Working so much around program code dealing with these things you would think I would have brought this up sooner, but it never really crossed my mind to bring it up until now. Realism in video games is useful to provide a point of reference, to make things understandable. Too much realism and the game is no longer fun - unless that's the entire point of the game - and too little leaves it abstract. When dealing with firearms it tends to be fairly simple - draw a line from point A to point B, and if it hits something, hurt it. Shotguns just draw a spread of multiple lines. That's how it's pretty much been since shotguns became a thing in video games. Even older 2D games where the bullets were a flying sprite the effect was the same, just that it took some time for the bullets to go across the screen.
Real firearms are more complex, with bullets having a mass, velocity, caliber, trajectory, air resistance, etc. Ballistics involves a lot of math. Shotguns behave even more complex than that. A real shotgun has its pellets encased in a wadding - a plastic, or in the old days cloth, cup that protects the barrel from wear and acts as a gas seal to make sure the entire payload is sent out the barrel as efficiently as possible. This wadding separates from the pellets after a few meters, and only then do they begin to disperse. Until that point they all act like a single mass. It's something that really isn't a concern in fantasy games like Doom or Quake, but I think about more so-called "realistic" games - especially hunting games - and wonder why nobody has picked up on this, or if anyone actually has. It's not a genre I follow, nor do I tend to play military shooters outside of Wolfenstein, but that again falls into the fantasy realm. I'm curious - what are your thoughts and experiences with this? Has anyone played these kinds of games and if so, how do they relate to this?
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