10 Overpowered Video Game Weapons That Made You Rage Quit
Too good at their job.
Perfect, harmonious balance, that's the dream of a developer when piecing together the landscape for any competitive multiplayer arena.
Such lofty aspirations will never be realised, of course, thanks to the impossibility of predicting player behaviour, but that doesn't mean the alternative has to be a grossly imbalanced hellscape where one emergent weapon combo or poorly-tuned murder tool reigns supreme over all others.
Sanity is a valuable human trait, so why is it that developers seem keen to craft tools seemingly designed to do just that?
How could red flags not have been raised at Epic headquarters when it internally tested Gears of War's human-melting Gnasher shotgun? Did Bungie honestly believe that the unique ability of Halo 2's Plasma Pistol wouldn't be abused?
How, in this reality or the next, did Infinity Ward not cotton on to the fact that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare's standard-issue M16A4 outpaced every other weapon of its class so effortlessly that not running with it essentially amounted to a self-imposed handicap?
Many, not all, of these cheesetastic weapons have since had their effectiveness curbed for the sake of controller and console safety, but documentation of their raw, unaltered forms lives on in the scarred minds of their many victims, never to be forgotten.
Time for a trip down memory lane.
10. M16A4 - Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Believe it or not, Call of Duty's first modern-day outing had a suite of different ordnance types all vying for a spot in your soldier's space-limited loadout, but Call of Duty 4's problem was never a lack of variety.
Rather, unless you fancied gimping yourself in battle, the only logical choice for filling your avatar's hands would be the M16A4, such is its all-encompassing power.
Introducing a highly versatile piece of kit into an otherwise skill-based environment is always bound to cause issues. The M16A4 didn't eliminate that entirely, but it did narrow the gap between top-tier and newcomer thanks to obnoxious aim assist and an inbuilt ability to kill in a single burst regardless of which body part took the brunt of its force.
Infinity Ward opted not to reign in its ferocity through subsequent patches. A mistake if ever we saw one, considering the rifle, to an extent, singlehandedly shaped the meta and invalidated player choice.