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Stuff.tv
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Stuff.tv
Help! I'm a serial reloader in videogames
I have a confession to make: in videogames featuring gunplay, I reload. Excessively. I'm not sure how or when this became a problem, but in bullet-ridden titles like Call of Duty or Apex Legends, I'd down an enemy and immediately mash the reload button on my console controller before they've even hit the floor, no matter my ammo status. Meanwhile, their best friend comes steaming around the corner, catching me like you would your dog with their snout in the biscuit tin, desperately trying to jam my virtual magazine into my virtual firearm. And then sweet revenge is theirs. Yes, yes, I still hear the advice of the late Gaz from Call of Duty (2007) ringing in my ears: 'Remember, switching to your pistol is always faster than reloading.' But you see, I'm the sort of person who can't stand the sight of my ammo counter reading 29 when it could and should be 30. So, I reload. And reload. And reload again. The familiar sight of me hemorrhaging barely empty magazines all over the shop is enough to turn John Wick crimson. Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, England, says I'm not the only one: 'I can only speak to my experience and a couple of friends who've found themselves doing this due to a) time to kill and b) lack of skill where you need most of a mag to kill a player, so you reflexively reload after one burst, which gets you killed if someone is close by when you're in the middle of the reload animation. Play For me, ammo anxiety is very much a real fear. Case in point, when the undead hordes in Resident Evil 2 Remake are bearing down on my tasty brain lobes, and I have the closest creeper's noggin perfectly lined in my sights, but suddenly, 'click.' I'm out. Cue my gratuitously gory demise with that heavily unsubtle 'You are Dead' message. No, I say. I'd never let the lack of a lead projectile accelerated by igniting gunpowder be my untimely demise. So, if I fell an enemy, I reload. If I'm testing a game's physics by shooting a window out, I reload. If I nudge the R2 trigger mistakenly and let loose a rogue bullet, I reload. In fact, the only time I'm not reloading is when I'm firing. Then, I'll reload. Of course, this gets me into all sorts of trouble 'twixt-gunfight. When you're a level 1 noob, re-magazining takes an eternity when there are no skill points banked under reload speed. And as I'm unsheathing my next mag before glacially placing it into my firearm with all the grace of a double decker rolling down a cliff, I wonder if my foes die of laughter before I succumb to lead poisoning. Of course, common sense dictates that the ideal time and place to reload is between bullet trading sessions, in plenty of cover, away from adversaries. When I'm doing it, I'm out in the open and surrounded, so I do the 'dance.' An erratic choreography of circling frenziedly across a 3-foot ballroom, optimistically dodging airborne lead and waiting impatiently for my reload to complete. It rarely ends well. Jonathan has some ideas on how to help counteract this phenomenon: 'The only ways I know of to avoid that would be to slow the pace of the game itself, or implement semi-realistic ammunition management. So a reload over half full means you drop a load of ammunition or fully realistic where you end up with a load of half full mags later in the map/mission, which isn't ideal if you end up in a protracted gunfight. And despite my damage per second and K:D ratios drastically diminished, there's almost no reason to reload so compulsively. Except for when your mag isn't full, and you hit a spare ammo pickup, maxing out your reserve ammo without topping up your mag, losing out on precious bullets in the process. We call that disposophobia, or a fear of waste. So there's that… Forgive me, Gaz.
Yahoo
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
10 years later, Dying Light's night time psychological warfare is still one of the strongest hooks in horror gaming history
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A digital watch has never been more threatening than in 2015's Dying Light. Picture it: you're crouched on a rooftop after losing track of time, and the staccato alarm emanating from Kyle Crane's wrist feels like a chastisement. Pained howls pierce the darkened sky. Nightfall is here. You are out of options, out of time, and out of daylight. The fear is paralysing – and that's the whole point. Dying Light's harnessing of player psychology is part of what cements it as one of the best horror games of all time. Like Pavlov's dog, upon hearing those sharp digital beeps, the player is obediently trained to break out in a cold, dreadful sweat. The watch is a harbinger of doom, alerting us to the fact that you do not want to be caught out on the streets of Harran at night. Immediately, it's fight or flight: do I stay put and finish my mission, or run for the nearest pool of UV light? It's still an underused feature in horror games in 2025, but looking back a decade later, Dying Light's day and night cycle truly is the crux of what makes it the stuff of nightmares. Bloodied legacy Dying Light: The Beast wants to be "the ultimate zombie adventure", and it only exists because Techland's DLC plans leaked "Night is coming." The on-screen text marks the terrifying home stretch at the tail end of Air Drop, the first Dying Light story mission that brings us face to face with a Volatile. Tower resident and ally Judy's voice crackles over the radio receiver, and her words are anything but encouraging. "The nightmares are walking. Don't let them see you." What comes next is one of the most stomach-churning chase sequences I've ever experienced, firmly in line with anything you'd expect from one of the best survival horror games, as a low level Crane has no choice but to run for his life from the most dangerous undead in the game. You cannot kill them; all you can do is go. It's true that danger is shambling around every corner in Dying Light, no matter the time of day. But while some of the other best zombie games are set in a state of perma-darkness (like Resident Evil 2 Remake) or feature scripted time shifts (like The Last of Us), Techland uses time differently. It's a dynamic tool, intended to psych the player out by creating a palpable sense of imminent danger, higher stakes, and ramped up difficulty. There is so much buildup around the terrors of the moonlit hours that, save for one or two missions, interacting with them at all is almost completely at your discretion. So why would anyone risk it? Because there are actual benefits to risk-taking. There's no illusion of danger in Dying Light – the Volatiles are stronger, faster, more relentless than regular zombies, and you are more likely to run into a world of hells when you venture into their dens. But by having only one or two main mission segments where exploring after nightfall is unavoidable, thereby relegating the majority of night time quests to optional side content, the inference is that it's your call to avoid it. ...nothing quite compares to the simple yet omnipresent fear of Kyle Crane stepping out into the gloaming... The optionality of interacting with Dying Light's strongest horror moments is cyclical. That was certainly the case for me when I replayed Dying Light recently; I avoided going out at night at all costs, which in turn made the night scarier and scarier. Darkness was a constant source of anxiety, prompting me to weigh up whether I'd have enough time for one more mission before the telltale watch alarm would spell out my fate. Ultimately, this turned me into just another resident of Harran; I was playing it super safe. It just goes to show how easy it is to get swept up in Dying Light's narrative and lore, with the time cycles feeding into the semblance of Harran as an ever evolving, ever shifting entity with deadly peaks and troughs. On one hand, it makes us feel more powerful when the sun comes out. On the other, we constantly fear the dying light above us. The utility of day and night cycles in horror games – and the psychological warfare that can be waged against the player's sense of self-preservation through implementing them correctly – is a surprisingly rare find, even now. Only 2007's Stalker: Shadow of Chornobyl comes to mind immediately, with The Forest and Darkwood no doubt taking inspiration from both it and Dying Light later in 2017. Sure enough, Dying Light 2 doubled down on the potentiality for night time dangers by implementing an immunity meter, with Aiden's exposure to darkness increasing the likelihood of his transformation into a Volatile himself. Still, nothing quite compares to the simple yet omnipresent fear of Kyle Crane stepping out into the gloaming, knowing full well he's not fully capable of fighting back. With Dying Light: The Beast potentially just months away from launch, replaying the first game feels all the more exciting in 2025. Dying Light marked a pivot in zombie fiction as we once knew it, and with such strong material under its belt ready to be pushed to new extremes, I've no doubt that Techland is set to impress us once again with Crane's long-awaited last hurrah. Check out all the upcoming horror games set to scare you in 2025.
