>>6051743For the purposes of guns IN GAMES (as opposed to firearms handling in real life) I suggest using
imfdb.org , eg for your game anon
https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/S.T.A.L.K.E.R.:_Shadow_of_ChernobylYou can look up gun stats on wikipedia or as this anon
>>6051848mentioned, youtube live fire demonstrations (you probably need to resort to this anyway, because in many games you may feature unusual, rarely accessible or uncommon / antiquated historical firearms).
I have zero knowledge of firearms I just play A LOT of first person shooters. The way I think of it is almost like you are a "casting director" for guns. Think of say some iconic characters, heroes, villains from videogames in films, it helps if you think of the most cliche or archetypical ones etc. What sort of guns do they use? eg maybe you think of the agents, Agent Smith in the Matrix, or Kate Beckinsdale with her vampire / Lycan hunting machine pistol; maybe you are thinking of something more realistic like a Michael Mann film, the bank heist / highway shootout in Heat or Tom Cruise doing his hitman thing in Collateral. Maybe your game is historical so you want matchlocks or arquebuses or Wild West or ww1 era guns etc. So you can find film and videogame references and look up what they equipped characters with as loadouts.
Another consideration from videogames is just clip size, attachments etc. You probably don't want to start the player off with something too powerful with a massive magazine capacity. (Think the Doom 1993 progression, pistol, shotgun, chaingun... etc)
You also want a good spread of firearms for different situational roles eg think counterstrike pistol, smg, assault rifle, sniper rifle, he grenade, tactical / flashbang grenade etc
>How do you differentiate guns in a narrative rpg, they all shoot bullets? Isn't an assault rifle always more desirable than a handgun / smg?So if you play tactical shooters, you know they model ergonomics. eg if you are shooting close to a wall or corner window with an awkward long rifle eg FN FAL vs SA58, you have problems with handling (in some cases, you literally cannot extend or shoot the gun in confined space). So you could imagine an rpg scene framing - do you explore the wide open ruined hallway or crawl through the abandoned sewer tunnel etc with different firearm handling rules
