Basics
Recoil: In Dirty Bomb recoil simply changes the player’s view. Most guns in Dirty Bomb have a small horizontal drift with a larger vertical drift.
Spread: Bullets land with some variance around the crosshair at the center of the player view. Spread describes the size of the variance which also increases with burst duration.
Demonstration
SMG-9 Stationary Hipfire w/ Red Dots
SMG-9 Stationary ADS no Dots, last two sprays, unlike the rest, are compensated
Comparisons
CS:GO: CS:GO has two recoils, one for the player view and one for the gun. Uncompensated shooting similarly has vertical and horizontal drifts in the player view. Additionally for longer bursts bullets land above the crosshair, hence there is gun recoil which is not always aligned with player view recoil.
Each weapon in CS:GO has fixed recoil patterns but each bullet in a given burst does not leave at exactly the same angle, rather there is spread about the set recoil pattern calculated for each shot.
Call of Duty and BF4: Both games use player view recoil. Recoil patterns appear to not be fixed but weighted in a certain direction (see symthic.com recoil plots).
I decided to look closer at the spray patterns for some weapons after being increasingly frustrated by the random kicking around when firing in ADS. What I found for several weapons is clearly demonstrated in the two SMG-9 videos:
- Sway could be to either direction burst to burst
- Magnitude of vertical and horizontal sway is different burst to burst
- A large vertical and or horizontal kick occurs on unpredictable bullet counts (in the above three hipfire sprays, the first large kick happens after the 13 bullet in spray one, 5th bullet in spray two, and the 3rd bullet in spray three)
My opinion on this is that random spread is fine as this is a fast paced realism shooter so it comes with the territory-- sometimes you sacrifice pure skill-based mechanics for aesthetics. The random recoil on the other hand needs to be way toned down but hopefully removed all together. The reason is that this is already a complex game with respect to aiming. Tracking aim in general is difficult, perhaps only surpassed in difficulty by predictive tracking aim (e.g. grenade launchers), on top of that there are strategies for tracking aim that actually depend on which merc or loadout you are using. Additionally the Merc animations can at times be clunky in side-strafing fights, where side-strafe animations are not correctly displayed and mercs instead float side-to-side which makes reading and responding to enemies unnecessarily difficult. The difficulty in both track aim mechanics and game execution turns yet more frustrating and unrewarding when your tracking aim is spoiled by the unpredictable recoil/view sway. This is also magnified by the long TTK in DB (relative to the shooters mentioned above). I’m struggling a bit to find a good reason to have BOTH random spread and random recoil in DB, so thought I’d open it up to someplace less small than my head.