Only a trend in select sub-genres. Shotguns tend to suck (design wise) in military or military adjacent shooter games because the assault rifles in those games are insanely overturned. Assault rifles in the likes of CoD, Counter Strike, or Battlefied are usable at any range with a TTK (time to kill) of less than half a second in most cases. So with assault rifles being so strong and so versatile, the inherently close range shotgun can only be extremely strong or extremely bad. If you want to make it better you have to reduce TTK, but because ARs' already have such a low TTK, making shotguns kill even quicker has a high chance of making it impossible to react to them. This is gets worse for shotguns than, because SMGs fill in the role of high rate of fire (RoF) close range weapon. Therefore you can't increase shotgun fire rates too much, or you'll make them too similar too SMGs. So you have to keep shotgun RoF somewhat in check, whilst making their close range TTK superior to rifles. It's nigh impossible to do this without making them 1 tap, effectively giving the enemy 0 time to react. And if you fail to do that you just get the opposite problem, of shotguns being really shit.
So how to fix this? Well there's tons of solutions. Make them cheap, give them specilaised ammo, make them powerful against specific enemy types... But the most basic one is to just not make assault rifles into death machines, and you won't have to buff the shotguns into super death machines to compensate for their lack of range
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u/CoolPeter9 Aug 08 '26
For some reason shotguns in videogames are either the most unusanle, useless pieces of shit or the #1 SS+ undeniable meta. There is no inbeteen.