| abstract
| - An FPS may boast a variety of original weaponry with some fairly creative names, but when it comes right down to it, there are effectively less than twenty different weapons in every single FPS game ever made. This is mostly because FPS guns are mostly based off standard Real Life weapons, which aren't exactly bursting with variety. (note that this also applies to other FPS-like genres:)
* Knife: Melee attack used as a last resort. Sometimes, this is just a punch, kick and/or swipe with another weapon's butt, and an actual knife is upgraded to Chainsaw status. In order to compensate for its notorious uselessness, many newer games give it stealthy instant kills or encourage you to break stuff with it. Frequently it also has the ability to let you run faster while it is equipped, since you're not carrying anything heavy in your hand, and it's not like you're carrying anything else. Often used for Cherry Tapping.
* Chainsaw: Melee weapon of outstanding power and coolness, but actual usefulness varies from game to game. While an actual chainsaw is the original, any melee weapon that's designed to compete with the rest of one's arsenal (even if it's your only one) fits the definition.
* As more and more games incorporate melee attacks using guns, this is quickly becoming Discredited, except where Rule of Cool is concerned.
* Pistol: Weak beginning weapon with plentiful ammo. In many FPS games, often for balance purposes, the pistol will be both more accurate and more lethal than an automatic weapon shooting the same (or more powerful) caliber. In many others, however, the pistol will be an Emergency Weapon, used only when you're out of ammo for everything else. Oftentimes in the latter situation, the pistol will be given unlimited ammo and take the place of the knife. Also tends to be the only weapon that can be silenced or usable underwater.
* Revolver: Sometimes called a magnum, this is usually the larger, more powerful counterpart to the regular pistol, capable of killing most enemies in one or a few shots. Can alternatively be a more modern Hand Cannon like a Desert Eagle. Sometimes, it will function as a dinky Marksman Gun or even a sniper rifle in its own right.
* Dual Pistols: An occasional upgrade to the otherwise weak pistol is to let you wield two of them For Massive Damage.
* Shotgun: Deals a lot of damage up close, but nearly useless at long range (with a few exceptions -- early games like Doom in particular) and slow to reload (although it almost always lets you 'top off' its ammo, even in games without One Bullet Clips). Even cooler when cut down to size.
* Super Shotgun: Occasionally found as a more potent alternative to the basic shotgun. In this case, the basic shotgun will often avert Short-Range Shotgun by having a more realistic spread, while this weapon will play the trope straight. Normally either a double-barreled or an automatic shotgun. In old-school first-person shooters, both the single and double shotgun usually have enough ammo so you'll rarely or never run out.
* Automatic weapon: Shoots fast and has lots of ammo. While they range in size from tiny SMGs through assault rifles to hulking machine guns and gatling guns, they tend to be less accurate than a pistol and do less damage per slug no matter how large they are.
* Old-school first-person shooters usually have at least one which shoots hitscan projectiles and one which shoots fast but non-hitscan projectiles. The classic-style automatic weapons can include
* Nailgun: Rapid fire and powerful, but shoots relatively slow and visible projectiles.
* Chaingun: A powerful chaingun or minigun. Chugs ammo like nothing else and usually takes a while to spin up, but absolutely devastates everything you point it at. Also tends to be heavy and recoil-prone. Often suffers accuracy issues.
* Lightning Gun: Creates a focused, sustained lightning bolt of death. Powerful, but ammo will be scarce and incompatible with other weapons.
* In attempts to follow guns more realistically, games may have their automatics follow this pattern:
* Assault Rifle: Likely to not have mobility penalties or not very heavy ones, is rather balanced in usefulness, and may be the most plentiful weapon in the game.
* Submachine Gun: Likely has no movement penalties, but suffer from range and magazine issues forcing them to be relied on only in closer ranges. If a shotgun is in the game, the shotgun will tend to beat the submachine gun within a certain range (in which they usually inflict a One-Hit Kill), and the submachine gun will likely beat the shotgun outside of that range.
* Machine Gun: Will probably have movement penalties disallowing the user to run toward their enemy and shoot them, and reload slowly, but have large magazines and powerful stats which will allow their users to mow down enemies that run into their sights easily.
* Grenades: Can be either thrown by hand or launched from a weapon. Pipe bombs, bundles of dynamite, etc. fall under this category. Grenades are also the most likely weapon to have side-effects (fire, gas, flashbang, cryo, EMP, etc.). Timed 'nades can often be "cooked" (held for a few seconds after pulling the pin) for better timing. If anything in the game has a physics simulation, it'll be these first, and ragdolls close after. Grenades are a prime way to deal with campers. Usually does Splash Damage.
* Mines: Dropped where you are, or sometimes thrown to stick to walls. Explode messily. Most mines are proximity mines, which explode when an enemy gets close enough. Players can often trigger the explosions as well; in multiplayer, Hilarity Ensues. Other types include remote mines, which require the player to trigger the explosion via a handheld detonator, and timed mines which automatically detonate after a specified time. Hybrid timed mines even more with grenades and you get the Sticky Bomb, which bounces around until it touches an enemy, which it then sticks to. Usually does Splash Damage.
* Demolition packs: like a mine, but always manual triggered, and ludicrously powerful. The weapon of choice for destroying parked vehicles or mission objectives.
* Marksman Gun: While not as powerful as a full Sniper Rifle (though it usually has a simple scope) or rapid-fire as an Automatic, this selective fire gun has enough punch to kill in one headshot and groups tight enough to land them all in skilled hands, while its firing rate and mag size allow many consecutive kills. Most historical FPS fill this role with a semiautomatic rifle, such as the M1 Garand.
* Crossbow: Distinguished by a slower projectile, and usually requires the player to compensate by aiming higher. Could be quieter than standard guns, able to fire a variety of different bolts such as non-lethal or elemental ones, or they could be more precise than guns. Also, you will almost never be able to recover ammo, and you have an abnormally high chance of wielding preposterously rare repeating crossbows. Longbows are reserved for a true Badass, usually with Native American influences.
* Sniper Rifle: A powerful rifle that needs careful aiming, but can kill from a great distance. Usually has a scope and/or a Laser Sight. Also tends to have limited ammo available. In more modern incarnations, to prevent a particularly good shot of a player from dominating everyone else far too easily, using a Sniper Rifle may leave the user extremely vunerable to anything that they aren't aiming at already due to being slowed down or requiring it to get into position in some way leaving its user vunerable when not already prepared to fire, or slow fire rates making it unlikely to kill many players quickly at once where other guns can do so much more easily.
* Rail Gun or Gauss Rifle: Capable of overpenetration, this weapon fires right through people, vehicles, and sometimes even walls. In short, an up-gunned Sniper Rifle. In the latter case, it usually comes with some way to see through walls. Typically leaves a brightly colored trail behind (caused by the sheer speed of the projectile ionizing the oxygen in air, which then converts into blueish ozone), exposing the shooter immediately upon firing. Its lack of stealth is a trade-off for its tremendous firepower.
* Rocket Launcher: A powerful weapon with limited ammunition. In most cases, it's basically a more accurate version of the Grenade, exploding on contact with solid surfaces or enemies. Do not fire in close quarters. Some games, however, let you Rocket Jump, and some encourage it (Team Fortress 2, for example). In manuals, it's common to warn a reader to not use it up close, even if that warning is not present for other weapons in the game, even if they can do more damage. Encouraged to be fired near the target's feet (rather than directly at his body) to deal splash damage. In more realistic games, rocket launcher can have one to few shots with relatively long reloading time but the projectiles are fast and leave a powerful explosion. In classic ones, it's possible to fire tens of rockets without needing to reload but in return, the rockets are relatively slow and have an explosion radius of about a meter.
* Missile Launcher: A version of the Rocket Launcher with lock-on ability, sometimes useless against anything but vehicles.
* Grenade Launcher: A large gun that fires explosive shells. These rounds usually fly in an arc, giving them a limited range but allowing the player to hit enemies behind cover. Sometimes your grenades bounce off walls, allowing for kills around corners as well, though it also allows for occasional accidents where it bounces off a wall and ends up coming right back to you and blowing you up. May be the cheaper, more common alternative to the rocket launcher. Often appears as a secondary fire function for assault rifles. Usually does Splash Damage.
* Flamethrower: A medium-range weapon that slowly kills foes by lighting them on fire. While Real Life military flamethrowers operate more like pneumatic squirtguns that propel an arcing stream of gluey napalm over 120 feet away, they are typically portrayed as atomizers that jet out a hazardously inaccurate cloud of burning aerosol for about 30 feet (this isn't their fault though, since they're just imitating Hollywood).
* Energy Gun: Can be charged before firing to increase its effect. Very often is just a cosmetic variation of one of the above, with increased damage and decreased ammunition availability. If any weapon in the game can recharge its own ammo over time, this is the one.
* BFG: Extremely slow, and chews up a lot of ammo (or has very little ammo to begin with,) but annihilates everybody in the room.
* Target Designator: A signal flare, laser designator, homing beacon or other tool used to mark targets for air strikes, Kill Sat strikes, or other massive damage from above.
* Gimmicky Weapon: A peculiar weapon that operates more on the Rule of Funny than any practical usage. Like Duke Nukems shrink-ray and freeze-ray, Unreal Tournaments translocator and link gun, Doom 3s soul cube, Portals portal gun, Half-Life 2s gravity gun, Battlefield 2142s EMP grenades and countless Grappling Hook Pistols. Often helps in puzzle solving, sometimes to the extent of being a Magic Tool.
* Utility Weapon: A gun which is mainly there for the afformentioned puzzle solving.
* Secondary options: Simply put, things you can do with the weapon in addition to its primary fire and method of killing. Not to be confused with scopes, silencers attached or different kinds of (lethal) ammo, as it is still the same weapon being utilized in the same way, aided toward a certain role. Examples include grenade launcher (frequently to assault rifles) or bayonets attachments, or just plain hitting something with the weapon.
* Gun Turret: A very powerful, rapid-fire, high-accuracy weapon, usually with unlimited ammo. Would be perfect and utterly overpowered if it wasn't bolted down in a fixed location (sometimes facing a fixed direction only, giving it a limited area of fire). Expect More Dakka, maybe even a minigun. When you see this gun, prepare for a scripted ambush.
* A recent trend in shooter games with superhuman protagonists (Halo 3, Gears of War, WH40k: Space Marine) is to give the player the option of tearing the turret off its stand and carrying it around. It maintains its power, fire rate and accuracy whilst becoming portable, but sacrifices its infinite ammo for a finite number of rounds in return.
* A Sentry Gun is like the above, but it does the shooting without a player present. Both of these provide a valuable game balance, by letting a small number of defenders fixed in place cover an area against superior numbers, thus allowing the bulk of the team to take the field for offense. Some games may try to spice things up by adding a few others, which will usually be modified versions or combinations of one of the above. Alternatively, they'll try to come off as original by giving genre thematic names to some of the weapons, like calling the Flamethrower a "Thermal Destroyer" or the Pistol a "Chi Blast" -- but when it comes right down to it, it's really all the same. This is arguably taken to its extreme in the Time Splitters series, which has the same basic weapons with variations from different eras (for example there's the Tommy Gun, the Soviet S47, the SBP90 Machinegun and the Plasma Autorifle). In the wake of Doom, almost every FPS had a shotgun or shotgun equivalent with a cool reload animation that was basically the standard weapon for most players. These days, however, shotguns are generally treated as specialist items that should only be used for close-up attacks on soft targets, since the pellets (shotguns almost never use slugs in computer games) spread out over much wider distances than they would in reality. The traditional order of weapon inventory is: knife - pistol - shotgun - machinegun - grenades - rocket-launcher - various unusual weapons - BFG, with each new weapon typically rendering all others totally useless. In many shooters, especially older titles, you can easily carry every one of these weapons in your Hyperspace Arsenal. However, many games these days offer unique or limited inventories that make this system impossible. Some FPS games will mix up the order of effectiveness. For instance, the pistol in Halo is arguably the most effective weapon in the game, despite it being the first weapon you receive. Similarly, the gravgun in Half-Life 2 is possibly the most useful weapon in the game but is one of the first you receive in Episodes One and Two. (In Half-Life 2 itself, it's the fifth of nine.) One other way of mixing things up (especially in multiplayer games, which tend to involve getting killed and respawning with the basic peashooter frequently) is to let you use two weak weapons to make one decent weapon. Most class-based FPS games, such as Team Fortress 2 or Star Wars Battlefront have an interesting variation on Standard FPS Guns; character classes are given the roles of the weapons (as well as the weapons themselves). For example, in Team Fortress 2, the Pyro fulfills the flamethrower role and the Demoman is armed exclusively with grenades and mines. Examples of Standard FPS Guns include:
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