shooting 44 caliber rifles at my local gun-club with my dad once or twice a year just before I moved away to college.
I suspect you mean 22 caliber rifles
1) How do you see the game design industry depictions/uses of firearms in games?
Strongly innacurate
2) How visually accuracy are firearms used in games? (Please do not refer to sci-fi guns as they are doubtfully intended to resemble a realistic firearm.)
most models are quite correct as far as the details, sometimes being a mirror image of reality, when the model is static. However, often the model is incorrect as far as how the gun acts. I have seen the forward assist on an AR-15 (M-16) treated as some sort of full-auto/semi-auto switch, and similar issues
3) What would you say the most glaring problem in regards to firearms are in games?
A. Failure to understand that it is the cartridge, not the firearm itself, that determines the power. Possibly a short barrel would make a minor amount of difference. In general I am refering to different types of 9mm handguns, or different types of 9mm SMGs or different types of 5.56 assualt rifles doing different amounts of damage simply because one is newer. My example may be a bit outdated, but look at FarCry, the M4 carbine you start out with is much less powerful than the G36 you get later, even though they are both firing the same exact ammo. The M4s shorter barrel will impact that a tiny amount, but not really. The OICW has an even shorter barrel than the M4, which would be even less efficient at harnessing all the power generated by the gunpowder being burned, and yet that is even more powerful still
B. Failure to understand the huge difference between a handgun and a rifle. A famous saying is that the only purpose of a handgun is to fight your way back to the rifle you should have never set down in the first place. Even a 'powerful' handgun like the desert eagle is quite short-ranged compared to even a 'weak' and 'short ranged' rifle like the M4
handguns suck. If anything, they should be treated like the knife in most shooter games, a last ditch weapon, heck give it magically unending reloads if you must (a knife will eventually dull and break too...eventually) Most assault rifles in games use 5.56NATO which has about 1250 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, the AK family uses 7.62x39, which has about 1500 foot-pounds at the muzzle, but looses it's energy faster. In comparison, a 9mm cartridge like coming out of a M-9 handgun or a MP5 SMG, has about 350 foot-pounds of energy, a 45acp like used in an Mac-10, Thompson SMG or 1911 style "colt 45" has 500 foot-pounds of energy
B2. Knock off this silly 'guns akimbo' nonsense. Unless you have genetically engineered your eyeballs to work like a Chameleon so they can track indepentant of eachother, you cannot aim and fire two guns at once. IF you don't aim, you don't hit.
C. Failure to understand the big difference in power between assualt rifles, which are defined as using 'intermediate powered cartridges' (read, pretty weak) compared to a 'true rifle' using full powered rifle rounds. It seems like games always have some modern 5.56 weapon as the pinnacle of standard arms (obviously not counting the laser gun or the rocket launcher) when in actuality, the 1950's era 'battle rifles' like the FN-FAL, M-14, AR-10, G-3 are all basically just like their smaller 'assualt rifle' brethern, except they have for the most part 20 round magazines and TWICE THE POWER PER SHOT. Most assault rifles in games use 5.56NATO which has about 1250 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle, the AK family uses 7.62x39, which has about 1500 foot-pounds at the muzzle, but looses it's energy faster. The battle rifles listed above use 7.62x51mm aka 7.62NATO, and that has 2600 foot-pounds of energy at the muzzle. It can blow through a brick wall no problem, blast through a car door, smash through a bullet-proof vest, punch thorugh a small tree.
In most places, the 5.56NATO and 7.62x39 are considered 'not powerful enough to hunt deer with'
See this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vgr3kTU68uw&feature=related
D. Power of shotguns. You can pepper a guy all day 10 paces away with a shotgun and it does almost anything. Using birdshot at a big distance, yes, it won't to a ton of damage, re, dick cheney's hunting buddy catching a load in the face at about 100 yards (which is a LONG distance in video games)
But in 'combat' or 'home defense' people are going to be using 'buckshot' which is lethal for a very very long range. Aside from that, people use slugs, to turn the shotgun into a defacto rifle. When Timothy Treadwell got eaten by those grizzly bears, and the bush pilot who when to check on him saw the bears eating his corpse, he grabbed his 12 guage shotgun loaded with slugs, as did the game wardens who came with him. A grizzly weighs in the neighborhood of 1000 pounds. Remember the piddly little 9mm at 350 ft-lbs, and the 45 at 450 ft-lbs, and the 5.56 at 1250ft-lbs, and the mightly battle rifles with 2600 ft-lbs, 12 gauge slugs like the Remington Buckhammer and the Brenneke Black Magic have 3200 ft-lbs of energy.
They are so powerful they also make 'managed recoil' which are lower powered, 2000 or so ft-lb energy versions.
Most police departments use 'managed recoil' and 'low power' rounds often with the name 'tactical' because a 12 guage firing slugs or buckshot kicks like a mule and even at the low power rounds is INCREDIBLY POWERFUL.
If you want a 'close range' scatter gun, fine, put in a 20 gauge. 20 guage shells are universally yellow, and then you can be having a lower powered (1500 ft-lbs for slugs) 'birdshot' gun to match the developers desire for a gun that is really powerful if you are in spitting distance of your target, but not very powerful if the guy is a room and a half away.
But a combat 12 guage loaded with full power slugs, that should be performing the way the plasma cannon is performing.
See, there is no need for all these tons of fancy space-guns, when real guns, properly depicted, are going to be head-and-shoulders above the run-of-the-mill M-16 or AK-47
4) What would you like to see implemented in the future of games in regards to firearms and the culture surrounding them?
This was covered somewhat above.
I'd further like to see a wider variety of guns. For starters, if you need a common 'rifle' at the early levels of a game, the old M-1 carbine is second only to the AK-47 in terms of how many were produced and out in the world. It isn't a super powerful weapon, having only about 900 ft-lbs of energy at the muzzle, so it woudl be a good thing to find right after you grab that 9mm handgun from a guard
or, what about 'pistol caliber carbines'
http://www.cx4storm.com/ like that beretta storm carbine. Now you have something that is about the same power as a handgun, but capable of much longer shots. If you want something just a little bit better than the staring handgun, rather than instantly going to a 5.56 rifle like the M-16, stick em with that, then finding an M-16 a few levels later is going to be powerful.
or bring in the good old 30-30, or an SKS, etc etc.
Weapon Progression, I never liked the general gun progression in most games.
let's say you have 3 catagories, Power, Magazine Capacity, Rate-of-Fire, and each one is on a 10 point scale.
Your beginning pistol is going to be a 3-3-3. Normally, the next gun you find is some sort of 'bullet hose' where a 3 round burst does slightly more damage than the handgun (even though each single shot is about the same power) which would probably be described as a 4-4-4, after that you upgrade to an M-4 or somethign, which is depicted as a 5-5-4 and maybe later you get something more modern so it is depicted as more powerful with maybe a 40 round magazine, so then you are 6-6-4 and then you get a belt fed gun wich is 7-10-4 etc
I'd like to see getting guns that suck in some catagories (rate of fire, magazine capacity) but are great in others. Like a Mosin-nagant bolt action rifle (the gun the russians get in World War 2 games) a 5 shot powerful rifle that is very common, but it has a very low rate of fire.
So you start out with your 3-3-3 handgun, and then you find a 8-1-1 Mosin-Nagant and then you find an MP5 which is 4-4-4
So which is better? 4-4-4 or 8-1-1? Each one becomes situationally useful, so you desire to have them both. Later on, you get an M-16, a 5-5-4 but you still probably want to carry that Mosin for it's raw power even though it is slow and has a low magazine capacity, so now you have a hard choice to make.
I have heard boardgamed defined as the more 'interesting choices per minute' the better. Give people choices, make them hem and haw about which guns to keep and which guns to leave behind. Right now it is obvious, whichever new gun you stumble upon, ditch your old one for it, it must be better.
Don't force us to run room to room willy nilly spray and pray
All during Half-Life I was pissed that I got stuck with a pistol or a SMG, or a shotgun (or later on some sort of futuristic beam weapon) Some good old 1899 world war 1 and world war 2 rifles, which are still avialble by the crateload for roughly $75 right here in the USA would have been much better weapons for what was doing. I basically used my revolver as a sniper rifle, laugh! Why are games designed to have you run in and just wave a bullet-hose around. I much prefer being a bit tactical, taking headshots, retreating, etc. Thing is, most games don't have to change at all to do that, you just need to give them slightly different weapons. Why Gordon could find so many SPAS-12 shotguns, but no one from the resistance had access to some good old surplus rifles, or even some old deer hunting rifles, I just don't understand.
Okay, a little 'energy chart' summary at the end, so it isn't all mixed together
22LR (like you and your dad shot) = 100 ft-lbs
9mm = 350 ft-lbs
45acp = 500 ft-lbs
44 magnum = 950 ft-lbs
5.56NATO (M-16) = 1250 ft-lbs
7.62x39 (AK-47) = 1500 ft-lbs
20 guage =1200 ft-lbs (for 'short range birdshot shotgun effect if needed in gameplay, energy of slugs just for comparison)
7.62x51 NATO (battle rifles, hunting rifles) 2600 ft-lbs
12 guage 'low recoil' slugs =1500-1800 ft-lbs
12 guage 'standard' slugs = 2400 ft-lbs
12 guage 3 inch slugs = 3200 ft-lbs
I almost forgot. Counter Strike was one of the first ones that I took one look at and was like "Wow, that gun really looks and acts like the real thing". You could still play it over dial-up back then. Honestly, after examining some firearms that were in CS throughout the next decade, I have purchased a Sig P228, Sig 556, Bushmaster M-4, Remington 700 (don't remember if that was in CS) Remington 870. However, those are just fine guns that happened to be in the game. I don't have that kind of money to blow on a crappy gun just because it's in a game