First we had the return of inflated heads, then we had the uber-challenging Suicide-levelled "Poundemonium" Outbreak. Last week, we were treated to the absurdly graphic yet inherently playful Up, Up and Decay and now we have Zed Time. Killing Floor 2 sure is keeping us on our toes by way of its Weekly Outbreak schedule.
"In Zed Time the game is always in Zed Time," explains developer Tripwire Interactive. Unsure of what Killing Floor 2's Zed Time is? Let me point you in the direction of Wes' GIF-tastic gunslinging animations article.
Tripwire continues: "The Zed Time in this mode is a little faster than normal. When there are only 5 Zeds left or during Trader Time the game goes out of Zed Time. We've also cranked up the spawn rate to super super-fast and Zed Time skills are disabled. This mode is cranked up so high that it would be impossible to beat in real-time! Good Luck!!"
And now onto some moving pictures:
This is one of several time-limited challenges running until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last month at E3. Here's the remaining two upcoming events:
August 1—Beefcake- Bigger they are, harder you fall.
In this outbreak, Zeds increase their health, size, and reach when they hit players or are affected by certain Zed abilities.
August 8—Boom- Zeds under pressure; may explode.
Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.
Killing Floor 2's Zed Time is what I imagine it's like to get opera. Time slows to a crawl and your existence becomes pure sensation. You're crying, you don't know why you're crying, and then you're laughing, and you experience the spectrum of human emotion in an instant as your vision becomes nothing but light and an angel descends on golden wings and offers you a deeper understanding of the universe and your tiny-but-significant place in it. Zed Time is like that, but with guns and disgusting piles of flesh.
Killing Floor 2 is a co-op game about shooting genetic freaks and watching their guts explode in beautiful, filthy slow motion. It's become dramatically more fun since its first Early Access release, thanks to a wide variety of character classes and weapons added over the past couple years. It's still a really straightforward and repetitive game—see mutants, shoot mutants—but with a secret weapon to keep that repetition entertaining. KF2's secret weapon is that its arsenal of guns is the best-realized in gaming: thanks to absurdly detailed high framerate animations and great tuning, most of its guns feel and look incredible with every single bullet leaving the barrel. And then there's Zed Time.
Zed Time is a fancy name for slow motion, but in KF2 it kicks off for everyone when some Cool Shit happens, like a perfect headshot or a grenade that separates seven charging zeds from their legs simultaneously. When you trigger Zed Time yourself it's hard not to immediately mutter a fuck yeah or an ohohoho as your screen explodes in viscera. Suddenly you're hearing the chug chug chug of every bullet as it fires and feeling the power of the gun in your hands as the action hammers back and forth and the barrel trembles from the force.
When someone else triggers Zed Time, you might laugh because you're watching a set of legs and arms fly across your screen in slow motion, or because you just started reloading and have five seconds of no-shooting ahead of you. It's agonizing, but that five seconds is a great opportunity to admire detailed reloads that would otherwise go by in the blink of an eye. Like so:
All of Killing Floor 2's reloads are motion captured, which includes its faster "tactical" reloads like the one above. You unlock those faster reloads in a skill tree as you level up KF2's classes, and they're definitely cooler when you know some guy with expertise in 19th century pistols actually did that sick reload in mocap gear.
As I've been playing a ton of Killing Floor 2 lately, I've come to appreciate the little details of all of its weapons more and more. So I asked developer Tripwire to send over some special captures of its weapons firing at full speed and in Zed Time, without the background confusion of a bunch of exploding bodies distracting the eye. Let's look at some cool guns.
M14 EBR
Here's a really simple one to start with. There's nothing crazy going on here, but if you look closely you can actually see the barrel wobbling after it fires. That's the kind of detail you'd only pick up in Zed Time, and most games would never both to animate, because the entire firing animation would only be a few frames.
9mm pistol
Another basic one, but damn that must be the best looking 9mm pistol in a game.
Kalashnikov AK-12
Okay, now we're talking. The animation on this gun is incredible. Watch the barrel. Watch the sight mounted on top. Watch the ejection port. So many tiny movements.
SCAR-H Assault Rifle reload
What happens if you try to reload a weapon but are already full on ammo? There's a unique animation for that, of course. Actually, there's more than one.
M14 EBR Reload
Of course, sometimes you just want a regular old reload. But why remove the magazine by hand when you can knock it out with the new one?
Okay, let's look at some gibs
There's some amazing detail in those animations, and they make those guns feel good when you pull the trigger. But so do explosions and headshots. And KF2 does those incredibly well, too. Cue the opera.
Yes, that is, in fact, a map based on Peach's castle from Super Mario 64.
No, it's not usually this bloody. But now I'm imagining a Brutal Mario 64 mod where each Goomba is filled with five liters of blood.
An Evan Lahti special. Gibs + physics = magic.
See, it's not just the gun animations that are ridiculously detailed. Zed bodies gib depending on the type and directionality of an attack. In this case, that means a perfect knife slice from head to toe.
This is the kind of silliness Zed Time was born for.
Firing the gunslinger's dual pistols in Zed Time is SO SATISFYING.
And, finally, the best damn gun in Killing Floor 2: the double barrel. Quite possibly the only shotgun outside of Doom to earn the Super Shotgun name.
One of the things I like most about Killing Floor 2 is the way it mixes absurdity with graphic violence. This week's Weekly Outbreak—essentially a temporary mutator—goes all-in on gore and humor.
Earlier in the summer KF2 added a shrinking zeds, and now we continue to see Tripwire play with physics in "Up, Up and Decay," where shooting and slashing zeds will cause them to fill with air.
"As Zeds receive damage they inflate," Tripwire tells me via email. "After some time they start to deflate. Once they reach max inflate they turn into death balloons and rain down gibs. The idea is if you don't finish them off they go back to normal size and heal!"
Complete this challenge, and you'll earn the Hans Plushy Backpack item shown in the trailer above. This is one of several time-limited challenges running until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show at E3. Here's the rest of the schedule:
July 18- Up, Up and Decay- Try to make ninety-nine Zed balloons.
Shooting Zeds in this outbreak will cause them to inflate like balloons, even to the point of floating away and popping!
July 25- Zed Time- All the Zed Time in the world.
Ever think that life is passing you by? Not in this outbreak! You'll be in Zed Time any time you're near a Zed.
August 1– Beefcake- Bigger they are, harder you fall.
In this outbreak, Zeds increase their health, size, and reach when they hit players or are affected by certain Zed abilities.
August 8– Boom- Zeds under pressure; may explode.
Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.
With last week's ludicrous big-head mode still on our minds, the new Killing Floor 2 Weekly Outbreak is a little less lighthearted. You'll fight an insane amount of Fleshpounds in the "Poundemonium" Outbreak, but they're not all created equal.
Via Tripwire: "The mode has two new zeds—a Quarter Pound which is a mini Fleshpound, which behaves differently than a regular Fleshpound. They have less health, are in much higher numbers, and move much faster than a regular Fleshpound. The other is a King Fleshpound, which is the 'big daddy' of all Fleshpounds. He has a new attack and is the boss for this mode. The chest beam attack is something he uses when he gets really pissed and the player is too far for his melee to hit his target. The beam attack does a lot of damage, the best way to dodge is to get behind cover or crouch, which will have the beam fly over your head."
Tripwire says to expect "a lot, and I mean a lot of both Quarter Pounds and regular Fleshpounds mixed with lower level supporting zeds," with the King Fleshpound replacing KF2's standard bosses. No problem, right?
On top of that, Weekly Outbreaks have to be completed on 'Suicidal' difficulty, so good luck surviving wave after wave of KF2's toughest zed. Complete the 'Poundemonium' challenge, and you'll earn a unique cosmetic item called the Fleshpound Visor.
This is one of several time-limited challenges running until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last month at E3. Here's the rest of the schedule:
July 18- Up, Up and Decay- Try to make ninety-nine Zed balloons.
Shooting Zeds in this outbreak will cause them to inflate like balloons, even to the point of floating away and popping!
July 25- Zed Time- All the Zed Time in the world.
Ever think that life is passing you by? Not in this outbreak! You'll be in Zed Time any time you're near a Zed.
August 1– Beefcake- Bigger they are, harder you fall.
In this outbreak, Zeds increase their health, size, and reach when they hit players or are affected by certain Zed abilities.
August 8– Boom- Zeds under pressure; may explode.
Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.
Off the back of last week's character-shrinking mode, this week's Killing Floor 2 Weekly Outbreak flips the switch, giving enemies and players enormous heads. In a game that strongly favors headshots, this is an unexpected gift. Why did "Big Head Mode" ever go out of style, anyway?
Complete this 'Bobble Zed' challenge, and you'll earn a golden-colored 'Precious' variant of the Horzine Helmet. This is one of several time-limited challenges running until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last month at E3. Here's the rest of the schedule:
July 4- Bobble Zed -...that must hurt their necks.
Something went horribly wrong with this batch of Zeds and their heads are wwwaaaayyyyyyy larger than normal! Huge even!
July 11– Poundemonium- All Fleshpounds, all the time. Almost.
The Fleshpound Convention is in town!
July 18- Up, Up and Decay- Try to make ninety-nine Zed balloons.
Shooting Zeds in this outbreak will cause them to inflate like balloons, even to the point of floating away and popping!
July 25- Zed Time- All the Zed Time in the world.
Ever think that life is passing you by? Not in this outbreak! You'll be in Zed Time any time you're near a Zed.
August 1– Beefcake- Bigger they are, harder you fall.
In this outbreak, Zeds increase their health, size, and reach when they hit players or are affected by certain Zed abilities.
August 8– Boom- Zeds under pressure; may explode.
Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.
Following last week's headshots-only mode last week, Killing Floor's next Weekly Outbreak is Tiny Terror, which makes its various zed enemies—even bosses—shrink when you shoot 'em.
The mutator should test your ability to pull your crosshairs downward as zeds get lower to the ground. And as seen in the trailer above, it seems players will be subject to shrinking, too. Try not to fall down any sewer grates.
Beat Tiny Terror, and you'll earn the Tiny Terror ballcap, a cosmetic item for all characters. If you're matchmaking, select the "Weekly" mode rather than the usual "Survival" to be queued into Tiny Terror.
This is one of eight Weekly Outbreak challenges that will run until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last week at E3. Here's the rest of the schedule:
June 27 - Tiny Terror - A small threat is still a threat.
Shooting Zeds in this outbreak will cause them to shrink, making them harder to hit.
July 4- Bobble Zed - ...that must hurt their necks.
Something went horribly wrong with this batch of Zeds and their heads are wwwaaaayyyyyyy larger than normal! Huge even!
July 11– Poundemonium - All Fleshpounds, all the time. Almost.
The Fleshpound Convention is in town!
July 18- Up, Up and Decay - Try to make ninety-nine Zed balloons.
Shooting Zeds in this outbreak will cause them to inflate like balloons, even to the point of floating away and popping!
July 25- Zed Time - All the Zed Time in the world.
Ever think that life is passing you by? Not in this outbreak! You'll be in Zed Time any time you're near a Zed.
August 1– Beefcake - Bigger they are, harder you fall.
In this outbreak, Zeds increase their health, size, and reach when they hit players or are affected by certain Zed abilities.
August 8– Boom - Zeds under pressure; may explode.
Maybe it was something they ate? Bad gas? Whatever it was, Zeds explode when killed in this outbreak.
"...By removing the head or destroying the brain." The sage advice in the early minutes of Shaun of the Dead is especially applicable in this week's Killing Floor 2 Weekly Outbreak, the temporary challenges running in unison with its free, horror circus-themed Summer Sideshow update.
In "Cranium Cracker," players can only put down zeds with headshots, a test of marksmanship, especially for KF2's guns and character perks that don't emphasize single-shot accuracy. Beat Cranium Cracker, and you'll earn the "Headshot Weekly" skin for the Sharpshooter's SPX 464 Centerfire rifle, appropriately. If you're matchmaking, select the "Weekly" mode rather than the usual "Survival" to be queued into Cranium Cracker.
This is one of eight Weekly Outbreak challenges that will run until August, as Tripwire creative director Bill Munk announced at the PC Gaming Show last week at E3.
Tripwire announced the The Killing Floor 2 'Summer Sideshow' event today at the PC Gaming Show. The seasonal event will include a new map, Tragic Kingdom, complete with carnival games, as well as "over 50 cosmetic items" to unlock. Watch the trailer above to see how the Zeds have transformed.
Also coming is a new game type called The Weekly Outbreak which introduces a new challenge every week, such as a headshots-only mode—and beating one of the challenges unlocks a precious item. There are two months worth of Outbreaks planned, says creative director Bill Munk.
The Summer Sideshow will be out tomorrow, and Killing Floor 2 will be free to play for a week—with a discount for anyone who decides to buy it during that time.
Here's how big a deal Doom's shotgun was: in a game with another weapon called the Big Fucking Gun, the shotgun is the one we remember best. It's reliable at practically any distance. One clean shot to the chest will eviscerate most enemies. Somehow that pump action reload animation and its cha-chick are satisfying every single time with only five frames of animation. How many other games are confident enough to give you a gun this good 10 seconds into the first level?
Before Doom, shotguns were for shooting clay pigeons. After Doom, they were for annihilating demons. And for annihilating practically anything else: as Doom birthed a new genre, you could rely on the trusty shotgun to be there almost anytime, more steadfast and reliable than a squirrely pistol or a ammo-hungry rifle. It's our pellet pal. Our blunderbuss buddy. In the wry words of John Romero, when we spent half an hour reflecting on the design and history of Doom's shotgun: "No other game has a BFG 9000 in it, but lots of games have shotguns."
Today we're celebrating that lineage by talking about some of our favorite shotguns and why we love them. Step one: make it kick, and make 'em bleed.
How to make a great shotgun
"Number one, the damage it does is the most important part," said John Romero. He was talking about weapon design in general. There's so much that goes into a good game gun, but those pain points have the biggest impact in making a weapon feel powerful. "If it does more damage than any other gun, it doesn't matter if it has no sound effects, you're going to be using it," he laughed.
OK, but all that other stuff is important too. Animation, sound effects, the works. When they all come together, you can just feel it. It's an almost animal hell yeah. Fullbright's Steve Gaynor practically got poetic describing this sensation:
"Shooter games can be about a lot of things—the complexity of tactics as you use the environment to your advantage, the cat & mouse drama of chasing and being chased, sneaking up on your prey or falling into your enemy's trap—but it's also always about that aesthetic moment where the trigger's pulled and the audiovisual effects deliver that moment of utterly blowing a videogame creature away. And that's what the shotgun's all about. It's loud. It's sudden. And above all, it's effective."
So how do design all that stuff to feel just right? Bill Munk, animator and creative director at Tripwire, had this to say about developing Killing Floor 2:
Shooters are always about that aesthetic moment where the trigger's pulled and the audiovisual effects deliver that moment of utterly blowing a video game creature away.
Steve Gaynor
"We start with the gore system, which is a very important ingredient that makes shotguns feel devastating. Second is the impulse force applied to the creatures when they get hit, this is really important to not only make the shotgun feel powerful but also adds to the enjoyment of taking down a target. Third is the damage each pellet does, it's a hard balancing act because depending on what you shot, if it doesn't die or react the way you picture it, everything falls apart and the weapon feels unsatisfying. To balance shotguns in KF2 we first start with the price for the ammo, the weight of the gun and the time it takes to reload. Shotguns generally have massive damage but become less effective at range due to the spread of the pellets which also is a nice tool to balance these high damage weapons.
"Last but not least are the shoot animations. This is an area we've put a lot of time and research in. We animate the shots at high framerate so that we can animate the violent force when you fire a shotgun. This is a detail you barely notice in realtime but can feel the difference."
And when Killing Floor 2 slows down into Zed time, you can really see that animation at work.
You can see even more detail in KF2's shotguns firing and reloading here. They're ahead of the curve in animations, but the fact that Doom's shotgun still feels good with only five frames of reload animation shows how much the damage, muzzle flare, sound effects, and other elements of a shotgun can make it feel satisfying without much real detail.
Take Resident Evil 4's starting shotgun, a standard pump action. It's much simpler than Killing Floor 2's weapons, but blasting zombies with it feels a bit like smiting them with the fist of God. Part of that comes from RE4's once-novel over-the-shoulder weapon aiming. It's incredibly physical. You hold a button down to aim and Leon plants his feet. The camera zooms up to his shoulder, and it feels like you're aiming the shotgun with the whole of his body. The muzzle jerks sharply upward when you fire, and a single blast can send a whole crowd flying backwards. Leon pumps out the spent shell before recentering his aim. It's not fancy, but it feels sublime.
Sound off
No game gun sounds more pleasing to the ear than a shotgun except for, maybe, a bolt-action rifle. And those two weapons have something in common: both are about a single moment of release, followed by a peerless sound saying fire again, baby.
Most game weapons are about a constant stream of sound. The blam, blam, blam of a pistol, the ratatatat of an SMG, the heavy thugthugthugthug of an LMG. With a shotgun, it's all about that one shot. It's a crack of thunder, not a boom. "You need a good, sharp, aggressive sound to drive the shotgun's presence home, not some underplayed thud but a good, bracing crack," said Gaynor.
But the reload can be even better. Only a heavy bolt can match the click of a double barrel popping open and closed or the cha-chick of the pump action. That sound effect really hasn't changed much since Doom 1, and it's easy to see why.
I'd say sound is 70% of the feel of a great shotgun mostly because I've played games while they are muted and they lost the feel.
Kynan Pearson
Sound is a big part of why we love shotguns, but it's also crucial to the "feel" of hower powerful they are. "I'd say sound is 70% of the feel of a great shotgun mostly because I've played games while they are muted and they lost the feel," said Kynan Pearson, who's worked on the Halo and Metroid Prime series. "The reload noise, the boom and the pain noises create a fantastic symphony of death."
Producer Matt Powers, who worked as a producer on the Medal of Honor and Call of Duty series, wrote about this on Gamasutra:
"I kept getting feedback that our shotgun was underpowered…people really kind of hated the shotgun. When I looked at the balance numbers, the shotgun was actually a little overpowered if anything. So…after much consternation I decided to attack the balance issue from the side of perception rather than through the actual numbers themselves. I went to our audio director to talk about changing the sound. He added a bit more low end to the fire sound, pulled out some midrange and bumped up the high end to give it a sharper punch. I did not tell the team that the only thing I changed was the sound, I just asked them to give it another try to see if the changes I made addressed the balance issues they were seeing. The feedback came back unanimously positive."
Animation, sound, weight. Those are some of the ingredients of a great shotgun. So how did id make the first FPS shotgun, with no history to draw on, back in 1993?
History lesson: the original boomstick
Our love affair with the shotgun started with Doom, but for Romero, it started with two other sources: Rednecks, and Evil Dead. In one of id's earliest games, a 2D sidescroller called Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, you blast ghouls with a shotgun (and can even shoot at diagonals!). In Dave's first game, you had a pistol, but changing that to a shotgun in the sequel was an obvious move. "You're a redneck in Louisiana, of course you'd have a shotgun," Romero laughed. "We mentioned it when we were talking about Doom, we're like 'Hell yeah man, we had a shotgun in Dave and it was awesome. Why not?'"
Doom's shotgun wasn't originally in the plans for the game at all. The small team at id had the pistol, and plans for a rocket launcher, but they needed something in between. So they designed a rifle with a bayonet. The only problem: it wasn't cool enough. "We didn't like the fact that when you jabbed, it just didn't look good. It looked lame," Romero said. "We'd already had lameness issues with Catacomb 3D earlier, when you're using your hand to throw fireballs and stuff. That didn't look or feel cool. With Doom, we did have the bayonet in there, and I believe we even had it working, and it was just like, you know what? No amount of frames will make this look good."
As they started brainstorming sci-fi weapons like the BFG, their thoughts turned to Evil Dead 2. And voila: a shotgun and a chainsaw appeared. "We basically went, 'a shotgun would totally blow away that stupid rifle.' We made the shotgun, we made the chainsaw. It totally felt right in the game. We put it in, and it was just perfect. The gun cocking animation, the sound, it was perfect. The shotgun blast was great and did a good amount of damage. So that's what happened."
The Doom faithful may know that the shotgun was a Tootsietoy Dakota cap gun model bought at Toys R Us and scanned into the game using a video camera, then edited and animated in a Carmack piece of software called Fuzzy Pumper Palette Shop. It was named after a Play Doh toy. What's surprising about Romero's story is how little tuning it took to get Doom's shotgun just right. They added a spread and randomness to the firing, but treated the shotgun pellets as if they were bullets, making the gun easy to implement. And because they "wanted every gun to be effective at super far distances," handicapping the shotgun's range wasn't an issue.
"It was important that whenever we added any gun to the game, it never nullified a previous weapon. There had to be a reason for keeping the pistol around and everything else," Romero said. "The shotgun, I believe used the pistol randomness, and also added some to the spread, but not too much. So you could kill stuff at a distance. It was not like a sawed-off shotgun that would have a massive spread."
It was important that whenever we added any gun to the game, it never nullified a previous weapon.
John Romero
That would come later, of course, with Doom 2's double barrel super shotgun. First person shooters have since skewed towards treating shotguns more like the sawed off: close combat killers with a very particular purpose, a more compartmentalized approach to "balance" that gives every weapon its role.
"I feel shotguns live and die by where they sit in the balance," said Pearson. "It's easy to make a shotgun too effective or nerf it so it's not dominant in the weapon selection. I feel like shotguns need drawbacks, but part of the satisfaction is the exaggerated quality of wrecking opponents at close range. I prefer tight spread with damage dampening at distance. Everyone has different preferences so it depends on the game."
We can still delight in a good kill with a well-balanced modern military tactical 12-gauge, but our favorite shotguns are the ones that defy those restrictions. Look at the shotgun in Halo: Combat Evolved, which was overshadowed by the pistol but still had tremendous range and a vast ammo reserve.
Other shotguns do something unique to stand out, either in how they affect enemies and the world, or in how they let lead fly.
Blaster master
When I get a headshot with a pistol I expect, at best, a backflip or an exploding skull. But much of the joy of a shotgun comes from its physicality. I want my enemies blown backwards by raw force. This is where other elements of the game come into play to make the shotgun itself better. A perfect example, Gaynor explained, is Bioshock's shotty:
"It reinforces what makes a great shotgun on its own—an awesome muzzle flash, great pump action animation, amazing sound design, and high destructive power—but also how important its effect on enemies can be. Not just the blood effects or how much damage it does, but how they flip, spin, and pirouette through the environment when blasted. BioShock used tech that allowed the enemies to do a crafted death animation—ie spinning through the air in response to catching a handful of buckshot in the side—and transition that smoothly into a dynamic ragdoll that leaves them convincingly sprawled on the environment in the aftermath. Blasting Splicers with the shotgun was great because the shotgun was great, yes, but also because the Splicers were such wonderful fodder, their reaction to your blasting being an integral part of the whole exchange."
This is one area where Valve's typically soft weapons really shine: Left4Dead 2's shotguns can lift a group of zombies off their feet and send them flying. They also absolutely shred enemies. Valve's Alex Vlachos gave a great talk about Left 4 Dead 2's wounds at the 2010 Game Developer's Conference, and you can see how the system works in this presentation. This applies to all weapons, but shotguns are your best bet for blowing off limbs or big chunks of torso.
Gaynor similarly praised the F.E.A.R shotgun's "effect on a highly dynamic gameworld, where firing this thing off causes dust, concrete chunks, and broken glass to fly everywhere. But of course it would be nothing if not for F.E.A.R.'s slow-mo bullet time mechanic, allowing you to enjoy the shotgun's effects at half speed, every frame of its destructive power lovingly rendered for the player's satisfaction. Jumping over a barricade, going into slow-mo, and hearing an enemy soldier shout "OOoooohhhhhh shiiiiiiittttttt" as you pull the trigger, causing him to backflip over a railing with balletic grace, is maybe one of the most satisfying interactions in any FPS game. Oh, and if you play your cards right and get up into point-blank range, this thing can straight-up mist an enemy in one shot. That's how badass it is."
Romero and Bill Munk both called out Soldier of Fortune's shotgun for similar destructive power. "Soldier of Fortune, especially for the time, really showed the brutality of a shotgun and made the player feel extremely powerful based on the gore system," Munk said. "But for overall feel I'd have to give it to F.E.A.R. The first time you experience a shotgun in slow-mo seeing every pellet fly and the ragdoll react to it is a thing of beauty!"
Soldier of Fortune sure wins for nastiness, though.
Gettin' weird with it
God I love the flak cannon. In my imagination, the flak cannon is what would happen if the god of death metal looked at a normal shotgun and turned it into an industrial tool that could conveniently be used to shred men into paste. It's not simply firing a shell when you pull the trigger: a metal piston slams forward to propel a disc the size of a hockey puck out of the muzzle, where it separates into a spreading pattern of glowing superheated scrap. You can watch every piece make bloody contact with your enemy, but it also has a utility unlike any other shotgun: bouncing those metal meteors around corners to shred bad dudes from afar. Is there any wonder it's our favorite gun ever?
When Doom gave us a shotgun to blast demons, it was novel. Now that every shooter has its own take on the shotgun—and it's usually pretty straightforward—we love the flak cannon and other alternative shotguns for stepping out of that mold.
The flak cannon's secondary fire is a perfect example: it concentrates the heavy damage of the shotgun into a single arcing grenade that's harder to land, but offers concentrated damage you won't get at range with a spreading flak cloud. Romero himself designed a shotgun that was meant to diverge from the straightforward utility of Doom's shotgun: Daikatana's Shotcycler-6.
Daikatana had rocket jumping, but because its rocket launcher fired two shots, it would really hurt. "I thought, can I make a safer rocket jump type weapon?" Romero remembered. "With the Shotcycler-6 I can do six shots, and if you jump it'll take you up to another place. I thought that would be kinda cool for people who are good, and know the secret of the shotgun jump. So it's basically six shots, who doesn't love that, with kickback enough that you can actually get propelled up in the air, almost like a rocket launcher."
Gears of War 4's Overkill is a madman's fusion of double-barrel and auto shotty: it fires a shell from one of four barrels on mouse click and on mouse release, giving you the flexibility for tactical timing or a panicked barrage of eight shots in the span of a second.
Bulletstorm's ridiculous four barreled shotgun has a charge shot that simply vaporizes enemies, burning them away to nothing but bones. It's a fitting middle finger to the concept of balance.
And though it was a short-lived glitch, not an intentional design, I have to sing the praises of the most overpowered shotgun of all time: Battlefield 3's briefly broken underslung M26 DART. A patch made every 12 gauge flechette pellet deal the full damage of the assault rifle's primary bullets, making the spread an ungodly cloud of death. And yet it's so politely soft-spoken.
In conclusion
Videogame shotguns are rad. When you use a good one, appreciate it: marvel at its kick, its cocking action, its thundercrack, and the knockback like no other.
"There's something inherently satisfying about video game guns that are built to be 'one shot, one kill' like, say, a hefty magnum revolver, or a bolt-action sniper rifle," said Gaynor. "And that's also the shotgun's job... with the added benefit of not really having to aim. Who could ask for more?"
Launched in November last year, Football Manager 2017 has since come under fire from a number of Steam players despite being one of the platform's most played games, and having secured good reviewselsewhere. Performance issues and the absence of Chinese localisation seem to form the majority of complaints—however if you fancy coming to your own conclusions know that Sports Interactive's enduring football management simulator is free to try on Steam this weekend.
From now through Sunday, March 26 at 8pm GMT/12pm PST, the "full Football Manager experience" can be sampled giving players access to over 2,500 clubs from leagues all of the world. If you like what you see during that time, FM2017 is also subject to a 50 percent discount until Monday, March 27. Here's Paul Walker-Emig's review for further reading.
Football isn't everyone's cup of tea, though, thus if zombie hunting better aligns with your sport of choice, you may be pleased to know Tripwire's Killing Floor 2 is also free to try on Steam this very weekend. Andy mentioned this as a footnote while reporting on the Zed-slasher's newly announced free-of-charge Descent Content Pack—which brings with it new maps and guns—however I felt it merited its own post because everyone loves something for free, right?
Similar to the above, the game which Tyler described as "repetitive but fun, a hellish challenge or a relaxing, spectacular gore bath depending on how you approach it" is free from now through Sunday 26, and is also going for half price till Monday 27.
