Games are full of patterns. Those patterns train players to do certain things. For years, multiplayer shooters have been training them to reload whenever possible in order to keep their gun magazine full for the next encounter. Now Counter-Strike 2 is going to start punishing players for doing precisely that.
Valve’s tactical shooter is going hardcore and ditching lossless ammo reloads. Going forward, any ammo still in the magazine when you reload will be ditched, just like in real life, forcing players to be more mindful of their actions and treat the game a bit more like a military sim. The company outlined its philosophy on the groundbreaking change in a new blog post:
When you reload in CS2, the leftover ammo in your magazine is dumped back into an essentially endless reserve supply. And so the decision to reload has never offered significant trade-offs—in a safe position with enough time, you might reload after firing a single bullet, or half a mag, or after firing down to empty, and the rest of the round would be unaffected.
We think the decision to reload should have higher stakes, so in today’s update reloading has been redesigned. Now, when you reload, you’ll drop the used magazine and discard all of its remaining ammo. Instead of ‘topping off’ your weapon with a few bullets, a new full magazine will be taken from the reserves whenever you reload.
To make the radical shift a bit easier to manage, Valve is going to give guns extra magazines to compensate. Some weapons will be more forgiving with burning through ammo, while others will reward higher precision and better bullet management. It raises the game’s skill ceiling by giving players another mechanic to garner small advantages from, but it’ll also take some deprogramming for long-time players.
I have over 100 hours in Helldivers 2 and 30 hours in Marathon and still haven’t unlearned my twitchy reload instincts. Both games include weapons where reloading ditches all of the unused ammunition, and frequent situations where that can leave you screwed. Maybe if game developers stopped making their reload animations feel so satisfying it would be easier to stop.
