be, since you're very likely to get a headshot if you click near a person's head. Any narrower and you make it harder to get headshots at typical combat range (though it's better at long range).
Any wider and it becomes unreliable.

In a game without headshots, then you want your shotgun to have a narrow cone, and games will often either give shotguns realistic cones (making them massively damaging if shot accurately), or wide-scatter cones with very weak pellets (making them useless).

TF2's shotgun is well-balanced because it's got a moderate scatter with moderately powerful pellets.
It's got an effective range that is appropriate to the typical combat range.

Halo/gears of war shotguns are good within a 2 foot range

For the most part Halo did a great job balancing the shotgun. It's meant to be 100% deadly when you're close and make an accurate shot, and it's a decent shield buster at medium range, and becomes pretty useless beyond that. I've always liked how it felt in the Halo series.

Game devs don't own guns, so they have no idea that buckshot had plenty of killing power down range.

>BFBC2
>Sniping wookies with my slug shotty

Feels good man

I miss that game sometimes, but then I remember all the bullshit hitboxes it had.

What online games don't have bullshit hitboxes?

simple. give characters helmet.

STALKER

>only useful for hunting mutants
>pulling it out against other humans gets you killed in 95% of situations

>not clearing out the military base in Cordon with your trusty double barrel for an early Abakan and loads of 5.45x39

cyкa

I wouldn't call that piece of shit "trusty".

I disagree. the shotgun is complete dogshit in Halo 2, Reach and 4, unless you're playing on Normal.

блядь

this desu.

>Quake
U wot m8, shotgun+DBS carried me through the whole game on Nightmare

>game devs dont know that a shotgun is as acurate as a rifle long range

Shotguns in Payday 2 are nice.
Load up the Over/Under with Slugs and take out sniper's cross map

>Doom 3
Are you kidding, it was fucking perfect, it felt powerful, reloading felt great, sound was great.

balance

I must be the only person here that played medal of honour warfighter. Shotguns in that game were godly. I remember killing people at 70 yards with a few pumps.

>Slugs
>Not flechette
Slugs are great for dozers and shields tho

Original Half-Life. FEAR 2.

That's the only gun I really liked in HL2.

They're good in Killing Floor, but in both games they're a bit weird compared to the other guns in that their projectiles have a slower travel speed. This probably also makes it easier for smaller zeds to react and dodge them in the second game.

They let shotguns be good again after raping the moscani for that exact reason in early patches? Do you need to be a good goy and buy dlc?

Counter strike

The issue is that, to begin with, the range of engagements in games is really short.

In real life, assault rifles are used out to hunderds of meters, and the typical FPS map there aren't even sightlines that far across. So to begin with, ranges need to be abstracted to be smaller then they would be in real life. So that really only allows shotguns to be useful out to a few feet, or else the drawbacks they would have in real life can't be applied.

CE's shotgun is good. 2 and 3's is bad. Reach's, 4's, and 5's are increasingly okay.

MAG-7 is pretty sweet.

realtalk OP, it's because irl shotguns are very much overpowered. So lots of games either do the whole "marshmallow pellets at 10+ feet" thing to either nerf/compensate, or they try to be very realistic and have them fucking destroy people's torsos.

sorry cant hear you over the sound of my BALANCED SHOTGUN

>zed time
>fire my sg500 at a crawler that's like... 8m away
>the pellets slooooowlyyyyy fly towards the crawler
>crawler just lmao sidestep dodges it: 0 dmg

>Aim a Deagle at the head of a Gorefiend in attacking range and
>The bullet penetration also kills the Clot behind it on the other side of the area
>Stalker right behind the Gorefiend is unscathed

>irl shotguns are very much overpowered
Actually they're kind of underpowered, which is why military generally doesn't use them.

Because most fps games have tiny maps where shotguns would naturally dominate.

That's because they memed it up to be OP compared to its IRL version, which is trash.
They then take the galil, a great URL gun, and make it a piece of shit in the game

People love to bitch for the lack of their situation awareness. Games like bf4 and ps2 people have ample time to set themselves up to have as much open cover between them and a flanker can get to them or just not choose room to room clearing.

But nope people get ass lasted when their mlg play gets ruined by a guy who has a dedicated weapon one shots them or is able to do a chunk of their hp at 30m+. Good bye darts you were so good.

Actual shotgun have stopping power over 30m
Very few maps in FPS allow more range than that so if the dev dont do anything you're at optimal range to One hit kill all the time

>which is trash
If you're talking about that one Ian video, he's using shells that are like 1.5 times smaller than the proper ones, hence the constant misfeeds.

It's a weird gun for sure. What's up with Africa and weird shotguns, anyway?

That's because you have bad aim
The shot probably went over the shortstack stalker's head

>Ian
I don't know who your big black African lover is and I frankly don't care

On uneven terrain like the paths to the beach at Zed Landing it could probably hit. But Stalkers in general are very skittish fucks

SW2 shotguns are incredible though

They might have changed them but shotguns in payday 2 used to deal full damage as long as one pellet hit a dude and they did literally no damage past 15 meters or something

That's literally what OP described

>starting pistol is the best all-around weapon in the game

Make it 50m. With buckshot. Over a few hundreds meter with slugs

I know, I'm just being cheeky because most shotgun shells in video games evaporate after 6m

>to make them like a real shotgun
>stopping power
I see armchair experts are in the thread

Shotguns in games are either a one shot kill or not a one shot kill.

That is why.

Remind me how is stopping power used incorrectly here ?

yes well no shit sherlock of course you would fire one shot at first, and then fire another one shot, and another one shot until whatever it is youre killing is dead

Every halo shotgun except the very first.

i would argue any cod game because their idea with shotguns is that the pellets actually disappear beyond point blank range.

The post of truth.
>decent at medium range, but still outclassed by primaries
>close range isn't a instant kill for all classes, but it's fire rate is perfect
>fun as hell to switch up in combat while using Pyro or soldier

Reminder that pancor jackhammer is a meme gun

You're a retard. The damage drop off is clearly for balance issues.

Shotguns are a meme weapon.

It's meme, but it appears it was used seriously.

...

The only true, non-meme weapons are halberds, spears, war hammers and grenade launchers.

Pleb. SHotguns are considered a power-weapon from h2 onwards

>Model 10
>Not the M97 Trench gun

BF1
CS 1.6

>polearms
>not ultimate meme
>muh reaching advantage

it's simple.

Either a shotgun oneshots at point blank or it doesnt.

If it does, you scream about muh OP bullshit blizzard pls nerf

If it doesn't, it takes too long to fire a second shot and you lose every fight.

2bh, shotguns are pretty balanced in BF1

Borderlands

I used it on purpose because it's a broad term and I didnt want to have a full autism discussion about shotgun in video games and if they're OHK irl too

So in KF2, I've been running the trenchgun over the sg500 when I'm a SS. It's stats are better besides the tiny drop in ammo and the burning is nice.
Is it really just a straight upgrade like the medic rifle to the ak12?

Boredomlands had some amazing shotguns, both 1 and 2.
>play Roland
>get a class mod that decreases shotgun spread by like 60% and increases rate of fire by the same amount
>completely shit on Atlas arena with a corrosive Maliwan unique shotgun

2 had Torgue three-four barreled ones which shot dozens of exploding projectiles.

On Halo CE this was true but on H2 forward the shotgun does practically nothing past melee range.

>can fight in line
>can pull a knight off his horse
>can stab
>can chop
>can satisfy a woman better than you ever could
>all from a safe distance

Because a real shotgun is explicitly lethal out to a given range if tooled correctly

Seeing military use, you can assume it is tooled correctly.
This in a game is OP a hell.

And trying to balance shotguns is a fucking nightmare.

>military use
>shotgun
So it's loaded with breaching rounds? That's not very lethal.

>Because a real
Red flag for a shitty post

Americans used buckshot in both world wars

>you now realize WW2 was almost 80 years ago
damn...

>2months ago marked 100 years since the end of the battle of Verdun

There's an Abakan? I only ever got 74s out of it.

>1HKO at close range
>peanuts at a distance
I suppose it's due to how easy or hard it is to get close to someone in that particular game.

Let it Die, range is about 3 feet and the first shot you take after reloading usually doesn't register damage.

It is not exactly a meme, but it is really hard to measure. How much damage you need to make some people go in shock and stop being a threat? Some people on hard drugs can keep being insane even after being shot a few times.

A larger caliber does help to ensure enough damage to muscles and nerves.

And about "a real shotgun", i guess real weapons have a much longer effective rwnge than nearly all games portray them. Shotguns are super efficient past 10 meters in real life. Military rifles are efficient up to 400+ meters. Most games dont even have this draw distance.

No fuck you it was a melee weapon the splash was so bad. It couldn't even kill flying skull guys because of the enormous spread and how small a target they are.

Exactly, which means you had to gear near the enemy, but that was what made it satisfying.
It felt REALLY powerful.

Yeah, games usually just feature exaggerated ballistics because the scale is smaller, same with bullet drop and bullet speed in game that feature them.

I'm one of the few people who will defend D3 shotgun's efficiency (it's a potent melee weapon), but even I didn't think it felt particulary good.

Because it's what people come to expect. Seriously, in the interview in R6Vegas the designer even stated that if they wanted to make shotguns real there would be no reason to use other weapon because of the range you were fighting at. In general video games love close-range fights so the shotguns have to be 'scaled-back' as to keep their niche use. In real-life shotguns have a pretty decent effective range, but there is a reason they don't see that much military use - they don't penetrate body armor too well even if you load in slugs. Sure their stopping power might be better but that's why police/counter-terrorist units equip them more frequently. I should also note that another advantage of the shotgun - the ability to load specialized ammo types doesn't crop up that frequently in video games.

The blast sounded fine the pump was weird. But nah that thing was ass, might as well just been a fucking melee execution button instead.

In a low time-to-kill game, like in real life, pump-action shot guns aren't useful in most cases.

Shotguns are good for CQC and breaching. In a CQC situation, whats the point of a shotgun if you can just pump 2-4 rounds of a high-RPM SMG into your targets chest while still being able to effectively damage a target at a further range? And most games don't allow you to breach a room, negating any pros of a shotgun.

Shotguns are also anti-fun in low-TTK games. If you're casually playing a game of BF or COD and your run through a corner and instantly get gibbed by a camper with an AA-12, you are unlikely to feel thrilled about it.

Its like revolvers in games. Sure, they're slightly cheaper and more reliable and slightly easier to maintain than semi-autos in reality, but all that anti-fun shit is abstracted and therefore has no advantage over semi-autos in video games.

Mothafucker why are you posting that image, at 100 years I doubt you've ever even met a Verdun vet.

The sawn off sure. But using slugs with the full length one? god tier. You can make it by just fine with that fucker until you can buy the actual sniper rifles.

>he doesn't know about the allied time extension experiments

Use mods, then you can kill people from 70m away with buckshot.