Cooldown

Not to be confused with Cooling down.

Cooldown is, in numerous video games, the minimum length of time that the player needs to wait after using an ability before they can use it again.

One can think of cooldown as the reload time and firing rate of weapons. For example, a machine gun has very fast firing rate, so it has a very low cooldown between shots. Comparatively, a shotgun has a long reload/cooldown time between each shots. Cooldown also can be used to 'balance' a weapon such as a turret-mounted machine gun having infinite ammunition, since it can only sustain continuous fire until reaching a threshold at which the weapon would have to cool down (hence the term) before it could be fired again.

In design terms, cooldown can also be thought of as an inverted 'casting time' where instead of requiring a wait time before using an ability, cooldown may replace casting time and put the wait after the ability is activated. This creates a new dimension to the balancing act of casting speed versus power: "lower cooldown, faster cast, but weaker strength" versus "higher cooldown, slower cast, but greater strength." This sort of mechanic is integral to such games as World of Warcraft, where cooldown management is key to higher-level play and various abilities deal with cooldown (for example, cooldown reduction or immediately finishing cooldown on certain abilities).

From the technical point of view, cooldown can also be used to assert control over frequency of cast (for spamming) in order to maintain a fluid frame rate and ping. For example, in the game Diablo II, cooldown was added in the form of a patch to several graphically and CPU intensive spells (blizzard, frozen orb, hydra, etc.) to solve the problem of extreme lag caused by players spamming these spells in multiplayer.

In Fighting games like the Street Fighter series, cooldown refers to the time a character has before they can perform another action after having performed one, which is counted in Frames. Greater attacks like "Supers" and "Desperation Attacks" that also consume energy from an in-game meter also carry a lengthy cooldown. Because of this mechanic, it requires strategic use of skills to make sure the opponent cannot immediately counter the player during their cooldown phase of an attack, since it leaves the player wide open.

Many games also make use of a mechanic like cooldown placed at the beginning of a skill, referred to as "startup," which denotes a length of time between an action's input or activation and when it is actually used or takes effect. In Fighters, attacks with very low startup frames are used in order to catch an enemy and begin a combination attack string into stronger attacks that would otherwise be too risky to perform on their own, as their longer startup could result in interruptions from the opponent.

In the Nintendo DS game The World Ends With You, the player equips pins that allow the use of special psychic abilities, which carry a certain number of Uses before the pin enters a cooldown phase, which the game refers to as a pin's "Reboot," which must finish before the pin's ability can be used again. Some pins also come with an initial startup, called "Boot" that must finish at the outset of a battle before the ability can be used.