A Deep Dive in Mechanics - Active Reload

Adding gameplay to the mundane.

Introduction

The Active Reload is a very clever little piece of game design which I like a lot. It was first introduced in the Gears of War, to the best of my knowledge, and has remained a part of their gameplay since then. It adds some gameplay and tension to a part of the game that is usually just an inactive action that you wait through.?

It is a very simple little timing challenge which, in isolation, is very easy and basically no challenge at all, but in the context of doing it during the stressful situation you will find yourself in during the action scenes, it provides just the right amount of risk/reward to the Player.

Had it been any more involved or complex than it is, it would run the risk of just being annoying instead of adding to the gameplay, as it is something that you do constantly in the game.

What is it?

This is a little mini-game that appears every time you reload a weapon in the Gears of War series. It is quite optional, but gives some clear benefits if you do participate and succeed at it: the reload is much faster, and if you hit the “sweet spot” during the mini-game, you will also get a damage boost .?

Any time you reload, either manually or by running out of ammo in your gun, this little mini-game will play out, but whether or not you participate is up to you as the Player.

How does it work?

There are four important pieces involved in this feature, all seen in the UI above:

• The Progress bar: The bar stretching below the ammo and weapon information.
• The Timing marker: The white vertical line that moves from the left to the right.?
• The Success zone: The gray transparent zone in the bar.
• The “Sweet Spot”: The small and solid white zone.

Any time you reload in the game, all of these HUD elements will appear, and? the timing marker will start to progress from the left to the right of the bar at a set speed. If the Player does nothing further at this point and just lets everything play out, a normal reload action and animation will play out, much like it would in any other game, and the reload action will be finished once the timing marker reaches the rightmost side of the bar.

The timing marker moves at a speed of X (how fast it is varies on which gun you are currently reloading).

The Reward

The Player can choose to take a minor risk to speed up the reload action significantly by pressing the reload button again when the timing marker is within the Success zone. This will greatly speed up the reload, more or less skipping the rest of the time left on the Progress bar.

This means that the time to reload will be X (default reload speed for this weapon) multiplied by how far along the Progress bar the Timing marker is. If a gun would take 2 seconds to reload normally and you trigger the success at 47%, the reload time would be 2 * 0.47 = 0.94 seconds, which is significantly faster.

The Risk

If the Player messes up the timing and presses reload again either too early or too late, the reload will instead take much longer than if they had just let the reload progress normally without intervention, hence the risk.

In this case the design doesn't seem to use multipliers to control the penalty for failure, but rather having it so that the reload action starts over from the beginning, while also playing a slower version of the animation than the default one. This animation has the gun jamming or otherwise malfunctioning until the Player character manages to resolve it.

So, the time to reload on a failure would look like this: X (default time) * % of Progress Bar + Y (new reload action/animation). Using the same example as above, but saying that 47% is outside of the success zone, and the new animation is 3 seconds long would mean that it would take 3.94 seconds to reload instead of a flat 2 seconds or 0.94 on a success. This is significantly longer, especially when you are actively fighting enemies.

The Critical Success

If the Player manages to hit the “Sweet Spot” (the very small opaque white part of the bar), they will get the reward of a faster reload, just as with a normal success, but they will also get a bonus reward: any ammo that will be added to the magazine by this reload will deal extra damage. The ones that aren’t replaced will remain at normal damage level.

This gives the Player an incentive to wait as long as possible before reloading to maximize the amount of shots with extra damage they can deal out. This will also most likely increase the tension the Player will feel to get it right.

Why do I like this design?

I think this design is pretty damn brilliant for how deceptively simple it is; it uses a very simple mechanic in a clever way to give a previously passive action like reloading your weapons some bonus tension and gameplay.

The benefits are just rewarding enough for you to risk it and use the system, while still not gameplay affecting enough that you can’t enjoy the game without it. This is great for people who are not very familiar with playing games to begin with, where adding a system like this as a mandatory part would be far too tricky to ask of them as they are already struggling with just playing the game to begin with.

This is a system that doesn’t raise the skill floor to make it inaccessible for new Players or people with accessibility issues, but it does raise the skill ceiling for those that want to play the game at a higher level.

I also really enjoy that each gun has its own speed and placement of the different zones on the Progress bar for two reasons:

• It fits the “lore” of the world quite well, as any time you pick up a new gun, your character will not be familiar with it and its inner workings, making them more prone to make mistakes with it. Over time as you use it more and more, the timing for that Sweet Spot critical success will be ingrained so well that you won’t even need to look at the UI anymore. It helps reinforce the experience that both your character and you as the Player has gained throughout the adventure.

• It gives the different guns a unique character. For example, the Sweet Spot for the Sniper Rifles is extremely small and hard to hit, which makes a lot of sense, since it will get the biggest benefit of the extra damage due to its low magazine size. Weapons that are more common and with higher ammo counts tend to have an easier Sweet Spot to hit. This also fits well with the “lore” again, as you are Playing as soldiers, and they would surely be experienced with using these weapons already.

I also like how this system makes me alter the way I play games in a subtle way without me thinking about it consciously; in most shooter games I play, I am one of those people who reloads after every time I fire my weapons so that I will always have a maxed-out magazine for the next time I fire. While Playing the Gears of War games, I don't do that - I instead wait for as long as possible so that I will get the biggest benefit for (hopefully) nailing that Sweet Spot reload.

There are other games that sort of "force" this behavior by making you lose all the ammo that is left in the magazine when reloading, and I do not like that at all - that feels like a punishment to me, even though it does make sense realistically. With the Active Reload, it alters my behavior to the same thing, but now I instead feel rewarded, and thefeore clever, for doing so.

Conclusion

So, to conclude this first Deep Dive I have made on here, I would like to say that these fairly minor seeming designs can have a pretty big effect on how a game plays and what character it has when compared to other games in the same genre.

I feel like the active reload often gets overlooked when talking about the Gears of War series, probably because it did so many other good things too - more or less popularizing cover systems, a very unique multiplayer mode (of which I don’t have a lot experience) and, of course, putting a chainsaw on a gun.

I’m kind of surprised that the active reloads isn’t something that has been more widely adopted to other games, at least not as far as I am aware. It wouldn’t even necessarily have to be used for reloads, but for any minor little thing you perform often in tense situations.

I think the fact that this system is more or less unchanged from the first Gears of War (all pictures in this article were taken from Gears of War Ultimate Edition) to the latest release, which is Gears 5 at the time of writing, says a lot to me about how successful of a design it was.

I hope this deep dive has been interesting and perhaps given you another view on how even small and seemingly simple designs can have a big effect on a game.

//Jocke