In which I talk about how great the weapon reloading mechanic was for Marathon 2: Durandal.

Marathon 2: Durandal (recently re-released on XBLA) is one of my favourite games of all time. The fact that the whole series is now available for free on Mac and PC is nothing but good news for the human race.

One of the innovations of the game was Ammo Clips for your guns. At the time, most FPSs (like Quake) treated you as if you had a hose attached to your ammo pack and you’d just keep firing and firing until you ran out. Ammo clips matter because they add a tactical dimension to gameplay by giving you moments of total vulnerability to your enemies when you can’t shoot, leaving you to dodge and run and seek cover. It gives weapons a new dial to fiddle with when you seek to make them feel different.

Plus, loading a gun is viscerally cool. Shotguns are awesome because “Shck-Click .. BOOM” is about 200% cooler than “BOOM”.

In modern games, the visceral thing tends to be more important than the vulnerability thing because most fire fights last less than a clip. There are few opportunities for the player to run out of ammo on a moment to moment basis and reloading tends to sync up with natural pauses in action and players are pavlovianly trained to hit ‘r’ after each mini encounter to refill the gun.

Running around with with the pistol in, say, Half Life 2 goes like this:
“Bang Bang Bang … Reload … Bang Bang Bang Bang … Reload … Bang Bang”

Most games pull the difference in bullets between FULL and CURRENT from your reserve pile of ammo when you reload. In Marathon, one key difference exists in the ammo clip scheme: When you reload your gun you LOSE the bullets that were in your discarded clip.

First off, this more realistic. If I’m ripping the clip out of my gun, while an alien-zombie-demon thing bounds towards me, I don’t have time to collect the three rounds that were in the old clip.

More importantly, this changes the flow of fire and reload dramatically. In an environment where ammunition is a scarce resource (and what post-apocalyptic biohazardous space hulk under siege isn’t?) throwing away perfectly good bullets is stupid and dangerous. But so is running into a room of grenade-hucking shock troopers with only 1/2 a clip left in your SMG.

And so in Marathon you find yourself constantly faced with an interesting choice between immediate efficiency (reload now!) and long term effectiveness (save ‘dem bullets!). A dynamic that I haven’t seen in any game since (not even the System Shock or Deus Ex series both of which would have benefited a great deal, I think).

I really don’t understand why not.