So... Shotguns?

[Tompig]

Hey everyone,

 

So I've been musing the development of doom and its influence on the usual FPS lineup of weapons but a question sprung to my mind, why shotguns?

 

It isn't the most commonly found military weapon, heck the standard rifle doesn't make an appearance unless we're looking at former humans, and its inclusion might appear strange next to the new-fangled sci-fi weaponry of the rest of the roster. So why do you think the shotgun got its FPS crown in doom?

 

Purely gameplay? With it serving a mid-range combat role with easily distinguishable ammo vs common bullets and clips?

Or is pop culture more to attribute to its stardom, as something 'Groovy' to keep 'For Close Encounters'? 

 

I'd love to hear what you think.

Let's give the Boom *chick chick* some affection.

[Trar]

Probably because it was cool and a pop culture thing. Ash thought it was groovy, the guys at Id must have liked Evil Dead, and the rest is history. It also helped that they were able to find a toy shotgun to scan and digitize.

 

The pre-release versions of Doom up until the press version had assault rifle weapon sprites, funnily enough. It must have been cut to reduce redundancy since the shotgun, chaingun and pistol could already do what it did.

[Tompig]

Hm, do you think a co-existence of the rifle and shotgun could have happened? Or too much cross over?

[SMG_Man]

As far as avoiding overlap goes, I would probably choose to balance it in the following fashion:

 

• The rifle would do consistent damage at a range, between the max hit of the regular shotgun and the super shotgun, with little spread and only a single bullet.

• To make up for its more positive DPS traits, it would probably need a re-fire time close to the SSG, so that way there's still a valid reason to use the shotguns in close quarters and/or against groups of enemies.

• With an actual precision weapon available, chaingun-sniping would probably need to be explicitly removed. I don't think the pistol would need any change since sniping with it is more cumbersome than the chaingun.

 

The only issue then becomes, what ammo would it use? As it is there's a fairly precarious balance in the original four ammo types, and adding a fifth ammo type unique to it may feel a little out-of-place ("why can't it just use regular bullets?").

[Lucius Wooding]

In FPS there used to be a decent amount of difference between the feel and roles of the weapons so they'd actually play different. A lot of newer and more realistic shooters achieve too much of a balance or have too many redundant weapons. Even something like Halo is a culprit; it started with a decent roster with personality but then shoehorned slightly tweaked versions of different guns in each installment until now there are a ton of very similar options for any one. 

 

If you're playing a mil sim kind of shooter, and you have 10 different primary guns but they're all assault rifles and light machine guns, then weapon selection means pretty much dick. Yeah I get that an AK47 and an M16 might have their differences to the avid gun fan, but functionally they're the same. Part of what makes Doom great is that each weapon has its own style and the range of choices, although not terribly many, is very diverse ranging from short, long range, rapid fire, and AOE. IMO this is a huge factor in its longevity and a reason why many games are obliged to copy some aspects of the arsenal since it was so iconic.

 

Shotguns have been used in most every major war since they were invented, they're a hugely practical and effective weapon. Admittedly they wouldn't be a standard issue gun for most large armies, but it's a tremendous upgrade from a pistol. In a space station environment I'd expect shotguns to be highly useful due to the short ranged nature of combat and the risk of stray shots penetrating the hull. The Evil Dead stuff is absolutely a valid point and shouldn't be overlooked. Additionally, it doesn't make sense to include a sniper rifle in a game that was non trivial to run in the early days; it didn't have big rooms with long distances where a rifle would make sense outside of a couple of the shittiest looking levels and the auto aim range was also very limited before mouselook was a thing. Most modern rifles would have a whopping effective range on the order of tens of thousands of map units.

 

Because 90% of Doom's combat is close range, shells are common, the shotgun is one of the most easily found weapons, and most of the  bestiary can be taken down with it effectively, it becomes the de facto weapon of choice in a lot of scenarios. Noobs are also not going to get the most out of the BFG or RL since they require more skill to utilize efficiently and safely, while the shotgun is mostly a safe and easy to use weapon. Due to its slow fire rate, it also encourages good movement more than most other weapons and allows peekaboo shooting with no drop in FPS. The SSG is even more blessed since it's still very common but it makes more efficient use of ammo and has great firepower.

[TheMagicMushroomMan]

10 hours ago, Tompig said:

Boom *chick chick*

Why shotguns? This^^^ is why. Shotguns give incredible and powerful feedback. They're big, they're loud, they do gory damage, and the kick from a shotgun is much more immediately satisfying to most people compared to the repetitive, controlled rattling of an automatic assault rifle.

 

Another thing: there are only two or three weapons in Doom (IMO) that have satisfying sound effects without using mods: the super shotgun (maybe the combat shotgun as well), the plasma rifle, and the rocket launcher. The shotgun obviously gets the most use. The chaingun, pistol, chainsaw, fist, and BFG can be satisfying to use, but not because of their audiovisual design. It feels much better to blast an enemy with a super shotgun than it does to fry them with a BFG, which is supposed to be *the* weapon.

[banjiepixel]

Have been playing some Wolfenstein 3D lately and was reminded that all the guns in that game are basically just variations of the same weapon. As the main difference was that how fast those weapons fired, adding shotgun to Doom definitely seems like a very natural next step, a weapon that shoots bigger blast at once but has longer recovery time. Shotgun has very high risk and reward values and that makes it so fun to use. Chaingun is fine weapon but also very safe weapon to use and requires much less skill than effective use of a shotgun.

 

Also it's the reload animation that does alot of work to make shotguns awesome. This is why Doom 64 and Quake 1 shotguns feel much worse to use than Doom 2 versions. Weapons not needing to reload does feel usually bit unnatural and because how old school shotguns work, it is easy add reloading animation to them that looks awesome, makes them feel more like the real world shotguns, works as way to balance the high damage output and still avoid adding actual reload mechanic to the game.

 

Doom 1 shotgun was so awesome weapon that they decided the create even more powerful version for Doom 2 despite RL being basically the "high tier shotgun". SSG had bigger risk with reloading animation being longer but also it had much more bigger reward in damage output, making it basically work as both high and low tier weapon.

 

Shotguns just work great as a FPS video game weapon. It is easy weapon to make very satisfying to use and is often good option for players with bad aim.

[banjiepixel]

11 hours ago, Tompig said:

Hm, do you think a co-existence of the rifle and shotgun could have happened? Or too much cross over?

 

Based on how many people want to turn the pistol into basically just slighty slower firing chaingun, I'd say that main conflict would had been with chaingun. I feel that the plan was at some point to include all original Wolfenstein 3D guns in Doom but then they realized that they can't have all three because they are so similar and eventually weakest (pistol) and strongest (chaingun) variants ended up in the final game. It does seem that Rifle was supposed to be the starting weapon at some point but for some reason they ended up making pistol the starting weapons. Maybe rifle was too good to be starting weapon or they just wanted to starting weapon be pistol, just like in Wolfenstein 3D.

 

Alot of decisions made while developing Doom are continution from development of Wolfenstein 3D. Adding shotgun to Doom basically created problem of weapon roster being unbalanced. You can't have four guns in a game and three of them use bullet ammo and one to use shells. Final weapon roster balances this by having two bullet ammo weapons, two energy cell weapons and both shotgun/RL have their own unique ammo type. Shotgun was also probably the first new weapon they added that wasn't based on a Wolfenstein 3D and I am pretty sure that the scifi weaponry was added later in the development. Large portion of Doom's weapon roster being pretty old school makes sense since it probably used Wolfenstein 3D's roster heavily as it's base.

[RDETalus]

2 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

audiovisual design

The chain gun is so terrible in this regard. It shoots pistol caliber bullets with slow ass fire rate, yet it looks like the way it does? Makes zero sense. It should have just been an M3 grease gun or something similar.

[act]

Not sure if it's been said in this thread before, but I should add that generally guns that are "Shoot once every second but deal a fat amount of damage" are far more fun to use in both singleplayer and multiplayer games than guns that are "Shoot once every 0.1 seconds but deal a bit of damage" - with few exceptions.

That's why the shotgun is the "primary weapon" of Doom: it's satisfying to use due to its ratio of damage to fire rate.

[banjiepixel]

42 minutes ago, act said:

Not sure if it's been said in this thread before, but I should add that generally guns that are "Shoot once every second but deal a fat amount of damage" are far more fun to use in both singleplayer and multiplayer games than guns that are "Shoot once every 0.1 seconds but deal a bit of damage" - with few exceptions.

That's why the shotgun is the "primary weapon" of Doom: it's satisfying to use due to its ratio of damage to fire rate.

 

Just like in a fighting game, it is more fun to use more powerful special attacks on your opponent than it is to jab them to death with normal attacks. Extra effort and extra risk makes just the extra reward feel more satisfying. Both types of attacks have their place in a well balanced game but more powerful attacks that need more precise timing are always more exciting than weak attacks that you need to spam alot to make any decent damage.

[Shepardus]

5 hours ago, act said:

Not sure if it's been said in this thread before, but I should add that generally guns that are "Shoot once every second but deal a fat amount of damage" are far more fun to use in both singleplayer and multiplayer games than guns that are "Shoot once every 0.1 seconds but deal a bit of damage" - with few exceptions.

That's why the shotgun is the "primary weapon" of Doom: it's satisfying to use due to its ratio of damage to fire rate.

Aside from the general satisfaction of landing big blows, it also works better with the way pain chance works. Faster-firing weapons like the chaingun and plasma gun tend to stunlock enemies, while slower-firing weapons leave time for the enemies to respond so they can actually use the attacks they've been given. On the flip side, the large number of pellets per shot gives a good chance of triggering a pain state when you do attack, adding to the satisfaction. The SSG in particular lends itself to a nice call and response rhythm between the player and enemy.

[Sena]

Adding to its cinematic origins, Doom started development as an ALIENS game, and well, ALIENS gave us this