Helldivers II does this and it really changed the way I play. I stopped spamming the reload button
Been watching CS2 tournaments since summer 2025 again. Pros kind of already do not reload so often. Most of the time it is in the end of the round when stakes are high with 1v1 and reloading would reveal your position to an enemy. I have seen so many last bullet shots and have heard so many “low ammo while shooting” sounds.
Also, funny how community is divided on this one. I would say that it is not about reality. It is about additional mechanics for pros and alike. It probably wont change fundamentals of the game.
I think it’s Insurgency that keeps track of what’s left in each mag. So if you cycle through all your mags, you go back to the first with however many rounds you had left. Which is realistic and sucks when you got 3 mags with less than 5 rounds each; changed how I engaged fights and reloaded.
Sandstorm also gives you the option to just throw away the magazine entirely, but you’ll get a faster reload that way.
Arma also does this, I think since Arma 2
Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis is the oldest game I know that uses it.
I’m pretty sure it’s always been part of VBS, but Flashpoint is the first commercial game made with it afaik.
Knife/Zeus meta emerges?
this is more hardcore than Insurgency. The replaced magazine is just thrown away, not saved to inventory for later use. Although yes rounds in CS could be very sort. I feel like secondary weapon/pistols would also get an increase use.
*Mag
*Magazine
*Clipazine
*MagaClip
*MAHAclip
*clippie
From a rando commenter it’s annoying enough, but a game Dev? Come on, it’s the 21st century
*reticle
apparently the wording used by Valve themselves is clip
Yeah and it’s wrong.
Depends on the weapon. Maybe they were only talking about Garands.
But also civilians aren’t going to know or care to learn the difference. Reading the article you can see the author swaps back and forth so it’s just a case of not knowing the difference.
Nice! Really wish this was the standard in most FPS games.
I have such a habit of reloading after every encounter, this will kill me
Same, to a point where I dipped back into Doom Eternal the other night and kept using the flame belcher on nothing.
That’s why I wish “realistic” had been the standard all along. By now, I would intuitively know how many shots I have left and whether or not a reload makes sense.
It’s a weird mechanic. In real life you could sit and recombine the ammo back into magazines. So you don’t actually lose the ammo.
Not in the middle of a fight.
So it doesn’t have a place in every single game, but in almost every game you could go find a safe place and do it. It’s not realistic to lose the ammo, so what’s the most realistic?
In real life you could slap that mag back in and use it even… so why lose the ammo?
Tactical FPS games (Tarkov, Ready or Not, Insurgency come to mind) have the option to fast reload by dropping the magazine (double tap R) or taking a little more time to add the partial magazine to the back of the rotation.
In Tarkov, magazines are individual containers where you can add or remove bullets through the inventory menu.
Games like Counter Strike are timed and high pressure. The round has a 2 minute timer, and if you were to take the time to combine your mags, you would most assuredly be killed before you were done.
The question here is whether to risk running out of ammo in your mag before you’ve won the next encounter, or if you should instead dump the mag with any ammo left over and possibly run out of total ammo before the end of the round.
If you were in the same scenario in real life, you would have to consider the same thing. You don’t have time to combine mags, so do you dump it for short-term safety, or do you count your bullets and hope you don’t run out mid-firefight?
It’s true, I’ve always said that a lack of realism really sours my enjoyment of blasting the face off of space demons from hell
I really wish so in serious ones like CS, but something in me still gravitates towards silly arena shooters that we now sorely lack.
Niceee
It’s like that in hardcore mode on BF6. Standard mode just has all the ammo available.
Why not just have a limited amount? No one in a fire fight is manually loading a mag unless shit has gone REALLY sideways.
It’s not like you’re reloading a magazine. It’s more like you take the magazine that’s in the gun, dropping it on the ground (including the ammo that was remaining in the magazine) and loading a new full magazine.
That part in parenthesis is what’s new. Previously, that ammo would have been returned to your reserve ammo.
That actually makes more sense than what I was thinking this said. I don’t play many war games, so thanks for informing me!
So is there an option to pick it back up again or is it just lost to the bits after that?
It’s just gone
Now, when you reload, you’ll drop the used magazine and discard all of its remaining ammo.
https://steamcommunity.com/games/CSGO/announcements/detail/532126482488623354
Gone. Counter-Strike rounds are fairly short and strategic anyhow
This is a thing in STALKER. you also have to reload by filling each magazine individually. It adds so much to the experience
Nothing a mod can’t solve.
Btw, why don’t game devs just dump balancing details in a config file?
No more reloading the Negev after popping a couple rounds off? Boooo!
