975 Bullet Management

Bullet management in games is a massive topic, probably larger than I can comprehend.

I’d love to see a game system that focused very heavily on the nuance of bullets as a survival resource. The player never finds ammo just laying around, unless its in a clip that’s on somebody’s person. And that wouldn’t likely be more than 1 or 2 clips of ammo.

Games like The Last of Us took steps toward this, although random enemies that never had guns to begin with will still “drop” ammo after you defeat them. The Metro series also does a great job with this system, making bullets relatively scarce overall, as well as the unique system of making certain material bullets a form of actual barter currency in the game’s underbelly city economy.

But, I’d still like to see it deal with more realism. Unless it’s a game that’s set directly in the location of a war, where bullets will very likely be everywhere you look, it generally doesn’t make sense otherwise. I’ve gone my entire 31 years of life without ever seeing a “box” of bullets, and yet characters in video games are constantly finding these boxes laying around.

I’m well aware that it’s just an abstraction system, and in so many cases is required for the fun of the game system to actually work, but I do think there’s room for a different system in a different genre that has some amount more realism.

[ Today I Was Playing: Mass Effect 2 ]

#game-mechanic-system