Hell Let Loose: Vietnam has a familiar voice hiding in its loadout menu. Click on any gun or grenade and you can listen to an audio description voiced by none other than Jonathan Ferguson, Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. Ferguson has become something of a cult figure at the intersection of firearms history and video games, thanks to his detailed breakdowns of video game weapons on YouTube, but he also now plays a part in the development of video games, thanks to the Royal Armouries' consultation service. He’s worked with studios such as Team17, Facepunch, and Rebellion to ensure their weapons are as accurate as possible and avoid commonly-made mistakes, such as getting shotguns completely wrong.

"The most persistent [mistake] that you still occasionally see is shotguns being completely less than lethal, or non-lethal, even, at a set distance," Ferguson tells me, although he does note that “I think a lot of developers have wised up on this.”

It's certainly true that the years of shotguns effectively being little more than loud knives is drawing to a close, across not only mil-sims but blockbusters, too. Both Insurgency: Sandstorm and Red Dead Redemption 2 are notable for their more realistic depictions of shotguns.

"The more and more detail we see incorporated in games, the more they're able to make it resemble reality a bit more,” Ferguson tells me.

There are few people better-equipped to answer a developer’s questions about firearms than Ferguson, who not only reacts to in-game guns for the EXP YouTube channel but is also a gamer himself.

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