Games where Shotguns are useful beyond arms' reach?

[TheVampwizimp_v1legacy]

A couple of the shotguns in ME3 were great, namely the N7 Crusader, which fired slugs that could oneshot enemies like a sniper rifle, and the Geth Plasma Shotgun, which could be charged into a massively damaging projectile with good distance (though it actually had a tendency to miss at short range when it shouldn't).

The shotgun in Bioshock had some reasonable range as well. It was actually the perfect trade-off, gameplay-wise, between range and damage. Most shotguns are instant death at close range and water pistols at medium to long range, but Bioshock's shotgun could be used very effectively at medium range and could even pull of some deadly headshots at longer ranges if you got lucky. And the slug rounds were awesome, ragdolling foes at short range and sniping at longer distances.

 

[DrownedAmmet]

The Rainbow Six: Vegas games did shotguns really well, in certain maps they made the game wayy to easy. Just post up behind cover and blindfire away until all the bad guys are dead

Resident Evil 4 is an obvious one too, it doesn't seem to have a maximum range like in other games, tho damage is shit at long ranges at least one shot will hit the dot at long ranges. That's probably my favorite part about RE4 is that the pistol and shotgun are the main weapons. I get kind of bored with modern shooters because most of the time the best weapon you can use is an assault rifle. Which makes sense since they are useful in any situation, but it's nice to see a game where the shotgun is the best weapon, and is treated as the destructive force that it is

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

The Battlefield series. If you put slugs in the thing in Bad Company 2, it had the effective range of an assault rifle. 1 hit kills too. Underbarrel buckshots were worthless, though. If you didn't get the kill on the first shot (and you would have to be right next to them to get it), you'd have to reload it and that would most likely cost you your life.

Call of Duty had fairly effective shotguns even at range. AA-12 or 1887 akimbo, SPAS-12 if you can manage pump-action.

FarCry 3 and 4 have the ridiculously effective SPAS-12. It is the most powerful shotgun and is correctly being used as a semi-auto shotgun. If you hit a vehicle with it, you stand a good change of killing all the occupants. Even if you don't get it on your first shot, you have 8 other chances in rapid succession to do so. Decent range.

Shotguns are typically made to be a situational weapon because of how effective they can be. In order to balance it, sometimes they make them too weak (MW3) in comparison to other weapons at any range or they make the effective range very short (basically every game) but godly. On occasions where shotguns perform close to how they would in real life, you tend to hear complaints about them. People will accept a weapon that has 1 or 2 really good characteristics with related shortcomings (e.g. fires really fast with pinpoint-accuracy but has crap per-bullet damage), but a really good all-rounder that takes some but not too much skill to use? That won't last long.

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

The Rainbow Six: Vegas games did shotguns really well, in certain maps they made the game wayy to easy. Just post up behind cover and blindfire away until all the bad guys are dead

RSV 1 and 2 had awesome shotguns. You could even put scopes on them. Against one target, if you hit them (and they didn't immediately die), they would flinch giving you ample time to get your next and lethal shot in.

And again, the best one of the bunch is the SPAS-12. I think game devs really liked Jurassic Park. Never mind it never killed anything.

Here's [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcuOUBG0Fz0] a video on the SPAS if anyone's curious.

 

[MysticSlayer]

A skilled player could also make the SPAS-12 work.

I actually preferred the SPAS-12 to the AA-12. Part of it was just a preference for the feel of a pump-action shotgun. However, the SPAS-12 also had quite an impressive range where 1-2 shots could kill someone. I always found the AA-12 to be limited to short and potentially medium range. The SPAS-12 felt like a borderline sniper rifle when using Steady Aim.

 

[Souplex]

I really enjoyed the shotguns in Mass Effect 1 and Borderlands. Why the sequels ruined shotguns I'll never know.

 

[wings012]

I kinda want to say Deus Ex and Fallout:New Vegas, but those may have been only with certain types of ammo (sabot rounds in the first, slugs in the second).

I don't remember sabot increasing accuracy, but with enough accuracy/recoil mods - the assault shotgun had an incredibly tight spread.

 

[thenewguy512739]

Quake's single-barreled shotgun. Surprisingly not much spread.

 

[Nuuu]

The Payday 2 Release day Mosconi, before it got (probably rightfully) nerfed in patch 11. It was a stupidly powerful shotgun with ridiculous range and the ability to insta-kill every non-special enemy. It was the sniper before snipers were released.

There was nothing better than taking this long-barreled shotgun and sniping the helmet off a guy from across the map.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Unloved (the Unreal Engine 3 remake, at least) has a double-barreled shotgun with a fairly reasonable spread (most of the fighting takes place in tight quarters, but you can depend on killing the weaker enemies with one shell at the far end of a long hallway). There are also random weapon mods that can tighten the spread even further, almost to the point of turning it into a slug.

 

[the7k]

Hotline Miami and, to a much lesser extent, Hotline Miami 2 had shotguns that were useful at any distance. Granted, the games (usually) took place indoors and as such they're much closer quarters, but shotgun sniping was a legit strat.

 

[Kyrian007]

Maybe we should have listed the games where shotguns AREN'T effective, because in listing the games where they are effective we have covered most of the games I'm familiar with. Is this the thing where because I don't play Call of Duty I've missed a trope. I've played games where shotguns are situational weapons, but they are always hugely effective when used appropriately. Somebody complained about RE 4? Really? The shotgun isn't good enough even though it can take out a room full of zombies, turning all their heads to mush and even killing the headsack dudes with a well placed shot or 2? That's ineffective somehow? Fallout, its an rpg and its all about build. Yeah, for some of my characters a shotgun is completely useless. And for other of my characters a freaking minigun or gatling laser is just shooting confetti, and my shotgun is a guaranteed one or two hit kill. They can take out bears and yaks and tigers in FarCry and only seem to suffer against armored opponents. In a game like FarCry where the physics of a silencer is so misunderstood I'm not sure that the physics of a shotgun are somehow as bad by comparison. Is this really a problem? Does "the shotgun" need a white knight? I don't hunt, I don't own a shotgun, but I've target shot before. Its a lot of fun. But I'm not particularly worried about "underrating" a shotgun. They seem as effective as they need to be for me.

In pen and paper Vampire the Masquerade I played a vampire with a shotgun as his primary weapon. Yeah, birdshot was fairly useless against other vampires. But load that thing with signal flares... and suddenly my nosferatu is "a menace to vampire society."

 

[Ender910_v1legacy]

Insurgency. Insurgency insurgency. Buckshot has a really refreshing effective range and slugs are brutal and quite accurate out to mid range. I've used shotguns to replace assault rifles that way. Even without slugs the shotguns rival SMG's, except there really is zero long-range effectiveness where an SMG round might randomly find someone at 500 yards once in a mag.

I was going to comment about this exact same thing too. Shotguns in that game are stupidly accurate, to the point of where it actually becomes a problem with the weapon class, especially with slugs. You sort of expect a shotgun to be pretty lenient with aim, big cone, buckshot and all, but no, you really have to aim directly at your target or your shots are going right past them. Great for mid range - not great for close range...
Still doesn't save them though, and they're worse than ARs and carbines in just about every single way. Damage, overall accuracy, shots per second, weapon length, reload speed...

Agreed on pretty much everything said by both. Although one correction, damage on shotguns is great, the problem is their abysmal armor penetration, which is why I think I'd usually try to aim for the neck/head, something that's kind of rare for shotguns in most shooters.

 

[fractal_butterfly]

Nobody mentioned Gunman: Chronicles yet? The Half-Life 1 Mod, which later became a standalone game, with all those weapons who had a metric shit-ton of settings?
With the shotgun here, you could adjust the choke and the number of bullets fired on the fly. With the smallest choke setting you could easily cover ranges of 50-100m with full effectiveness.

 

[Aetrion]

The thing is that all weapon ranges are condensed in games. Even assault rifles only fire effectively out to maybe 60-80m in shooters, and the levels will rarely even allow a target to be 300+ meters away.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

Fallout: New Vegas had some decent shotgun ranges (following a patch, that is) with the mid-late game guns like the Hunting Shotgun, and you could load slug or pulse rounds as well to give them a longer range. Problem with 'em though was that the way the damage/defense system worked meant any enemies with even a little armour would cut the damage considerably, though that could be remedied by a perk.

Warframe also has some pretty good shotguns, to the point that some of them can be pretty game-breaking if you mod the reload speeds properly given the close-mid range of the game. The Tigris (hunting shotgun), Hek (semi-auto Shotgun) and Drakgoon (chargable flak-cannon) are all surprisingly long-range, and even the mid-range shotguns like the automatic Sobek or the assault shotgun Strun Wraith have decent ranges. If anything the short-range shotguns tend to be the worst of the lot, being either beam weapons that just stop at their max ranges or don't quite have the level of damage to make up for the loss of range (i.e. the Boar, an automatic close-range shotgun, only has 176 damage, while the Sobek has 350, and the Hek has 515. By the time you get the Boar you should already have the Hek and Sobek, mind).

 

[MHR]

There was already a thread [http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/748] about shotguns about 5 months ago.


http://www.nerfnow.com/comic/748

I found Half-life 2's shotgun to be a shining example of a shotgun done right. Accurate, high damage so you can 1-shot soldiers on hard difficulty with 2 barrels, ammo efficient. It really made the pulse rifle kind of lame by comparison because even at medium range it didn't kill things as fast as the shotgun could, it had an unreliable spread for long-range, and you only had 2 magazines max in reserve making it not even as ammo efficient. The shotgun in Half-Life 1 was only average.

Because the Borderlands series has a lot of random guns, you can end up getting a few with decent accuracy, and some crazy properties like throwing them in the air and have them become little shotgun drones that make passes at the enemy while shooting them. The Torgue shotguns all shot rockets in a spread that did massive damage too.

Looking through my Steam library now, I'm seeing so many games with junky shotguns. I really hate it when games do shotguns wrong. If they don't want the gun to shoot straight, it should be a sawed-off scattergun. Instead, in almost every game, they put in regular shotguns that spread wider than a double-jointed whore.

In Bioshock Infinite you can get a weapon upgrade that increases the bullet spread of the shotgun. I felt insulted.

Bioshock Infinite's Vox Heater shotgun is pretty cool, it has better range then the Comstock shotgun and a wider and more powerful spread that can set enemies on fire(though it has a slower fire rate, smaller clip and takes longer to reload).

Now way dude. That heater was hot garbage. And despite only having one shot before needing to reload, it barely ever 1-shot an enemy unless you were right next to them, and the reserve ammo was a max of like 6 or something. It was pathetic.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

I find the combat shotgun in FO4 to be nicely destructive at relatively decent ranges against humans. The loads of ammo mod gives you some nice alternative ammo types. Shame FO4 dropped NV's ammo system.

On the shotgun note, anyone else watch this channel? Some really weird custom loads.

https://www.youtube.com/user/taofledermaus

 

[Cycloptomese]

Fallout: New Vegas had some decent shotgun ranges (following a patch, that is) with the mid-late game guns like the Hunting Shotgun, and you could load slug or pulse rounds as well to give them a longer range. Problem with 'em though was that the way the damage/defense system worked meant any enemies with even a little armour would cut the damage considerably, though that could be remedied by a perk.

Warframe also has some pretty good shotguns, to the point that some of them can be pretty game-breaking if you mod the reload speeds properly given the close-mid range of the game. The Tigris (hunting shotgun), Hek (semi-auto Shotgun) and Drakgoon (chargable flak-cannon) are all surprisingly long-range, and even the mid-range shotguns like the automatic Sobek or the assault shotgun Strun Wraith have decent ranges. If anything the short-range shotguns tend to be the worst of the lot, being either beam weapons that just stop at their max ranges or don't quite have the level of damage to make up for the loss of range (i.e. the Boar, an automatic close-range shotgun, only has 176 damage, while the Sobek has 350, and the Hek has 515. By the time you get the Boar you should already have the Hek and Sobek, mind).

You beat me to the punch on Warframe. It's worth mentioning that if you put the time into syndicates(Steel Meridian), you can get the Vaykor Hek. It's just like the Hek, but it sports a higher crit chance, base damage, and a really stupid eight round magazine as opposed to the standard Hek's four. I've put about a half a dozen forma in mine and it's pretty much an all purpose death machine from any range.

Edit: I was wrong. It doesn't have higher base damage, but a faster rate of fire.

 

[Poetic Nova]

Both the Striker and Conference Call in Borderlands 2 are at the least best used at medium range.