Just after playing some Alien Swarm I was reconsidering the way reloading usually works in FPS’s.
The status quo seems to be quickly filling up the bullets in your clip up to the max within two seconds. Which makes you very efficient as you don’t actually throw away the ammo you have left in the clip. This means that you’re usually reloading for the heck of it whenever you got a corner to hide behind.
It’s neither realistic nor, in my opinion, desirable from a gameplay perspective. In AS you throw away your ENTIRE clip when you hit reload. This makes reloading a far less trivial thing to do as you’ll run out of ammo very quickly if you keep tossing away your clips. Especially for the minigun with a long reloading time and a large ammo clip you’ll have to constantly think about what you’re doing.
There’s some interesting implications here. Having lots of ammo clips left makes you significantly stronger than a player who has less clips to go by. It means that you can afford a ‘wasteful’ reload or two in order to keep fighting, meaning that you have more freedom in combat than someone who needs to stick with his almost empty clip to preserve bullets.
Another thing I love, taken from Shattered Horizon, is the concept that disrupting a reload means you lose the entire clip altogether (after all, you removed it from it’s socket and went on to do something else, it means you have a clipless gun). Though in that game you have infinite ammo so the penalty isn’t that harsh as in a game where it’s scarce.
Also the tiny minigame originally from Gears of War, where you, if you hit the reload button again at the right time get a much faster reload (and hitting it wrong delays the reload) is something I’d like to see in a tactical shooter. What makes this reload interesting is that you need to keep your head cool in order to make it work, it requires your attention. This means that a player who is in control of the situation, like, laying an ambush or something will have an advantage over a player that desperately struggles in a fight and has no time to pay attention to reloading. This means that before reloading you need to decide whether you are or aren’t going for the quick reload, a decision based on how hectic the situation you find yourself in is.
Anyway, just some food for thought. I think the reload in most games is way to trivial and simplistic all the while it has so much potential for putting emphasis on skill and tactics within a shooter.