Army Funds Game Development

winter@ES writes: "The U.S. Army is teaming up with Sony, Pandemic Studios, and Quicksilver software to develop a pair of squad-level combat games. Through the Institute for Creative Technologies (jointly operated by the U.S. Army and the University of SOCAL) the Army will be funding and developing "C-Force", targetted for next-gen consoles, and "CS-12" for PCs. The project is headed up by Mech Warrior veteran, Rob Sears."

Comments

YARSS

[Rogerborg]

Yet Another Realistic Soldier Sim?

The trouble with RSS's is that they're helluva frustrating. Ever played Hidden And Dangerous? And I'm not talking about the irritating crash bugs, the actual gameplay is so realistic that it can send you into screaming fits. You're crawling along in cover for ten minutes, then there's a crack and one of your men goes "Urgh" and curls up. You can't even see the enemy; in some missions, you can be shot from beyond the far clip plane. The solution is often to charge your 4 men forwards until you spot the sniper (getting cut down as you go), then reload the level, creep forwards, and saturate the far clip plane at that point with machine gun fire. A small tweak to the engine, to randomly place the enemy, would remove even this cheat, and make the game so "realistic" as to be unplayable.

So realism and gameplay don't necessarily go hand in hand. You have to allow some "cheats", like static enemy placement, which then ruins the value of the application as a training tool.

On the other hand, I'd rather see something like Hidden and Dangerous than Solider of Fortune. "Realism" in Soldier of Fortune means that you can blow your enemies into screaming, writhing piles of organs and detatched limbs (the ostensible message being that "Guns are no joke, kids!"), but the effect on enemy fire on you is to whittle a little off your health bar, and a medikit will fix that right back up and let you get back on with breaking the 1000 kill barrier. Just like in real life! Hmmm.