How many Guns do you want in a game?

[Brian Boru]

I'm playing Ghost Recon Wildlands at the moment and decided to check out the weapons available. According to a Fandom page, here they are:

No way I'm going to go thru all those to ID some favs—must be over 100

Do you like this breadth of choice?

 

[Zimbaly]

Hell yeah. Would be even better if it was like the old days and you could carry em all.

How is that game by the way?

 

[Colif]

Hell yeah. Would be even better if it was like the old days and you could carry em all.

only if you could hot key favourites as scrolling through all of those to get to one gun would be annoying.

I expect Borderlands probably has more guns.

 

[Brian Boru]

Hell yeah

Weirdo!

You'll probably be delighted to hear then that many [all?] of the guns have major customization—select stock, barrel, muzzle etc. Total overkill—so to speak—for me, but should appeal to weirdos

How is that game

Ghost Recon Wildlands is squad-based and TPP by default. You can change to Lone Wolf in the menus, which I'm doing, and there's a mod for FPP, which I'm also using.

The map is huge and very attractive rugged mountainous terrain—you uncover plenty of fast travel points while wandering, so it's ok to get around. I'm ~7 hours in and it's CTD'ed twice, but nothing significant lost—also got stuck in the environment a couple of times which needed a reload.

I'm not a vehicle fan, but apparently there are over 60 in game, incl planes, choppers, boats. Once I went off road and down a steep hill, and was still good as new when it stopped. Traversal is very forgiving for driving and running up steep hills, much more than I'm used to from Far Cry.

There are 3 main factions. Rebels are on your side, Narcos are your 'standard' enemy, and then the Unidad are a sort of militarized corrupt police force who seem to be in league with the Narcos. Narcos are fine to engage.

Unidad are not—they destroyed me quickly in 3 separate encounters, at which stage I went and did a bit of research… the general advice is to avoid them. I'm not mad about that, as I enjoy wandering the landscape and getting into random skirmishes—which is what led me to check out the available arsenal.

With so many guns, I have no idea if I should exchange what I have for what an enemy drops. I've seen it said that the UI gun info is meaningless, which is just great if true I haven't been able to find a basic spreadsheet with the basic info I want—eg DarkDally's is way too advanced for me, clearly aimed at hardcore players.

Gotta run

 

[technomadic_rony]

Never played GR: Wildlands, but holy smokes that's a lot of guns. In a typical Ubisoft fashion, I'm guessing it's quantity over quality like they do with side missions in their "open world" games.

To answer the question here, I'd say in an ideal video game, weapons should have some kind of uniqueness to them like they have in Team Fortress 2. Almost all the weapons can be used to create different subclass within the game, meaning, the game only has 9 heroes but you can create 4x that by choosing to play with different weapons in the game because almost all the weapons have different stats that grants them the ability to create different playstyle.

 

[Pifanjr]

Options are a Good Thing!

Did you change your mind?


Personally, I don't really care how many guns are in the game. I don't play that many shooters, so I don't have strong preferences about what (type of) guns are included, as long as the shooting is satisfying. If there's a ton of guns, chances are I'll just stick with the first thing I find that works for me, unless I come across a clear upgrade or I run out of ammo and have to pick up something else.

 

[Brian Boru]

Did you change your mind?

that thought actually occurred to me when I was writing that post!

No, I'm totally for options. I'm just against the way they're presented here, one at a time with no practical way to compare them.

I don't play that many shooters

Me neither. After my first 'which way is up' foray into a game, I'll usually read/watch some commentary on the best weapons, and pick/get those and leave it at that. It would however be nice if the devs included a player-friendly way of comparing them, so I could pick based on my play style preferences.

 

[Colif]

I think the last Shooting game I played that is purely shooting was this on PS3

I don't play shooting games and I don't know why I played that game. I couldn't tell you the previous one to it... Golden Eye count?
I won't include TL2 where one of my characters used a cannon... I expect that doesn't really count.

I am surprised the obvious answer to question hasn't been given
How many guns do you want in a game?
All of them

 

[Pifanjr]

It would however be nice if the devs included a player-friendly way of comparing them, so I could pick based on my play style preferences.

What's wrong with "picking it up and shooting with it" as a way of comparing? That's how I've always done it in shooters.

 

[Brian Boru]

What's wrong with "picking it up and shooting with it" as a way of comparing?

Because it doesn't compare. It may give a feeling of 'I prefer this to that', but nowhere near a comparison.

Even if it did—doing that for over 100 guns is not how I want to spend game time. It's not a biggie anyway since I'm not avidly chasing any kind of performance, just wondering why devs do it like this.

 

[Zloth]

No way I'm going to go thru all those to ID some favs—must be over 100

That's it? Jeez, cheap game.

Head on over to Fandom's page on Metal Gear Solid 5. The page is interactive. Open, say, shotguns. There're your nine classes of shotgun. Scroll on down to, say, the KABARGA-83 and you'll see some numbers along the top. Each of those shows you a level of that type of weapon.

 

[Brian Boru]

Head on over

I did… and I headed right back out again Now that's TMI!

 

[Pifanjr]

Because it doesn't compare. It may give a feeling of 'I prefer this to that', but nowhere near a comparison.

Even if it did—doing that for over 100 guns is not how I want to spend game time. It's not a biggie anyway since I'm not avidly chasing any kind of performance, just wondering why devs do it like this.

I guess I don't really understand why you would need any more than the feeling of "I prefer this to that".

 

[Johnway]

Whilst i'm all for variety of weapons, counter intuitively, i prefer to have probably at max 7.

being old school doom i've conditioned myself to just 7 tops. hell, i'll take 4 or 5 or even 3 depending on the situation:

0. Melee/knife option.
1. My stealth weapon (a silenced pistol if needed be)
2. The work horse AR. smg at a pinch depending on set up for 4.
3. The heavy duty weapon. For armor, bosses etc.
4. optional flexible option. usually a sniper rifle or shotgun depending on situation or a spare slot for for another workhorse.


What i don't want to see is having so many weapons that i have to scroll through them to find the one i want. Project overkill (the brutal doom on steroids mod) is a prime example of this. You could be carrying 3 or 4 super weapons or explosive weapons on top of your rocket launcher and its annoys me that during intense fights i can't just switch to a reliable weapon. The same thing with brutal wolfenstein when the mod decides to combine all the assualt rifles into one slot. So you can have:

duel welding MP40
Mp40,
mp44
thompson
BAR

if i want to switch between them, say i want to go from mp44 to mp40 i'll have to scroll through the buttons. its not ideal that they all use different ammo. if they could have split it across the keyboard i would have been fine. maybe something like:

1. knife
2. pistols
3. Shotgun (although a bit limited compared to the rifles/carbines)
4. SMGs (mp40/thompson)
5.ARs (BAR/MP44)
6. rifles/carbines
7. venom/LMG
8. bazooka
9. Flamethrower - i never use it as theres hardly any ammo for it.

of course, i could probably have mapped it myself, but my point still stands.

 

[Frindis]

@Brian Boru Would not need to ID all, seems a lot are model variants with different stock/coloring, etc. Probably could have just picked one type of M4A1 for example and been fine with just that one. At least that is what I did when I played the open beta for it. Played around with some weapons, picked the one I wanted, and basically went with a long-range build for plucking nasties.

 

[Zloth]

In MGS5, the guns don't just have a wide variety, they also represent your advancement. That list is really the game's skill tree. It's just using those weapons instead of the more traditional things, like fireball or hacking. (And no re-spec'ing.)

I suppose you could get all of them researched, but you would have finished the campaign and all the side quests long before, so you would be playing the online game - and probably for quite a while. You can only carry a couple of larger weapons and a small one, plus a bunch of items (grenades, decoys, carboard boxes...)

 

[DXCHASE]

So Destiny 2 is roughly 5 years old now. This is how many guns they have at this point (the groups are hand cannons, sidearms, smg's, lmg's, snipers, shotguns, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, swords, glaives, fusion rifles, trace rifles and linear fusion rifles). The exotics are listed because half of those are weapons too but get their own category because they each have a unique characteristic, so this game easily has over 1000 guns. A lot of them are unusable or unobtainable at this point, but, one of the biggest draws in this game is finding and collecting guns and armor esp. the exotic ones, so the amount isnt suprising.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I think at least 3 would be ideal for me. I'd like one good close-range weapon, one power weapon, like a grenade launcher, or something, and one sniper rifle.

 

[Pifanjr]

I think at least 3 would be ideal for me. I'd like one good close-range weapon, one power weapon, like a grenade launcher, or something, and one sniper rifle.

In Sniper Elite two is plenty, not counting stuff like grenades and mines.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

In Sniper Elite two is plenty, not counting stuff like grenades and mines.

I need to try that out sometime. Isn't there one on Game Pass?

 

[Pifanjr]

I need to try that out sometime. Isn't there one on Game Pass?

Yes, Sniper Elite 5, which is the most recent one.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

Yes, Sniper Elite 5, which is the most recent one.

What is it like? Is it multiplayer-only, or does it have a campaign? I'm not really into multiplayer games.

 

[Pifanjr]

What is it like? Is it multiplayer-only, or does it have a campaign? I'm not really into multiplayer games.

I haven't played 5, only 2, but I believe it's the same idea: a scripted single-player campaign with levels that alternate between open environments and more linear (urban) environments.

 

[WoodenSaucer]

I haven't played 5, only 2, but I believe it's the same idea: a scripted single-player campaign with levels that alternate between open environments and more linear (urban) environments.

Sniping is my favorite part of shooters. Sounds like I'd probably love it if it's like you describe.

 

[Brian Boru]

Sniping is my favorite part of shooters

SE5 seems to be as well received as SE4, which is an excellent game—both are TPP and mainly open world, grab SE4 too sometime.

Have you tried Sniper Ghost Warrior 3? It's an AA game, but good enough that I've replayed it once so far. Open world, but it's empty, and getting around early on is a pain if you don't drive—next replay I'll prob suck my cheeks in and drive a jeep all over the place to activate the fast travel points.