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Graphic Novelist Calls For Better Game Violence
eldavojohn writes "Landry Walker (alternative comics creator of X-Ray Studios) has a brief opinion piece at Elder Geek asserting that all he wants for Christmas is more realistic game violence. While he acknowledges the world probably isn't ready for it, he wishes that getting shot in a video game was a bit more like getting shot in real life. From his piece: '... that's my problem with video game violence. Bullets are something we shrug off. Point blank fire with a machine gun is something that a tiny bit of flexible body armor and 20 seconds sitting on a magic invisibility inducing gargoyle can cure. Time and time again, I've heard people claim that they want to see a greater degree of realism in video games. But that's a lie. We don't want realism. We want fantasy. We want unlimited ammo and we want rapid respawns. We want to jump out of second story windows without a scratch. We want to dodge bullets and shake off mortal wounds without pause.' What say you, reader? Would this bring a new level of impossibility to video games or would there be a way to balance this out?"
Reality isn't fun. If it was we wouldn't play games.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
I'm fairly certain actually realistic shooters exist. It's just that realistic mechanics, from a player perspective, are extremely boring, except for in a few limited cases (only one I can think of that is fun and isn't at least a bit fantastic or sci-fi is Counter Strike).
With the whole rise of casual gamer shenanigans going on, making games realistically punishing isn't lucrative in the slightest. Even the most successful hardcore/brutally evil game that has come out recently, Demon's Souls, has a lot of unrealistic elements in it (such as excessive hit points, predictable AI, magic, etc).
A n00b gets shot at the beginning of the game. That means he would be out for the remainder of the game. Would you play a game where the playtime is about 1 minute for every 30 or so? I know I wouldn't.
And also it would be boring as hell. Very rarely do you have situations where you are shooting all the time.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
There are a few titles that try to give the combat experience in a realistic way. Theres always room for more realism, but these games are much more real than your typical shotter.
Ok, I get it. Hes out to make a point, he probably know the existence of these games. But is a moot point, only people that want that exact experience buy and play these games. Most other people want different degrees of realism.
From high realism to e-sport:
- ????
- ArmA
- Red Orchestra
- Battlefield 1942
- Modern War 2 and Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Counter-strike
- Quake 3 / Warsow
- ????
Point: people that want realism in games already are playing realism games.
Point: people that want more realism in games play "realism mods" in realism games.
Stament: most people seems to like some fantasy and realism mixed for most fun.
Stament: some people seems to like "electronic sport" games, like Quake3 or Warsow
Stament: people that make staments about realism, and play games like B:AA that have life regen ala "MW2" sould play different games...
-Woof woof woof!
I want an accessory that is worn on your torso (as a vest) and delivers a paintball-like punch when an in-game bullet strikes your avatar. That would teach stealth tactics better than anything.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
If I'm going to play a game, I want fun and excitement without any real threat of getting killed or suffering pain.
Without those things, games will never be 'real'.
I'm not troubled by that in the slightest.
By the way, Hollywood (a generic way of referring to almost all TV and Movies) doesn't portray reality, even when they claim to.
Oh, and professional wrestling is fake also...
(Slashdotters know that, but you'd be amazed how many people don't have a clue...)
This reminds me of the old discussions about realism in pen&paper RPGs.
We got a medievalist on our group, let him prepare a short demonstration game and quickly confirmed that it was, essentially, annoying.
He wants more real violence? There's no need to create a game for that, mod L4D2 or MW2 to multiply damage by a hundred.
It's one of those arguments that end as soon as someone actually does the little effort of trying the argued point.
For the next GTA release, I suggest not only realistic physics, but realistic body injury, healing processes, and legal consequences. Including getting stopped for speeding or eratic driving, or hit and runs. Felony stop if you get above 2 stars, and banned for a day of "real world" time, because you're in jail. If you kill a man and get caught, you lose the game. Doesn't sound like a game I would be interested in. "alternate reality" v. "Real world reproduction" borders a very fine line concerning game enjoyment.
Get your free Dropbox account with 2 GB Free storage!
So, where does America's Army (http://www.americasarmy.com/) fit into your list?
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
And here I was, thinking "oh, nobody's posted yet, maybe I can open with something interesting".
Shouldn't have wasted time hitting the damn refresh button.
Americas Army has always focused on realism. You can't run too fast, you can't jump too high or continously. If you fall too far you'll break a leg and bleed to death. And yes you usually die after the first hit from AK47. It's possible to have a medic bind your wounds, but you won't get to 100% health..you stay slow and weak. I used to play it a lot and loved it. Too bad they stopped making linux ports.
It's called nethack. The graphics aren't great, but he's said he doesn't mind that.
TFA says "I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is..."
I reckon you can get pretty close to that with some multiplayer game scenarios. Something simple, like Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, where it's just you and a friend, sneaking over the snow into the enemy base while the battle rages behind you... and the path ahead is mined.
Let me quote Eurogamer on the 1997 Playstation game Bushido Blade:
Bushido Blade works like this: If somebody scores a glancing blow on you, you're slowed. If somebody hits your arm, you fight on one-handed. If somebody hits your leg, you go down to one knee. If somebody hits you hard, anywhere at all, there is a horrible crunch or spurt of blood and you die.
Eurogamer's retrospective says it all. Imagine if it had caught on.
Sorry - I've been reading slashdot for about 8 years and never managed to get a first post. I saw my opportunity and took it!
And for that you deserve to burn in the lowest of hells for all eternity.
No idea, I have not played it.
Anyway my list is wrong. Batman is less real than counter-strike. In batman there are magic life regen.
-Woof woof woof!
Wow, couldn't pass up the opportunity to contribute nothing before someone else did? Be proud!
Simulating combat realistically makes for a short playing experience. Catch one bullet in the leg and then what happens? Do you have to start over? Do you bleed out if you don't immediately get medical attention? If you get medical attention then do you "play" recovering in the hospital and dealing with the police reports? Let's have a physical therapy "mini-game" as well; spend a few months doing some exercises and walking around with a crutch.
Having the screen go red and having to find cover until I recover so I continue mowing down the opposition with joyful glee sounds much more appealing to me.
Entropy just isn't what it used to be.
...Walker was highly critical on the realism of Road Runner cartoons, claiming that both Coyote thought processes and the laws of physics were grossly misrepresented.
Adding more realism does not equal to making game better.
Especially when it is "mind jerk" where you use realism to make game harder to play - it feels and sounds awesome because person who suggests it also imagines himself pwning in that game and getting to top of things using his innate "realistic combat skills".
It is somewhat similar to, say, people wanting hardcore pvp in mmos with full loot. You only suggest something like this if you can imagine yourself always on the winning side. Because otherwise, theese mechanics suck.
In some rare idealistic cases, people want challenge to be added to game (and of course, imagine themselves besting challenge while being awesome enough to get style points). That is, however, not something you automatically get if you make game harder and leargning curve steeper that eve.
Give him realistic fps with one-hit-kill bullet and he will not play it for long. You do not keep playing game you suck at, and adding some mechanics means that pretty much everyone ends up sucking.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
I've been wanting more realistic violence since forever. I don't want great big clouds of blood shooting out from someone unless it's called for. I don't want NPC's to fly back when you shoot them. I don't want NPC's to insta-die unless you hit them in the head or central nervous system. But more realistic violence doesn't necessarily imply more realism for the player. The player character can be genetically modified, enhanced by nanotech or whatever handwavy technology you want to use.
Say you shoot someone in the general torso area, you obviously miss the spine since he doesn't ragdoll and you take cover as he returns fire. When you pop out of cover the target is nowhere to be seen. When you find him he's on the ground aspirating blood and generally bleeding out. Or when you finish a firefight there is not silence but lots of poor fuckers screaming from their pain as they bleed out. If nothing else that might make you want to take the more stealthy route or make sure you aim better.
So why are games like Operation Flashpoint, ArmA, the Rainbow Six series and so on available? They're there because people DO want realism, they want one-shot kills where stupid rambo behavior action will get you killed. Sure they're not for everyone, but for people who want a challenge, they exist.
This novelist asks for something that already exist.
The last time I played a computer game was in 95, and after that, I lost passion for games. That was called, fairly enough, Virtual World. It's a game where you sit in a cage modeled like a car, and you drove it in the mining tunnel on Mars. Obviously, the car is not really moving, but it had enough hydraulic system to simulate certain action to give some realism, like a flight simulator. It was expensive to play, $15 per 15 minutes. It's a multi-player game in which you tried to shoot each other while racing. If you got shot, you heard a bang on your back, and the car shook so hard it gave you dizziness. If you sit with your back on the seat back, it could hurt pretty bad.
I spent a lot money playing that game, and after, I had no passions for other non-realistic games anymore. I always say to my other gamer friends that the game they play are for pimps :)
wow, really, you haven't heard of Codemasters' master piece Operation Flashpoint? The default setting is "get shot and you die".
How we know is more important than what we know.
FTFA - a footnote; "*I have no doubt that there are many games available that come closer to achieving a realistic setting than what I describe. I don't care. I'm making sweeping generalizations here. It's what I do." . So the whole-big-thing-point of TFA is arguing that there should be games which are more realistic, then the author acknowledges that actually well gosh you know, there are, but their existence is not relevant because he's only interested in sweeping generalisations. Errr....yep....ok....with you....right....I'm sure there is a finely honed point here somewhere...yep....
I definitely agree with the article, unrealistic games are terrible. I've found myself gravitating towards games with realistic damage rates and weapon accuracies.
For example:
- Counter Strike: Used to be really good in the early betas, then went to hell once the whiners in the forums resulted in every weapon being nerfed. I stopped playing it after I emptied a clip at point blank into a guy's head, missed with every bullet, and then had him turn around and knife me. Over 90% of players had never played CS when it was good, and have no idea just what they're missing...
- Day of Defeat: started off awesome, then slowly went downhill, but never to the same extent as CS. Players who thought they were 'l33t' at CS got massacred when they joined DoD games.
- Team Fortress / TF2: feels like you're using nerfbats at first, but there's lots of instant-deaths, more then you'd expect, which makes up for it. (snipers, spies, crits, etc...)
- Left 4 Dead 1 & 2: I love the way that one bullet from most guns will kill a dozen zombies in a row. Not only that, but Valve made the guns in #2 better, not worse! Someone at Valve is clearly learning!
Contrast these games with the likes of Quake, Unreal Tournament, Tribes, or the like. In those games, three or four direct hits with a rocket weapon is not enough. It's like using nerfbats. What's worse, Tribes basically had no hitscan weapons, so at range, you couldn't even hit anything moving, and even if you did get a lucky shot in, it would do no significant damage.
I've found that the games with accurate, lethal weapons result in very different game play. People jump around like rabbits less, stick to cover more, crouch, avoid open spaces, etc... Basically, they play just like you see soldiers or SWAT behave in real life. It's also gives me a much bigger adrenaline rush. Periods of quiet stalking interspersed with real terror, ending with either sudden death or a panicked getaway make for great tension. Jumping around like idiots in glowing neon green armor is just boring after a few hours.
There already are 2 very realistic games that should have been mentioned: Close Range and Modern Warfare 3.
The earlier Rainbow 6 games, including my fav - Rogue Spear.
You can't even jump in those games and climbing a little ledge seems to take ages. Getting shot is frequently lethal (even if they hit you in the foot or arm) or results in incredibly slow movement until someone finishes you off. Also, no respawning until the end of the round.
I loved those games! You'd feel a lot of stress immediately before the map loaded and then keep a bit of stress throughout the match. It was exciting and fun.
Nowadays it's the military sims mentioned above that keep flying the flag. (I also enjoy "silly" FPS games such as Team Fortress 2 and Mirror's Edge and haven't played a good realistic FPS in a long while.)
Codemasters master piece.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Flashpoint:_Cold_War_Crisis
winner of:
* PC ZONE Classic Award
* IGN Editors Choice Award
* Simulation Headquarters Best of E3 2001
* Gamespy: Best of 2001 (PC Action)
* Computer Gaming World's Editors Choice Award
* The Adrenaline Vault: Seal of Excellence Award
* ECTS winner
* The Wargamer: Award of Excellence
* Gamestar.de Award
* PC Gamer Awards
* COMBATSIM.COM: Best Integrated Battlefield Simulation 2001
I can't really comment on the sequel that came out this year.. although Codemasters didn't make it, so it probably sucks.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Urban Terror is a good example of a game that makes an effort to have "realistic" weapon damage effects. In the game—a free, open-source FPS—players square off using modern weapons and equipment. When you spray machine gun fire at your opponents, your accuracy degrades. When you get hit, you start bleeding, and you must bandage your wounds quickly before you bleed out. If you are shot in the leg, your movement speed decreases, and you also take damage to your legs if you fall from heights greater than one story. If you are shot in the arm, your accuracy decreases. Reloading your weapons takes time, and in the middle of combat it is usually more expedient to draw your trusty sidearm, rather than reload.
Unlike most FPSs, where players engage in running gunfights that can last for tens of seconds, the typical Urban Terror engagement is very short; players frequently die before they realize they are under attack. This turns the game into an unending quest for the perfect ambush—attacking with surprise, from behind, almost always ensures victory. Many players tend to be snipers or campers, since the gameplay mechanics make very difficult to "run and gun" effectively. With that being said, it is still possible to power-slide down a hallway, turn, and take out two alert enemies with well-placed bursts—it's just very, very difficult.
Nonetheless, UrT distinguishes itself for its reliance on teamwork. There are almost no plain Deathmatch servers, since UrT Deathmatches simply aren't interesting. Instead, it is all about the team-based gameplay: team-DM, CTF, and bombing run missions. A lone man is easy prey, but squad of two or three players can take and hold an enemy base for some time, provided they know what they're doing. In UrT, working with others is the key to victory, and your ability to score frags can increase exponentially if your team-mates are nearby. If you like teamwork, and don't mind the occasional insta-gib, then you should consider checking out UrT. The game is based on ioquake3 and will run on almost any Windows/Linux/Mac system that's less than ten years old.
At our school, we don't earn a degree when we graduate—we earn pi/180 radians
Oddly enough - I read FP as "first person", which as opposed to FPS, is basically what we're left with once bullets become deadly. An astute comment.
I don't like the idea of desensitising my children to realistic violence. If I wanted that I'd just let them watch the news!
very good game from 2001-2002.
One bullet usually kills.
Aiming is as slow as reality, no matter how good mouse hand the player has.
Realistic fog whose purpose is not to look nice, but to hinder visibility.
I consider this to be the best first person 3d game ever made.
The sequels were not so good, they were too much action, losing some of the realism, and losing the big maps.
Operation flashpoint is another example. It was also very good, maybe even mode realistic, but the playability was not as good as with ghost recon, so I rank Ghost recon as #1.
I am waiting for someone to create real sequel to Ghost Recon, instead of those Ghost Recon:Advanced warfighter toy shooters which differ nothing from those cs and other toy games.
I think Counter-Strike had it down pretty well. Quite easy to die, and then you have to wait out the rest of the round until everyone else is dead. If the round time is long enough, it encourages you to play as if it's more "real", as there is a real downside to dying.
which is totally what she said
I know you're joking, but NetHack is IMO on the 'pure fantasy' extreme of the reality spectrum. You enjoy the game because there's no sight/sound/physical action limiting your imagination.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20070622
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Yeah Operation Flashpoint must be one of the most evil games ever, but certainly pretty realistic, and the AI would actually hide in bushes and snipe you. It was however pretty annoying thinking you had killed everyone only to discover that there had been some guy hiding in a bush a couple hundred metres away and that you were now dead. ArmA is the spiritual successor to Op Flashpoint.
You can't make most FPSs realistic for the simple reason that they are created for you to die frequently, in order to keep things "exciting". If you want to make a realistic game seem fun, don't use super soldiers as the starting point. For historical reasons, most of those games only allow shooting as the single way to interact with the environment, which is obviously not the case in real life, not even in war. Take Heavy Rain, for instance: story-driven, but player-guided; death is possible, but the game is carefully designed to keep the consequences of your actions interesting. If that's not real enough, you might have to wait awhile before some genius game designer can take a realistic story like the job of a police chief or astronaut and make it interesting. Since most of the big realist developers are stuck on the FPS formula, I'd say it's the indy scene that will have to push the envelope.
I have yet to see any computer-game outside some adventure game that even loosely reflects what violence is like. And the war-games are probably the worst of the bunch. If a military simulator resembled what a soldier has to do in a real war it would play like this.
1: Get up, brush teeth, polish equipment.
2: Drive 10 km on a congested road looking out for bombs.
4: Walk to the observation post
5: Spend 8 hours looking out over a field with peasants, trying to figure out if any of them is a resistance fighter.
6: Walk back to the truck
7: Catch your buddy when the sniper shoots him in the hip
8: Spend 3 hours trying to keep pressure on the wound and wait for medivac
9: Listen to your buddy beg for his life while he is medivaced
10: Fire blindly at a few bushes where the sniper might still be
11: Get tinitus when they bomb the bushes and the nearby houses
12: Spend 4 hours sorting out the remains of the families in the houses, trying to figure out if any of them was the sniper
13: Go to truck again, looking out for snipers this time.
14: Drive home, looking out for road bombs.
15: Wash blood from cloths, eat dinner, go to bed.
16: Repeat...
War is not fun. War does not make a good game. Any "realistic" game still removes 99.95% of what it means to be in a war-zone. You don't get bored, watching a field for hours. You don't police bodies. You don't dig through bloody cloths looking for clues if the guy you just shoot was a resistance fighter or a civilian. You don't have to stop everything and arrange a medivac if anybody in your group is hit. You don't have to write letters home to the family, explaining what happened. You rarely have any rules of engagement. It's clear who is an enemy and who is not...
I wonder when we will see a game where the punishment for sticking your head out at the wrong time is 60 years in a wheelchair with no control over your body... If you are lucky.
Any sufficiently realistic video game will heal your character via virtual health insurance forms.
Thanks, but I'll take my crowbar any day.
What CS did was encourage everybody to camp. It just didn't make sense to move anywhere because you'd be one hit killed by some AWP-wielding camping lamer who would win by being the guy that moved the least.
If you're going to have realistic combat effects, you need to balance that by also simulating how hard it is to actually aim weapons with any precision even standing still, let alone while moving. America's Army did that sort of where you have to hold your breath to get your sight to stop wandering. You know what that is? Tedious and annoying. The GP got it right, what's next? Reports and physical therapy simulation? 'Realistic' games are for a special breed of lamer. If you want that much realism, go to a recruiting center and enlist, or enroll in a police academy, or at least get off your damn couch, go to a shooting range and put some real munitions down range. Games are for fun, if you want realism, the door to life is over there.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Speaking as someone who has built combat simulations for the US Army:
Real combat is boring... it consists of long periods of time where basically nothing happens, mixed with very short periods of combat where a lot happens but the winner of this short period of combat is rarely in doubt.
Actually getting shot is not fun. The reason it's fun in games is because its NOT real.
And it's made in flash.
You Only Live Once
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Games can provide realistic damage, but they need to provide -something- that makes the effects less permanent than in real life.
Games of the old provided "multiple lives". You could try again, repeating some of the work. But that's cheap, you live or you die but you won't be anywhere halfway.
Later games provided savegame, you pick a point in time where you can go back no matter how badly it goes. Very cheap again, there is no challenge if you can repeat each step as many times as needed.
There are these games where you have levels of energy and armor, thing is playing at 10% health is no different than playing at 100%, as long as you don't get hit.
Counter-strike and alikes got it nearly right, a kill is really crippling, making you practically lose the game - while the game itself is quite short.
What is really lacking is crippling damage. In CS, you could still run at full speed at 2% health.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. has this concept of bleeding, you need to stop and bandage yourself to stop bleeding or your health will drain. Unfortunately, medikits are so common, fast-acting and easy to use, that bleeding becomes moot.
And meanwhile, I remember the game of Gunship 2000 with extreme fondness, as I would return from missions in a heavily damaged helicopter. Autopilot out of commission, the rotor damaged, so it keeps turning, one of motors destroyed so that I need to run the other at overheating level just to keep from falling, electronics damaged, so that I have to depend on analog displays, and "wounded" like that I had to crawl back to base, fending off enemies that tried to take down the easy prey. These were some of the most memorable moments in my gaming past. Of course it was the machine damaged, not the person, but...
I think FPS games could greatly benefit from a realistic damage model. Something where pain is paralyzing, where blood obscures your vision, explosions stun you - not for 3 seconds, but for half a minute maybe. Shock from pain makes you stop and fall, wounded limbs fail to perform. Instead of running smoothly sideways with aiming cross precisely in the center of the screen, have the aiming cross oscillating in the corner of the screen as you try to hold a carabine with one hand, and your leg is wounded.
You can use medikits, but first, using them is an operation of at least a minute or two, then it doesn't magically heal you, it just stops bleeding (which makes things worse), reduces pain to allow better control, allows limited use of limbs that were totally out of use.
Imagine the epicness of a "capture the flag" game as the flag carrier gets severely wounded. Think of a defender of the base who got his both legs shot off, and fights to the last drop of blood, unable to move. Imagine a counter-strike terrorist activating the bomb with his last living breath. A moment of "You go without me", as a team needs to leave a wounded player at a difficult jump point, and he makes his last stand against oncoming horde of enemies.
Of course limping through the game for 16 hours, until the plot grants you mercy of a hospital is no fun. The games with realistic damage model would need to adapt the gameplay style. First, short and sweet sections to allow for -some kind- of respawn. Also, both incentive to keep playing while even heavily wounded, and not forcing a player to wait uselessly for some kind of help/respawn for hours. Some kind of reward for sticking to the same character, even wounded, but with ability to heal (or replace the character with a healthy one, say reinforcements arrive, wounded are sent back to hospital).
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
I'm a big fan of (pseudo-) "realistic" FPS like OFP, ArmA, OFP2, and Arma2. Many people claim they want realism, but for most gamers these simulations are too boring or too hard. Personally, I'm missing real realism as opposed to the fake realism of ArmA 2. I might be mistaken but as far as I know in a real war wounded soldiers sometimes scream like crazy without stopping, and I've also read accounts of WW2 where soldiers were walking around with their guts (literally) in their hands. For real realism my "special forces" team mates should occasionally go nuts (if they aren't already). There should also be trigger-happy soldiers that mess up missions, accidentally shoot pregnant women and kids at checkpoints, etc. Very rarely, a civilian could be raped by your fellow teammates and it would be up to you whether you want to participate or inform your CO. In both cases, you'd have to face the consequences. And, of course, don't forget friendly fire and jobs like cleaning the latrines.
If you think I'm being sarcastic, you misunderstand me. I really want this kind of realism in my FPS. But I guess this will never happen, because people would fear that depicting real violence might disturb the emotional balance of some American kids and lead to a lawsuit against the game company. For a start, I'd already be fine if they'd come up with a good story instead of the usual black and white "good vs. evil" bullshit.
"We want fantasy. We want unlimited ammo and we want rapid respawns. We want to jump out of second story windows without a scratch. We want to dodge bullets and shake off mortal wounds without pause.'" Disagreed strongly. He may want such, you may want such, THEY may want such...but I don't. If I wanted that I'd be playing with God mode on or I'd go for My Little Pony Online. I want challenge. I want realism. I want to have to use some skill and smarts to get the job done, not just mindlessly run around shooting anything that moves.
Yup if Modern Warfare 2 was realistic, nobody would play it past the opening battle. one shot and you're dead... Screw this game, I'm gonna play something else.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When I play a game, I want to suffer. Real life is easy and pleasant enough already.
Recent occurrence. You stop in a burger joint just in time to be caught up in the middle of a drug deal gone bad. A stray bullet pierces your skin and lodges itself between your C2 and C3 vertebrae.
When I play a game, I want to suffer. Real life is easy and pleasant enough already.
Do you really want experience the joys of spending your remaining days without the use of your limbs and your very survival dependent on those maintaining your life support?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Digg?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
This conversation seems to be cyclical. Let us remember that people play games for different reasons. We have Bartle Player Types and Nick Yee's player motivations to frame this conversation. Some people like ultra-realism, some don't. Different strokes for different folks. I'm a casual TF2 player, where I aim bazooka rockets at my feet so I can jump higher. I guess realism isn't that important to me. I'm also a text-based gamer, and I enjoy playing muds and mushes.
When the ancient Aztecs played basketball, the rules were simple - the first team that made a shot through the basket got to live. The other team was...well...beheaded. Now, if you want to make video games that are realistic, why not go all the way? Have some sort of controller that provides an electric shock or poison if you really die. That will make you think twice about going into that room full of zombies.
The bottom line is that video games are for fun and "practice". You go to a new level of realism and it just gets boring. I love flight simulators, but the ones that are completely realistic are the most boring. Who wants to spend 4 hours in combat air patrol with a 1 in 1000 chance of actually getting to splash a bogie?
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
Operation Flashpoint, ArmA, the Rainbow Six aren't realism. The game mechanics are slightly more realistic, but that is it.
Realism would mean you play once for 10 minutes, get shot, possibly through no fault of your own, and are permanently out of the game because in that game you are dead. No one wants that. Reality sucks. War is not fun. Sometimes skill counts but just as often dumb luck or being born on the right side does. War's not meant to be fun. Playing warrior is.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Well sort of anyway, but Arma2 is the same kind of game.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You obviously haven't heard the awesome reviews of the next game..
Also, I'm surprised that nobody else has linked that yet, considering the topic. (Note: link goes to onion video, sound required)
I don't like Linux. This doesn't make me a troll.
I love OF. But the same people has moved to ArmA.
Anyway, theres much more room for realism. People don't die just because are shot, or get unconscient. I would model a real game with a type of adrenalin simulation, so If you get a wound in combat, in a non letal area, you are crippled (aim, vision, speed.. ) but you can still combat, but If you stop and relax, the crippling become severe .A more real game could use some biometrics sensors on your body, so if you are scared, the character is scared too (and react with different phisical limits ).
FPS are also built on some horrible assumptions: perfect 90 from the ground, the mouse (or pad) perfectly control the angle of the camera (head), and limited vision angle ( 94 ish in PC, 70 ish in consoles ). You can make a game more real breaking these FPS rules, but may result in a unplayable game. If you make so explosions/melehit can change the camera angle, the game could result in "vomit inducing", maybe cause pain, headpain for some people.
OF did something interesting, making so you can see your own body in the game, and sit near a teammate, so you feel real in the world. There are much more to do. *cue to that youtube video of quake in real world*
-Woof woof woof!
One that comes to mind that I used to play is Action Quake 2. It was a bit more forgiving than America's Army, but not much. A shot to the head from any weapon and you were done for the round. This was years ago. As the "Quake 2" part indicates, it was a mode for the Quake 2 engine.
So games like this exist, and have existed for some time. However they are in the minority. Why? Well two reasons:
1) Only some people find this kind of thing fun. Some people want realism like that. More people don't. As such the majority of games won't feature it. More or less the more people that like something, the more games that are going to feature it. If something has a limited appeal you'll probably see it, just not a whole lot of it.
2) It can really get in the way of a lot of game types and stories. There are a good many kinds of games, a good many stories that just won't work if things are realistic to that degree. As such it will often get jettisoned as a possibility because it would mess with the overall game design. Even if the designers think people would enjoy it, if it would require a massive redesign of the game it'll get the boot.
I personally get tired of realism whiners when it comes to games. For the most part, it seems that there ARE realistic games out there of all sorts of kinds. However what it usually turns out is that the realism whiners don't, in fact, want the realism they ask for. If they did, they'd buy the games. They want it, but also want the games to be easy and fun for them. They claim they want it, but they don't in fact.
Apparently this person's never played Call of Duty multiplayer in hardcore mode. Is it realistic? No, but it's a lot closer to what the person apparently wants. You get hit by a single bullet in the foot halfway across the map and you're DOWN. Guess how much fun it is. Nevermind the fact that the .50 cal Sniper Rifle can't do the same thing, but that's another discussion.
But then apparently this person's never played the original Ninja Gaiden either. Fantasy setting, yeah, but that game beat you HORRIBLY if you screwed up even a little bit. Getting hit by demon spawn was a lot like...well, getting hit by demon spawn. It sucked, there was no health regeneration (minus a single, very very slow regenerative item later).
"Just a fox, a whisper."
I don't ever get hurt because no ennemy AI even knew I was here. No need for healing potion.
It's pretty easy to complain about something not being done right. I could complain that slashdot is doing it wrong, to which hundreds of helpful comments would tell me to make my own site with the same goal and do it properly. So why don't we tell him to do the same? If you see a problem with the industry, either fix it or stfu. No one is going to change the way they make games to please some random person on the internet.
Hasn't anyone else played this? My friends and I used to play Ghost Recon all the time in high school and there would be matches where we wouldn't fire a shot until 10 minutes into the game. If you got hit you were DEAD.
I remember the game Postal having realistic violence. When you shot someone, they didn't just die, they lingered crying for help or water. Sometimes they would crawl out of the way leaving a blood trail and then die behind an obstacle.
IIRC, there was a lot of criticism of the game, partly because of the realistic depiction of violence.
Just like movies, videogames are an escape. We want them to be "real" in the sense that we want to suspend disbelief (and thus the drive to create more realistic looking games). But once things look real enough, I think people tend to want the gameplay to be a bit more on the fantastic side. There's certainly room for things like Splinter Cell where you have some decent realism. Sometimes you might want Clancy-style realism. However, a lot of gamers prefer the "Jerry Bruckheimer" brand of "realism".
A personal example:
When I was a kid, I loved playing the original Amiga version of F-16 Falcon. It was a really fun sim and not too difficult to pick up and have a good time. It wasn't ultra-realistic, but it was just realistic enough to make you feel as though you were flying an airplane. Fast forward a few years and they released a sequel (this time for PC with 3D accelerated graphics). They had decided to make a very accurate F-16 simulator. I was so excited to try it out (being a big fkight sim fan). Finally, I would have a realistic military sim with great graphics!
It was so accurate, I found that all the fun was gone. The manual was a huge beast (a three ring binder if I remember correctly) that had all the details of how to operate the plane. I was just barely able to fly the thing. Landing? Forget it. I would crash over and over again. I've logged a lot of hours in MS Flight Simulator and other sims, so I'm sure that if I had practiced and read all the material I could have gotten better at it. That, however, sounds suspiciously like work. I realized that this was not really a game anymore. Furthermore, I realized that the truth is: I don't actually want to know how to fly a real F16. I just want to prentend I'm flying one so I can enjoy raids and dogfight. I want it to be just complex enough that I get a taste of the realism, but I don't want to have to sit there with a clipboard and go through a pre-flight checklist every time I want to take to the air.
A major part of the problem is that since real violence can, and in most cases will lead to death, it really is something to be avoided. This is one thing that most games fail at, and that is making it unpleasant to be in the middle of a lot of gunfire and such. This is where game design comes in, making the game, not about running around shooting people, but about trying to stay out of the line of fire while trying to accomplish your objectives.
If you have played the original Thief, it really pushed that idea, where you don't WANT to be seen or caught. Games where there is violence, but as more of a "this is the environment you live in, and it is a challenge staying alive while trying to live your life" type of thing WOULD be popular as long as there is a good story behind it. Games where you have to talk your way out of fights, because a real fight would get you killed would make a lot of sense.
Spend days in the rain, barely sleeping on a boat.
Spend a seasick few hours being ferried accross the channel in constant fear or a torpedo blowing the entire ship out of the water with nothing you can do about it.
Get into a tiny rolling vessel and find out that you are at the front.
Get tossed around as the landingcraft slowly makes its way to the coast, while the bombartment stops and you know every german on the coast has plenty of time to get into position.
Get machine gunned as the ramp comes down.
Get reborn.
War sucks, this scene has been done a lot if games and for some reason you are always in the landing craft that isn't machine gunned. Magically, you are one of the handful of survivors of the first wave at Omaha. Funny that.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I want gamers to have showers and wear deodorant when they go game and PC shopping.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
On Eminiar and Vendikar, they wanted more realism, and they got it.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I essentially agree with the article's contention but would expand on it with particular emphasis on the "War Games" genre; especially FPSs. Not only do they need more realistic violence, but also, more realistic plot lines. I'm tired of war games that are generally free of moral ambiguity with clear sides of good vs. evil. They completely fail to accurately depict the subject matter, namely the horrid realities of war, not to mention they tend to be boring.
War is by its very nature a horrible thing, and while one side might be preferable to the other, the harsh reality is both sides almost always commit atrocities, do things that are wrong or downright evil, and certainly the men on the ground do as well even if contrary to orders. That's not necessarily a "direct" criticism of those men, but merely the reality that war has a habit of bringing out the worst in people, that no other situation would. I'd love to see a war game that not only has more realistic violence, but has a correspondingly realistic plot line. I rarely see civilians in my war games, I rarely get orders that are perhaps less than moral, I rarely see my fellow soldiers do things that are less than reasonable. Yes, I'm asking for the opportunity to play a war FPS that lets me kill or even massacre civillians, that brutally depicts the horrific violence and injuries. I'm not asking this because I'd really enjoy it, but because much of what we have now is really just war reduced to an arcade shooter, and I find it somewhat distasteful, as it is in some respects demeaning to the target it is simulating.
I think it would be fascinating for example, to have a WWII FPS where YOU get to play a Nazi. Think about that for a minute. Not all Nazi's were evil, many were just loyal soldiers of Germany doing what they thought was right, even if right is the result of brainwashing and propaganda from the German war machine. You'd be killing Allied soldiers; that might make you uncomfortable. But the fact that you can kill thousands of Nazi's who had families of their own and may not individually have been bad people in every war game up till now says something as well. Hell, you could have the protagonist find out about what was going on Holocaust-wise and defect. At least we'd have a somewhat original and more interesting plot line. What about the Dresden bombings? Why haven't I seen those?
Please don't misconstrue my thoughts as me just wanting the opportunity to commit virtual atrocities from my armchair. I'm just tired of these simplistic, boring, and unrealistic depictions of war in video games, that strip from them much of what defines war in the minds of veterans and through them the public. For the record, Soldier of Fortune probably has the most realistic violence in a war game I've seen, and I (of course) heard about the Modern Warfare 2 terrorist scene, but I have trouble taking the latter seriously in a game with regenerating health and usually fairly cookie-cutter plot lines. Really, it sounded like more of an attention grab than as part of any sincere effort to depict the realities of war in a video game.
I know, it's not a FPS (it's a WW2 flight sim), but really, very accurate.
Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.
http://www.stfj.net/art/2009/loselose/
Combat and damage mechanics in any of these games are an abstraction. In Team Fortress 2, different classes have varying amounts of hit points. What this really measures is how likely that character class (all things being equal) is to survive for x minutes compared to a different class. So, a medic is less likely to survive for 5 minutes than, say, a soldier, if we only consider the hit points number. Incoming damage answers the question "how likely was that shot to kill me" and the answer is represented by a reduction of your hit points. At any given time during the game, your likelihood of being killed can be assigned a number, and that's what you see in your hit point display. This translates pretty well to other games that use a numerical hit point mechanic.
So, it's not so much that a bit of body armor can render Batman nigh invulnerable. It's that, since this is batman, being in an area with small arms fire directed at him is less likely to kill him than it is you or me, and hiding for a period of time makes the likelihood of being killed taper off.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
reminds me of that quote "if anyone shared your fantasies they wouldn't be fantasies"
The Rainbow Six games (1 to 3 at least) have realistic damage where the enemy can kill you in one shot. I think this makes these games better. But for games involving hails of bullets like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty realistic damage might make these games unplayable. I think it could be worked into a lot more games though, it would just require being more careful which is an acceptable part of the learning curve.
Original Tom Clancy games were realistic. Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon etc.
I think the idea is about consequences. However, no game based on "hit points" can ever feel realistic, even if the idea is sound ("damage" is a very bad name for what weapons do in a hit point system. But I guess it's less unwieldy than "decrement". Perhaps "reduce"? I HIT FOR TWENTY POINTS OF REDUCTION, MWA HA HA)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Reality is a really crappy game. Its rules were written by a sadistic game designer with no sense of balance, proportion, pacing, or fun.
not quite. realism has come a long way, and it just takes time for people to adjust. I mean look back at Mario, Pong, Karate Kid, etc. There will always be a small but of realism that won't be there due to making it a game, but the rest is slowly heading towards more realistic games. It may be a while but I do suspect there will be games that will be able to have as much realism as america's army and still be a good game. The reason america's army sucks is that you have to sit through a freakin class if you want to play the game. Honestly now, forcing that "Training mode" on people? It's not a fault of the realism, but just a bad design.
Ever play Rainbow Six Vegas 1 or 2 at Realistic difficulty? Try it, then cry as it makes you its bitch.
Living With a Nerd
More realism in consequences will only come with greater realism in controls. Once you're truly "in the game" can you deal with "in the game" realism.
How precocious of you to pick up slashdot in your toddler years.
I found playing Rainbow 6 and Counterstrike back to back was a slap in the face for this very reason. In R6 you run around getting shot but ultimately making progress whereas in CS you run towards the enemy and die almost immediately.
Without VR there is no need to strive towards ultimate realism - Laserquest is more realistic than any FPS you could name.
I recall some years ago (Sinclair Spectrum days) playing a Formula 1 game that was meant to be realistic. Unfortunately it was realistic enough that it was unplayable as everyone played it like Outrun and carried too much speed into the corners. That, coupled with poor GFX and controllers (rubber keyboard and Quickshot 2 joystick) made for a truly crappy experience.
Realism does not equal good gameplay.
I see your point but there are other ways to look at the situation.
I'm terrible at pretty much all computer games of any sort. However, I like some shooters. I can turn on God Mode in Serious Sam and then the game completely transforms. There's a certain challenge to seeing how quickly I can kill everything and complete a level. That's not a FPS any more. It becomes a puzzle game. Apparently, I like puzzle games.
But a realistic shooter is, to my mind, a non-starter. I've got too many real guns and I enjoy shooting them far too much to spend any time with a computerized simulation.
You should give America's Army a try, it's totally free via direct download and Steam. Plus there are custom peripherals available (http://vae.americasarmy.com/), to enhance the experience.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
It is pretty high up there IMO. My only question is "Wouldn't the war in Iraq have been over in a month if everyone had the M203?"
I have to mention this game, hasn't been mentioned so far in the thread. Project Reality is a team-based, teamwork-oriented, fairly realistic game. It absolutely craps on AA. I used to play AA for my "realism" fix, haven't even thought about AA since trying PR. Yes, PR has re-spawns, but it's more realistic. Also, it's a game where teamwork is actually present. People typically use VOIP and coordination within a single squad is usually good. On the better servers, the entire team will often work together in a coordinated fashion.
PR is actually a mod for Battlefield 2, so it's free if you own BF2. If not, I guess you can easily grab a copy of BF2 for under 10 USD these days.
A word of warning: PR is rather hardcore and fairly demanding, in terms of patience, willingness to work together and willingness to learn - there are numerous aspects of the game you won't immediately grok. But if you're looking for teamwork, tactics and realism, look PR up, it may well be what you want.
gun battles aren't the only thing happening....
Bang your dead end of game Oh dear you only just started shame close the thing down restart and try again this time pay attention and you might just escape getting wasted on the spot
I really loved Chuck Yeager's Air Combat. Nothing better than the scenario of taking on four or more WWII planes in a dogfight at ground-brushing altitude. Its popularity was really short-lived before the touted realism of the Falcon series ate its lunch. Unfortunately, with Falcon I would usually get blown out of the sky by a missile from 5-10 miles avay before I even got a visual on the enemy. Much easier to evade missiles in Air Combat. And much more fun for me.
America's Army is like getting a free vacation: you still have to listen to the timeshare pitch.
However you allude to classics that had little or nothing to do with realism. Mario games are about eating mushrooms to gain powers like projecting fireballs from your hands to defeat evil turtles while you bounce around a dreamscape and travel through pipes. It's not realistic at all, beyond the fact that Mario is human and there is gravity, but it was so damn fun that it sucked in an entire generation and spawned a huge franchise.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I thought Rainbow 6 did this well. Got shot anywhere, and you can't aim from the pain. Get shot in the leg, and you can only crawl. Get shot in the head or chest and you die. In the multiplayer game, this meant ten minutes of getting into position, followed by about thirty seconds of shooting (when you realise that your easily defensible position isn't at all defensible from the direction the attackers are actually coming from). In the single player game, if you die then you get to take control of another member of your unit.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I think I want a combination - a certain amount of realism, but enough fantasy that it's still fun to pick up and play.
For example, I still play Battlefield 1943 on PS3. It's a lot of fun to jump into a game and do some team-based shooting. But I think the game might be more fun if it supported different classes: medics to heal (rather than auto-heal), engineers to build/repair ... as well as the [existing] standard rifleman, anti-tank infantry, and sniper. Right now, the game merges "engineering" with the infantry class, which doesn't seem right. With separate classes to do these specific things (and especially with a medic class) I think people would do a better job of playing as a team.
I'd also like for these classes to be something you have to "earn", like a career ladder. I'm not talking about a "choose this-or-that" type of ladder. But I think it would be better for all players to start as "rifleman" only. When you advance a few levels (maybe to "sergeant") maybe you gain the "medic" skill, so now you can choose that when you respawn. Advance a bit more, and you gain "engineering", then "anti-tank", and eventually "sniper".
Basically, this adds a certain amount of realism in the game (not everyone can be a sniper, etc) without getting too bogged down by total realism.
While I find realism to be one of the most important aspects of a game (especially racing and sports games), more people enjoy stupid stuff like unlimited ammo and hitting 400 home runs in a game. I've always longed for FPS that rewarded the careful player (i.e. you get shot, you probably die, and stay dead for long enough time to make it worth your time trying not to die). I blame Quake and the early frag fests where you only got points for a frag, but never lost points for getting fragged.
This is exactly how I've always felt about it. I actually had a friend who complained non-stop about the lack of realism in Counterstrike, and started playing America's Army. I tried it along with him...and spent about four or five hours in "basic training". When I finally got out of that crap and started playing, the first game I entered started with me walking all of four feet before being shot and killed.
No joke, four feet.
I uninstalled the "game" immediately. I play Dragon Age without Friendly Fire, give my D&D monsters double or triple hit points to make battles more interesting and stack my Warmachine army lists with the biggest cheese I can cram in there because, as pretty much everyone has said, the purpose of games is to have fun. My version of fun involves fantastic and heroic feats of violence.
There's a reason movies about WWII don't last 3 years. It's not entertaining to vicariously live someone else's life whose life isn't also constantly in danger.
I used to play on one back in the day that went through the cries for more realism phase, so the next rev had more realism, and the next rev well and truly sucked, and was rapidly fixed to make it actually fun again.
We don't play games because they're like real life. We play games because they're NOT like real life.
If America's Army had you hold your breath, then they were violating their own marksmanship rules. You actually fire when you get to the end of your exhale. There's a natural pause there, your lungs aren't all bloated with air (making it impossible to line up your sights), and your pulse is normal.
I think it would be good for team shooters to simulate "skill" with a weapon. As it is today, everyone has the same skill with a sniper rifle, so you encourage a certain amount of camping because there's no reason to move if you're a sniper and are 100% effective off the bat.
But if everyone starts at "level 1 sniper" which maybe means your sights wiggle a bit, whatever, then I think the impatient types would abandon the "sniper" class and go do something else. But for those that really have the interest, you can "level up" your sniper skill so your sights don't wiggle so much, you can aim faster, etc.
Same for the other classes and their weapons.
I want people to stop being pretentious and start being more realistic in nomenclature by not calling their comic books "graphic novels". Sounds like we both will be disappointed this year.
Nathan's blog
I for one loved CS with all it's "camping lamers" as you put it. It forced you to learn maps and use terrain...especially if you were the assault team in the scenario. Don't get me wrong I played a crap load of Quake 2 in college and loved it too but they were different games and I don't think you have to worry about all the super space marine stuff going away anytime soon given our attention span and love of instant gratification. That said even though I played the Q2 and Q3 more than any human should have I now wish there were at least a handful of FPS/combat games that were deeper and required more thinking and strategy than twitch shooting.
The original Rainbow Six had this figured out. It was really really hard to hit a moving target while sniping, the hitboxes were very precise (unlike CS) forget about trying to snipe anything while moving and camping led to a frag to the face because the grenades actually worked in that game (again, unlike CS). It was the most realistic game I've ever played, and it wasn't lame because they made sure it wasn't tedious to play. It's quite possible to have realism that isn't lame, it's just hard to do, which is probably why no one tries.
I've found that the games with accurate, lethal weapons result in very different game play. People jump around like rabbits less, stick to cover more, crouch, avoid open spaces, etc... Basically, they play just like you see soldiers or SWAT behave in real life. It's also gives me a much bigger adrenaline rush. Periods of quiet stalking interspersed with real terror, ending with either sudden death or a panicked getaway make for great tension. Jumping around like idiots in glowing neon green armor is just boring after a few hours.
I completely agree! A certain degree of realism does help to minimize the stupid bunny-hopping behavior. Actually, I'd like to see a team shooter that was more accurate with how weapons could be fired "on the run". Ever try to shoot a target with a real weapon while moving? If you're more than a few feet from the target, you're not going to hit it. Yet all the team shooters out there let you "shoot from the hip" at a bad guy across an empty street, while you're running, and you can still kill him. That's not realistic.
I'd prefer that "shooting from the hip" be ineffective [at range] if you're moving, and barely effective if you're standing still.
The only way to effectively hit a target in real life is to stop, and aim. You can still do a good job if you move around when aiming but of course you can't move very fast.
Players would respond very differently to games that did this. "Rambo" behavior wouldn't get you very far, so I think you'd end up with players sticking to cover more, avoiding open spaces, etc. Just like the OP said.
I would also love to have more realistic violence in video games, but the thing to realize is that is that it just wouldn't work in current day games, as those games are from their in their very core extremely unrealistic, not just what the violence is concerned. On average you kill like what, 200-300 people in a single play through of a shooter, maybe even more in some games. Reality just doesn't work that way, unless you drop bombs from a plane you just don't get to kill that many people without getting yourself killed, a lot.
I think a sensible way to introduce realistic violence would be to tackle it in a basically non-violent game. See Mirrors Edge for example, that style of game has some huge potential in that area, as its core is not about killing people but about traversing terrain. You don't shoot people, but instead you get shot. Of course the game kind of butchers its own core mechanic by introducing level design that basically forces you to shoot at other people and its extremely terrible at presenting the shooting in a realistic manner (everybody is a clone, small girl survives more bullets then armored police man, etc.), but its a type of game where you could introduce realistic violence and get away with it. In fact it would even make the game better when you for example had a choice between shooting somebody in the leg, along with consequences, instead of just having him rackdoll himself to the ground. I would much prefer it to have the game show realistically that death of the opponent is something that should be avoided, not something that should be done on a casual basis. Another thing the game misses is in-game character interaction, you get kind of a glimpse at it here and there, but you don't really see much of it in the game, which is again kind of a bummer, as realism doesn't start with violence and death, but with having non-violent ways to interact with NPCs.
The one big issue of course remains player death. It is really hard to get away from rapid respawn. You could Sands-Of-Time your way out of it, but even that is just a cheat to avoid consequences of player death. Another issue is that such instant-kill kind of gameplay leads to lots of trial&error gameplay, which doesn't seem to be all that popular with todays audiences.
Another way to do realistic violence is of course to make it all story based, like in an adventure game, where its not something the player does, but something done by other people to the player or friends of him. Heavy Rain might have some interesting stuff to show in that area, but if it really works or will be panned as a series of QTEs we have to wait and see.
You missed one thing, and it is the point this article is making:
People who want more realism are saying the most realistic games out there aren't realistic enough for them.
That is all.
I am not much good at Falcon either, it is however a good demonstration how realism can make (some parts) of the game a lot more fun. I for example spend hours in that game and other flightsims doing just landings. Landings in EF2000 with a damaged plane are a lot of fun, since they can turn out in old kind of fun ways, as there are so many ways things can go wrong in interesting ways.
In most arcade flight games on the other side landings and starts are completly automated, the game thus loses a lot of what makes flying interesting and more importantly, they drastically reduce the number of ways you can fail in an interesting way. Instead of having a nerve wreaking task of flying a damaged plane home, you get a two second explosion and be done with it, which is no fun at all.
And I still enjoy sticking it into my PS3 from time to time. Combine it with the soundtrack to Kill Bill and a circle of friends who like Tarantino movies, and you've got an awesome party game.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Sometimes I enjoy watching an imaginative fantasy movie. Sometimes I enjoy watching a light-hearted comedy. Sometimes I enjoy watching a serious documentary. Sometimes I enjoy watching a thought-provoking indie movie. And apparently, some people enjoy watching NASA TV. There's a wide range of choices in movies. Why not allow for a wide range of style and quantity of violence in games and for the personal preferences of other people without labeling them as good or bad or right or wrong?
... had a "realistic" setting that included everyone, including you, dying quite easily. It was nice.
You could die in the old Sierra adventure games too. One of the reasons I've always preferred LucasArts. Most games aren't about realism, we have a word for those that are: simulations.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
the overblown unrealism really gets tiring after a period of time. the 'heal' thing especially, in all kinds of games. they dont even replace it with fatigue or something. its 'healing'. your 'health points' go down, you die. then you magically restore it, somehow. takes away the realism. at least make it fatigue or something, something we can accept.
Read radical news here
There's already too much realism in these games. I miss the glory days of Quake3 and it's huge modding community.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
This boils down to fiction vs. non-fiction games (if we dare try to wrap our minds around that).
Games are inheritly fiction. What Mr. Walker is purposing is far more significant then the sentence seems to imply. We are talking about the establishment of NON-FICTION video games.
Now just think about that for a minute. As far as I can tell there has never been a NON-FICTION video game.
Football is a non-fiction game as would just about any sport. But the reason is you are REALLY PLAYING IT as a game (versus say spectating.)
To make video games "realistic" is an oxymoron. It can never approach realistic because it is intangible. Better graphic and better simulation doesn't converge at realistic but rather at better fiction.
A non-fiction video game would have no "4th wall" to contend with. The closest concept to that would be .Hack in the sense that the characters and the game world would have to be aware of it's own nature. When a character dies their data is deleted, no rez so we can say that Diablo made in-roads to the idea of non-fiction gaming in the sense of Perma-death (which they were by no means the first to offer this) but to demand "realism" in a video game is to imply a non-fiction element to video games which, conceptually, has never been done (can it be done even?)
There was a movie not so long ago that showed the best example of non-fiction gaming in which a player took control of a real person, perhaps that is the only example of Non-fiction gaming.
Today's MRL Nugget:
Ashur Mai Koloko Wai = Piet Lemon for "We Walk In Another's Deam"
Ashur = The Whole, All of Us, We
Mai = To Pass, To Move, To Walk
Koloko = Not Ours, Others, Not Mine
Wai = Deam, Thought, Imagination, Inner World of the Mind
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Since the entire idea of computer games is to avoid reality it seems illogical to try to make them more like reality.
The most unrealistic online FPS game I can think of right now is Team Fortress 2.
But damn is it fun!
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
When I finally got out of that crap and started playing, the first game I entered started with me walking all of four feet before being shot and killed.
No joke, four feet.
Heh... my first time at a paintball range (which is the closest I've been to actually being shot at :P) I also lasted all of four feet.
Made me realize even more I'd NEVER ever want to live a solider's life (unless it's the videogamey one ).
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
You know the games that to me had the perfect mix of strategy, "realism", and shooting? everyone here will probably laugh at me for saying so, but the MechWarrior series, especially Mech3 and 4. As you said with many of the shooters it was about camping or "twitch" fire, but with the Mechs, especially if you had a good force feedback flight stick like I had, you really felt like you were in the cockpit of a large war machine. If you were running light scout you felt fast and nimble, but if you were running an Assault or ultra-heavy it didn't matter if you put the biggest engines in the world on the big monster you handled like a Mac Truck..slow to get to speed and you sure as hell weren't turning on a dime.
Man I miss those games. I used to have a blast with those games but had to give them up when I got a pissy loser that went so far as to make sure I couldn't even connect. That was when I got to learn about DDoS and even had to change ISPs to get away from the little shit. All because the little turd thought for sure his Shadow Cat couldn't have been beat without me "cheating" and by blowing his perfect record I had made a personal attack against him. The funny part is I have never cheated in a game in my life, or even used a built in exploit, I just had a weird strategy for those games. I would take an assault or heavy, strip it down as much as possible, and mount as many large ballistics as she would hold. I would only get "one shot" but if I connected...oh mama! Anything short of another assault was toast, and even a heavy would be hurting and damaged enough that a light could finish it off. I clanned with 4 other guys and used the "carrier" approach, with me and a beam loaded heavy surrounded by mediums protecting our slow asses until we could bring the pain. Man that was fun.
But too much realisim in a game and it would cease being a game anymore. Who would want to play a game where a single leg shot and you end up stuck helpless on the ground with a compound fracture? You would spend most of your time in the MASH unit healing or in a body bag. Not exactly the way I would want to spend a Sunday afternoon.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Obviously this person's never played it. Never before have I seen a FPS where it's impossible to hit someone if your rifle is on anything other than single-shot.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
With realistic games, "the only winning move is not to play."
Give me my unrealistic games any day.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Play dwarf fortress. Have fun having your throat ripped out by the first wolf pack you encounter and drowning in your own blood. No respawns, no resurrections, you just die.
I always thought it would be pretty hilarious and cool to create, as a piece of art, a standard looking FPS shooter where you're some kind of supercop or the usual fare, and right on your first mission, within about 8 seconds of daredevilry you get shot in the spine. You wake up in the hospital surrounded by staff. Like any good joke, the key is to take it as far as you can until the player first laughs, then gets sick of it, then laughs again at the ludicrousness of it. There would be an elaborate AI nursing staff waiting on you 24/7, rehab classes where you slowly work on getting your feet to move again, painful surgeries, altered reality due to the constant stream of drugs, dreams, nightmares, sleep terrors, day terrors, flashbacks, the crazy guy in the bed next to you, the trauma unit coming through with the occasional screaming patient with a missing leg...but really keep it at the pace of reality where in a 24 hour day you might spend 6 hours awake and drugged, 16 hours sleeping, 1 hour struggling to eat your meal and use the toilet, and an hour in rehab.
If America's Army had you hold your breath, then they were violating their own marksmanship rules.
It didn’t.
You actually fire when you get to the end of your exhale.
...correct.
Your sights wander in rhythm to your breath. There is no way to hold your breath, and when accuracy counts, you time your shots exactly as you described.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I just got MW2 this weekend and I played online. It basically is one shot and you're dead. Not just from snipers, but it seems like every gun in the game will kill you in under a second (2 or 3 shots). That's not enough time to turn around and return fire or even hide. Or maybe I just suck at it still :)
BTW what's up with matching a newbie with skill level 4 with these guys in the 40s??
If America's Army had you hold your breath, then they were violating their own marksmanship rules.
It didn’t.
Sorry, but it does. Please see this official manual for AA3. Search it for the term 'breath' and you'll find a section called 'Holding Breath to Improve Accuracy' wherein it describes how when you are 'in sights' aka zoomed in, you can press the space bar to 'hold your breath' to stop sight drift from breathing.
Beyond just the manual, this is part of the training modules and actual gameplay, which is what I was originally referencing. Have you actually played AA3 to speak so authoritatively and yet so incorrectly?
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
It's funny you mention realism mods. I remember I used to play Star Wars Battlefront (the first one) on my PC all the time. It was actually rather dull until I found a mod that made all shots one hit kills. It also implemented realistic accuracy, so shots went wild if you fired while moving. It actually added some strategy to the game, and finally gave you a reason to go prone or crouch.
Personally, I think there's a place for both realistic and fantasy shooters. My two favorite games right now are probably Insurgency and Team Fortress 2, completely opposite ends of the spectrum.
On one hand, Insurgency can give you a nice rush of feeling in the ballpark of "OMG all my mates around me just got mowed down and now I'm crouched behind this oil drum oh god I'm gonna die" while allowed limited respawns to forgive minor mistakes and counter map imbalances. For instance, there's one map (sinjar) where as the marines are rushing up the hill in the beginning of the game, the insurgents sometimes launch RPGs or throw grenades down the hill. A bit of bad luck and you get blown up less than 30 seconds after your first spawn. If it was über realism, your fun would be over. The map is designed so that if you don't charge up the hill immediately, the enemy will dig in and you'll likely have a grueling 20 minutes of standstill. I'd say that in this instance, the designer wanted some way to ensure not all the marines made it up to the cap point, so he allowed for evil-ness with explosives. My point is, such a tactic would be unplayable in a realism game. In real life, the Marines would probably call in some danger close arty for good effect on target. While I applaud games of the Apocalypse Now type, trying to convey a strong message, I also enjoy things that are fun.
Now if you want to talk about fun, then Team Fortress 2 should definitely come up in the conversation. I swear that game is almost as awesome as sex. It's full of these really fun moments that I can only describe as virtual highs. Things like rounding a corner, and releasing an arrow from your bow to nail the minigun-touting fat guy between the eyes. Or how about sneaking up behind half the enemy team with a paper mask on your face and then stabbing those six guys in the back. And then you can close the game and watch the hilarious machinima videos released by the game developers that describe the cartoonish personalities of the in-game characters. Watching a round of TF2 can be like watching a coyote-roadrunner cartoon. Full of silly moments and fails and hilarity. I'd say that this game has more silliness than Viva Piñata and more depth than Modern Warfare 2. I mean I've played the game pretty much since it came out and I still haven't heard all of the in-game dialog.
In conclusion, realism can get your blood pumping, but pure cartoon fantasy can make you smile. They're both fun in their own way. Personally I think I prefer the fantasy aspect, but I make room for realism too.
I played it when it was in version 1.7. I’m pretty sure you couldn’t do it back then.
Does it matter when you hold your breath? Holding your breath at the end of your inhale would be worse than holding at at the end of the exhale, right?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
You just made video games boring as hell, and removed a serious level of escapism.
I've seen popele shot, burned, hit by a car, and bleed to death.
I don't want that level or realism in gamers because it's emotional impact is high, and it's boring.
Visually and game playing boring, not boring when it happens.
Team fortress 2 is a great shooter, and making it realistic make it stupid.
If you are using it as training, then he has a point.
In fact, most shooters have setting to make them more realistic. DO you notice very few people use those setting for long?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Yes the 'feature' is new in version 3, and no, gameplay-wise it doesn't matter when in the breathing cycle you do it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Well if it does, they are still violating their own marksmanship rules.
I'm not saying the GAME doesn't tell you to hold your breath, I'm telling you that I was a marksmanship instructor for the US Army for 4 of my 12 years and the technique is to fire at the bottom of your exhale -- the natural pause in breathing. Granted, I wasn't a sniper instructor--maybe they have different techniques, but in the Basic Rifle Marksmanship course, you fire an M-16 or an M-4 at the end of your exhale. Period. Don't care what the game says, or what the game manual says.
I played the first version and remember now that you hold the space bar down. I haven't played it since.
As I stated, though, you NEVER hold your breath when firing. Breathe normally and squeeze at the end of your exhale (Breathe, Relax, Aim, Squeeze). Nowhere in the BRAS acronym does it state "hold breath".
A more realistic game would [...] force you to buy a new copy of the game
So would you say the arcade version of Pac-Man, which forces players to buy in again after failing, is more realistic than Modern Warfare 2?
The original Soldier of Fortune had the most realistic damage effects of any game that I've ever played. It still allowed you to withstand more damage than you would in real life and had fast respawn times, but the type of detail it had in weapon effects was shocking. That was back on the Quake 2 engine. I would love to play something like Modern Warfare 2 with the type of weapon effects they had in Soldier of Fortune. Location specific damage with realistic entry and exit wounds. Heavy weapons could dismember limbs. Internal anatomy was clearly visible in wounds. A head shot would blow out the back of the skull. Modern games make do with a little blood spray even in Mature games and I think that does as much to desensitize you to violence as anything. Games like Rainbow Six or America's Army can give you a realistic level of lethality in games in 1080p. Show people what really happens when a bullet hits a body and you don't need more pixels to have a whole new class of realism in games. In terms of visuals, I still consider Soldier of Fortune the most realistic game I have ever played.
I think realistic consequences and results are.
A players real behavior in games should be tweaked by the results of his/her actions. Ok, so this isn't a simple thing to explain, but I don't believe that it's so complicated that it can't be accomplished in logic. I like video game violence, and it seems to be a healthy way to express frustration and experience behavior without real consequences, however, the way some violent games encourage a lack of behavioral awareness is pretty appalling.
So, say there's a game where I can be good or bad, and shoot people in a mall for example (this may or may not already exist).. The idea of not having any realistic(ish) consequences there seems a bit off. So, I propose we make the violence more realistic, and make the consequences more realistic.. it seems like a sort of bad idea to have one without the other in terms of realism. But anyway, you could still go jumping out a two story window and be more or less in good health, because yes, this is what makes it fun -- the hyper-exaggerated/superhuman things that a player can do is what makes it more appealing than real life.
It's just the overall result of behavior that I think should be looked at. Eg. you get caught, the game gets harder and harder to the point of you always dying, you're avatar is sent to prison and you have to start anew. etc. These can be fun experiments with a very wide range of results..
For example, killing nazi's is pretty decent, but raping civilians isn't, so what happens when you do something like that? does your central command treat you the same, do you get to command people, or are you dropped to being a grunt and monitored etc? I think these are the things that can enhance the feel of reality, while communicating natural as well as enforced consequences.
Anyway, I haven't spent a huge amount of time thinking about this, but IMHO it should be moving in this direction -- even if not always being technically realistic.
Set it to one shot kills and get some mates around and prepare to swear your tits off.
Yeah – well, I didn’t really play it that much. The learning curve was quite steep.
MOUT seemed to be haphazard and confusing. Bridge was a pinch-point between the two sides and I didn’t much care for it. Most of the time I played the pipeline level, preferring defense, and generally camped the main room from the ceiling (not able to see the primary valve, but able to hear it turning if anyone tried to shut it). Doing anything else just made it too hard to stay alive.
That was actually just about the best strategic location in the level – you could guard both the primary valve and the control room, at least one of which had to be taken in order for the opposing forces to win. The best way to take someone down from that point was to scuttle out of the basement doorway and hit him immediately with a M203 grenade.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
What CS did was encourage everybody to camp. It just didn't make sense to move anywhere because you'd be one hit killed by some AWP-wielding camping lamer who would win by being the guy that moved the least.
Yep, you just described real-life combat. You come under contact, you camp out, you call in support. Pound the position until they're either dead or hiding at the bottom of their holes, and then you walk over and clean up what's left. When your life is actually on the line, you don't go bouncing all over the field trying to rack up kills - you keep yourself alive by doing everything possible to make sure the other guy never gets a shot at you.
You're right, it wouldn't make for a very enjoyable game.
I just got MW2 this weekend and I played online. It basically is one shot and you're dead.
Well, you must be using a lightweight mech, like the Jenner - and presumably your opponent is using something massive and this "one shot" is fire-linked, with all their weapons... When you're using the lighter stuff you need to take advantage of your mobility - those Timber Wolves are tough but they're not too fast...
Oh, and remember to set up the "torso twist" controls! You're really slowing yourself down if you have to reorient your legs just to fire in a different direction... If you can get one of those Thrustmaster throttles, and one of those joysticks with the hat switch - those are supposed to be very good for MW2.
Bow-ties are cool.
'Realistic' games are for a special breed of lamer
Actually, from my CS days I seem to remember the very best players could kick ass just by running around with a pistol.. camping is slightly more realistic yes, but it doesn't guarantee winning by any means.. if someone keeps camping, use flashbangs, shoot through the walls, etc. That's one reason I stopped enjoying CS so much when the source version came out actually, very few opportunities for wall shots (however unrealistic they are).
I do get off my couch btw, and guns aren't very common here in the UK. I think tactical FPS shooters are a great form of entertainment, much better than WoW and similar "you can do anything if you spend enough time grinding" type games.
which is totally what she said
I found playing Rainbow 6 and Counterstrike back to back was a slap in the face for this very reason. In R6 you run around getting shot but ultimately making progress whereas in CS you run towards the enemy and die almost immediately.
Hah, seriously? I'd say I felt the opposite. The enemies in R6 seemed kinda unrealistically difficult to me with the way they could see you through foliage when you couldn't see shit, etc. I only got through a couple of levels before getting bored. I spent a *lot* of time playing CS. After realising that if you bring your character to a stop you immediately have perfect aim, it made me such a better player. Also running around with your gun aimed at head height means a lot less to do when you see an enemy, you can headshot people almost reflexively by stopping and shooting.
I coded up my own bots to play against before I had a decent internet connection, and I tried to make the bots as human as possible. It was a much better single player experience than most of the games I've played, more enjoyable even than the "official" CS bots that came out (based on the POD bot), which were again inhumanly good with their aiming a lot of the time (but far too dumb if you put them to the lower skill levels).
which is totally what she said
reminds me of the re-spawn times on Return to Castle Wolfenstein; it was a totally different game to play, since people would be more careful with their (virtual) lives.
I find annoying that characters move and aim too fast in all shooters I ever saw. No human can't run like that, worse than that, in most games they don't ever get tired of running like that.
It's more fun.
Canadian Army: two deep breaths, exhale half a breath, hold breath, shoot.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
You need to get your partner into "the mood"
Not around here, you don't.
My right hand is suck and tired of being treated like a piece of meat! It has emotions too!
Put on your body armour, helmet, 10 mags of ammo, your tac vest stuffed full of first aid supplies, a couple of frags, a smoke or two, plus your sidearm and it's ammo, and of course the PRR, your compass, and binos... and you're looking at 60-80lbs of gear on you.
You cannot just go hippty-hopping all over the map geared up like that. 200m of running, and you are TIRED.
Man am I glad to be Armoured.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Probably highest on my wishlist for more realism in FPS games is pretty simple: add wind. While I do delight in sniping the heck out of an opposing team, the thing that gets me is that sniping is so trivially easy in these games due to the fact that no external factors really exist. If you're strafing with machine guns, you obviously lose precision, but in most of these games you just crouch or get prone and have 100% accuracy. If you add wind, I really feel like that might be enough to turn it into a more skilled game, since you COULD die instantly from anywhere, but a sniper can also give away his position without killing you.
'nuff said. eh?
If I wanted realism, I'd sign up for the corps and go get my ass shot off in over in the sandbox. Cool, huh?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If I want to jump out of a second story window and break my leg, I can do that in the real world.
I don't want a perfect simulation of the real world. I want a simulation of the FUN world.
This is where games like Team Fortress and Left4Dead excel. They KNOW they are games and try to be fun games. If you simulate the real world too accurately, then I don't have any zombies to fight. And I have a broken leg anyway.
You could make the same argument for books or movies. You don't expect a novel to be 100% true and accurate. You expect it to be a work of fiction. There is a place for realism. There is a place for fantasy.
While I will disclaim that I have not served in the armed forces, I do know something about combat operations. For one, the process is not
1. Contact
2. Camp out
3. CFS
4. ????
5. Profit
In the first place, when contact is initiated by an opposing force, it tends to be at a time and place of their choosing. This is why when a patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan gets hit by an IED or small arms fire, rather than stopping and waiting for the insurgents' plan to fully execute where and when they want it, the patrol hits the gas to get out of whatever trap may be there. After the patrol has moved to another area they believe is more secure they dig in and reassess the area they came from. (With whatever support is available.)
Also, when you're the attacker, the last thing you want to do is make contact and just sit in one place while what other forces are out there react, flank, enclose, and mop you up (or run off into the night).
This isn't WWI. Unless you're in a really, really important/secure position, you'll move when conditions dictate it. You're right that it doesn't mean bounce around the field like a twit with a target on your helmet, but it also doesn't mean hide behind the wall forever come hell or high water until support kills everybody for you (or the enemy blows up you and your wall after watching you sit there long enough for them to bring whatever they want to bear).
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
His conclusions were that ARMA was (very) far from being realistic, but that it was OK because it would have been boring and tedious to act exactly like a real soldier in a real war.
Never having been in a warzone, why is it boring?
I imagine you spend a lot of time digging trenches, marching from A to B, making sure your equipment works. The few clips from real wars I've seen (probably with a biased selection by the media), say from the Iraq war, show soldiers out on a job to arrest someone. Then there's the bomber planes doing most of the heavy duty destruction work.
Is it "only" boring because there's very little time spent in close combat? If that is indeed the case, you could, you know, make a game that focuses on the exciting bit.
(Before the moralists get to it: yes, war is terrible, stressing to the soldiers, needlessly destructive, and so forth; I'm with you on the "Peace, maan" philosophy. Interpret my comment in context, sanely)
How precocious of you to pick up slashdot in your toddler years.
If you think that's impressive you should my tamagotchi beowulf cluster.
In the first place, when contact is initiated by an opposing force, it tends to be at a time and place of their choosing.
It's a lot more complicated than that. What kind of enemy? Who's on the offensive? What's the force distribution? Etc, etc. These days if we're fighting an actual battle, it's rarely because the other guy chose to fight us. They prefer to blow something up and then run away.
This is why when a patrol in Iraq or Afghanistan gets hit by an IED or small arms fire, rather than stopping and waiting for the insurgents' plan to fully execute where and when they want it, the patrol hits the gas to get out of whatever trap may be there.
You're talking about reacting to an ambush, which is completely different than fighting a deliberate attack.
This isn't WWI. Unless you're in a really, really important/secure position, you'll move when conditions dictate it.
You're right, this isn't WW1. In WW1, they moved. Then they promptly got mowed down by machinegun fire, and the survivors learned that it's a bad idea to move.
As I said earlier, it's more complicated than that. Give me a couple days and I can give you a fairly thorough understanding of modern combat tactics. Otherwise, a few good rules of thumb are don't bunch up, don't move without first suppressing the enemy, make VERY short movements, keep aware of everyone elses arks of fire, and if you're in a kill-zone shoot everywhere and get the fuck out.
What Do Gamers Really Want?
Yes, what does that monolithic mass of identically thinking game players want?
We want fantasy.
Wow. Figured that out all on your own, eh, Landry?
I've been shot at a couple of times. I don't mean I was sitting at the TV waving a controller around so a little pixel person could dodge cyborg powered armor piercing poison tipped bullets. Nope. These were just bullets from a simple and boring hand gun.
Does he mean he was actually shot at in real life? Could this be some sort of mental issue where he wants to recreate the effect that had on him?
I want a game that recreates that insane rush of endorphins and adrenaline or whatever it is after hearing a simple bullet crack past your ear.
Seriously weird. I once had a speeding, red light running car miss me (as a pedestrian) by inches, but I feel no desire to play Frogger a lot.
As a gamer I want a fun game. The path the developer takes to get there is irrelevant.
Realism is fine if done well, but ultimately nonessential. Would it help to have Mario asphyxiate in the screaming void of space while traveling between levels in Super Mario Galaxy? Well, actually, that *would* be pretty funny.
Anyway, there's more to gaming than bullets. There's entire games with a single bullet in them. Getting shot dead in Flower would be unnecessarily jarring.
Cracked covered game realism with a Photoshop contest: http://www.cracked.com/photoshop_85_if-video-games-were-realistic_p27
you had to eat the flower to get the power of throwing projectile fireballs at evil turtles...
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Everyone loves permadeath. That's why all the current blockbuster games have it.
I think Day of Defeat did an even better job than Counter-Strike. In DoD, something like 50% of the weapons make one-hit kills (all machine guns, single-shot rifles, sniper rifles, and grenades.) In CS, a rifle takes 3-5 hits to kill someone with armor and a grenade does <=50% damage; in DoD two-thirds of the classes have primary weapons that kill in a single hit, in addition to grenades that will wipe out an entire room.
This weapon style wouldn't work in CS because of the single-spawn round-based system. As the lethality of weapons increases, so does the viability of camping. DoD solves this by pairing infinite-respawning with incremental goals such as control points. The effective damage-rate of weapons affects gameplay, game balance, and map design. The 8-round/sec machine gun in DoD is only balanced because a single rifle shot can knock it out. The DoD grenades are only balanced because the maps are larger than CS.
I read the comments and find it hilarious that the debate goes nowhere.
Here's the thing: Some people like simulations while others don't.
So please do make war simulations and please make arcade games.
End of story.
If flight simulators can exist in the same world as star fox, why should anybody care?
There was a not very popular mad for Quake 2 called Action Quake 2 that sucked me in back in the early days when mods started to gain popularity as alternatives to the plain vanilla game. The Urban Terrormod is basically an improved copy for Quake 3 with different weapons.
The idea is the same though, realistic weapon mechanics, including long reload times, very powerful bullet hits resulting in a lot of damage, hits require bandaging to avoid bleeding out and dying, bandaging requires you to stand still for many seconds unable to protect yourself or run away. Grenades are absolutely deadly with very large blast radiuses making them very powerful but they require time to prime and throw that can result in you getting shot and killed before you throw your grenade off. There are many, many one-shot kills due to snipers, well placed automatic gun fire at your head, grenade blasts clearing hallways on the front-line of the fight between bases.
The Capture The Flag type games turn into a grenade spam, sniper alley, and death-rush type of scenarios if both teams have competent players who can hold and defend a mid-point front-line bottleneck such as a hallway or two. Most maps have multiple routes to the enemy's base resulting in 2 or 3 front-line bottleneck hallways, with shotgunners camping waiting for people to run through, noobs grenade spamming the hallway, and snipers sitting far back picking off any folks showing their heads.
The more interesting game is the Last Man Standing with teams where each team goes against the other and there are no respawns but usually in those games the team with better squad work and team work will take out the uncoordinated noobs running around looking for a fight. Ambush scenarios are very common with multiple people camping a well known walk-by spot to catch a few folks from the other team off-guard. Camping is usually the default tactic so you end up walking along walls and checking all corners before walking through them.
These two mods kept my interest a lot longer than the run-and-gun type games since there was more skill required to survive and larger penalties for failure when you did get shot. Marksmanship became important since even a lowly shotgun or sub-machinegun was a great weapon and you didn't require ultra power rocket launchers or plasma guns. Pistol battles and knife attacks were also quite common since the reload time penalty was so high that it was faster to draw your sidearm and try to finish off a wounded guy in a firefight than it was to reload your primary gun. You could hear this happening all over the levels with trrrat, trraat, trraat machinegun fire then a pause, with pop, pop, pop pistol fire.
Very interesting and engaging mods. A lot of good memories and times.
Try L4D2 Realism Mode. I think they win.
A lot of people I know play games to take a BREAK from realism! Most games aren't meant so simulate reality, they're meant to tap into a world that is a mix of dreams and math.
Games as math- in chess, the logic of one piece "attacking" another is mainly that the board position change. When my knight "takes" a queen, I don't need a realistic depiction of him raping her to death and then beheading her. I just need to know that 4C now contains -1 queens and +1 knights. It's the same in first person shooters or World of Warcraft. In Warsong, I don't care if you fight the flag carrier "realistically" with swords or with awesome beams of color shooting from your hands. I just want to know how much damage it all added up to and if they dropped the flag or not.
Being able to fly in my dreams isn't realistic. But I'm glad it's not. I can jump down flights of stairs in my dreams, I don't want my brain to realistically simulate my shin bones splintering when I do it. I just want the fun. And I want that same dream-fun in my games.
One of the two times I played paintball I got shot in the back by my own team. Unfortunately that's pretty realistic too.
There's a long history of games that try to be realistic with one-hit kills and body disabling; Bushido Blade in particular tried to make an enormous selling point of it, but I can name dozens of these games off of the top of my head.
None of them are popular. It's not that they're too difficult; there are many far more difficult games out there with enormous cult followings (R-Type, the 2d Prince of Persia games, Puzzle Fighter 2T and Solomon's Key come to mind).
It's that when you get hit once and go down, it feels cheap; like cheating.
They don't do well in the market because we're so used to video game laws that more realistic laws leave your player feeling ripped off.
The only game I'm aware of that ever got popular with a bunch of one-hit kills is Dragon's Lair, and I maintain that that's more about the ridiculously high production values for the day; nobody plays that game today, or even five years after it was contemporary, and there's a reason for that.
And don't kid yourself into thinking it's about hardware; laser disc hardware is still in production, and people fly over the moon to get 49-way laser joysticks for their Sinistar consoles.
It's because this "oh my god have to be real" thing doesn't lead to fun games. Stopping and starting over at the slightest mistake doesn't make good entertainment.
Incidentally, real humans can usually take several bullets which aren't headshorts or heartshots.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
sorry I wasn't clear due to my wording. What I meant is that "realism" has evolved from games like Mario to where it's at today.
Thomas Aquinas once went into the office of the Pope, and the Pope was sitting at a tablecounting money and stacking it in various denominations. He said to Aquinas, “Look, Thomas,the Church can no longer say, ‘Silver and gold have I none’.” Thomas replied, “Neither can it say, ‘Take up your bed and walk’.”
When considering what has been 'gained' it is also necessary to consider what has been lost.
Pretty much the only game made after 2002 that I keep coming back to is Civ IV. Whereas there are tons of games from the 80s and 90s that every few months I'll think to myself, wow, that was so fun I'm going to run it on DOSbox and/or beat the crap out of Vista until I can play it again.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
the first game I entered started with me walking all of four feet
I read this as "walking on all four feet". My first reaction? "Damn, that's not very realistic. Since when the hell did people have four feet?" Heh.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
To my eternal shame, I played the first Rainbow Six for about 10 minutes. Why not longer? Because I couldn't figure out how to open the door to the next training area. Didn't have a manual, tried every button on the keyboard, nothing. I was stuck. Fuck me sideways.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
oh come on, that would never work. You'd be constantly feeding them, or one would die and you'd lose the system. Time investment totally not worth it.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
I have all the latest Call of Duty games and by far, UO is the best. You want realism? UO has it. Yes, the graphics are a bit old and not nearly as good as the later games, but the game play is great. When you get shot, you can't lie down and take a little nap while your body heals. If you are lucky enough you can pick up some health packs. Some of the AWE MODs cause you to "bleed out" if you don't find a health pack. Fatal shots are, well, FATAL! If you get shot in the head, you friggin' die.
The latest games have really crappy sound too. A M1911 sounds like a cap gun. In UO the same weapon sounds like the real weapon. That's because when the game was created actual weapons were recorded for the sounds. A rapid fire MP44 sound like the real thing (given you have the sound system to support it). This may not be important to some gamers because they are probably listening to tunes while they play and don't give a damn about the in-game sound. Personally i like to be able to hear someone sneaking up behind me (5.1 surround sound).
I would love to see a re-make of the graphics only for UO. That would be a dynamite game (pun intended).
there's no way any software can satisfy those two criteria, being a game, and being realistic, ever.
Games aren't realistic; they're a way to escape reality. Being able to start a new game is an acceptable break from reality. I was making fun of people who crusade against these breaks from reality.
Areeed. Seriously - Have any of you EVER BEEN SHOT AT? It is the scariest thing ever to happen to me! No, I was not in the army. Yes, I am a normal American Male. Yes, I own guns. Yes, they are in a safe. No, I am not a criminal. OK, now that we got the fringe group stuff OOTW.... Realism beats the hell out of fantasy every time. Just go watch Avitar.......nice graphics, stupid story. Our teenage sons have a balance of sports, outdoors, and Xbox-WOW. The key is balance and talk to your kids ALOT! I fear darwinism is a visious trick being played on this generation. You are already seeing the fruits of thier labors in the papers...err, google news. J
So pure real-teim realism would make a game less fun but you can still have variety of strategy and more realism. Additionally, just because you have realism in damage (i.e. your leg example) doesn't mean you have to have pure realism (i.e. your time to heal example). You can add realistic or pseudo realistic damage but also add how hard it is to hit something in real-life. Also why does it have to take forever to heal...maybe damage is realistic but medicine isn't. I don't think there is one answer to realism here. What I do think is that if you explain your non-realistic parts away via story and keep some very realistic parts that offer strategic options you have a fun game.
As an example, a game based on Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon series could include both realism and sci-fi elements. You could have realistic damage but the fact that you can import consciousness into a new body could explain relatively fast respawns or swapping out "sleeves" that had different characteristics for different strategies.
Your mech warrior example of strategy was a good one too. I would just like to see more of that kind of thing. It doesn't have to be pure realism but it should offer something other than super men taKING rocket blasts to the face in every game. I'm not against those games either but we have enough already.
Thats Bohemia Interactives masterpiece, which is now ArmA. Codemasters just owns the name. Unless you are talking about OFP2 Dragon Rising... which just plain sucks.
In CS, a rifle takes 3-5 hits to kill someone with armor and a grenade does
That's why you aim for the head.. needing headshots was one of the reasons I enjoyed CS so much. I get bored having to pump lots of shots into people.
DoD was a great game too, and there wasn't so much need to be cautious or camp because of the instant respawning, but I'd say there was still plenty of camping going on - as there should be if you have control points to protect - but the grenades were indeed good for sorting that out :)
which is totally what she said
I hate how when I get shot by an RPG, my computer doesn't explode and pierce my body with hot shrapnel. It's so fake!
You're right that if you mixed the fantasy and reality just right you could pull it off, but it would take someone with guts and imagination, which sadly the game industry seems to be in short supply of. Instead we get to storm the beach at Normandy for the 500th time, while either facing enemies that line up to die or worse 'rubber band" AI where a single grunt with a lousy bolt action can pick you off from 1000 yards while taking more rounds than the Terminator.
But as far as Mech goes with that game you really had to think. There was no "infinite ammo", every weapon and piece of armor cost, and there was no way to mount a huge weapon on a tiny chassis, and getting hit hurt! If somebody popped you in the arm with an AC20 most likely the arm was gone, even if you had enough armor to take the blow you would lose weapons to damage. If you hit them in an ammo store you could do deadly damage if the ammo went off as well. I limped in after many a battle with an arm missing, most of my weapons depleted or destroyed, and my mech handling like a dying elephant from the chassis damage. You couldn't just "Rambo" that game and expect to get anywhere, and even the lightest mech could take on a heavy and if the pilot was good he could survive and even win the battle.
While I hope the Mechwarrior reboot is good, sadly nearly every game I've played lately has been the same old tired crap. It is as you say everyone running around taking rockets to the face and being able to take incredible amounts of damage with nary a penalty. It is all 100% alive or 100% dead, with nothing in between. At least with the mech games if you took a hit there wasn't any "hide and regenerate" crap, you were just gonna have to work around it or hope you can limp back to the repair bay while the smaller ones looked at you like wolves looking at a wounded elk. It really made you work for it. So maybe a little realism would be good, but it would have to be balanced and not done ham handed, which sadly in today's game market is highly unlikely.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.