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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)
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 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.