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Crytek Dev On Fun vs. Realism In Game Guns
An anonymous reader tips a post from Pascal Eggert, a gun enthusiast and Crytek developer, who sheds some light on how weaponry in modern shooters is designed. Quoting:
"Guns in games are like guns in movies: it is all about looks, sounds and clichés. Just like in the movies, games have established a certain perception of weapons in the mind of the public and just like in movies games get almost everything wrong. ... The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment. ... if you want to replicate the looks of something you need to at least see it, but using it is even better. You should hold a gun in your hands, fire it and reload it to understand what does what — and at that point you will realize, there is nothing on it that does not have a function — because guns are tools for professionals. Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers or magic devices that kill people at a distance when really it's just a simple and elegant mechanism that propels little pieces of metal. Unfortunately 3D artists often only get access to the photos that Google Image Search comes up with if you enter 'future assault rifle' or, even worse, pictures from other games and movies that also got it wrong. This may explain a lot of common visual mistakes in games, especially since guns are mostly photographed from the side and egoshooters show weapons from the first person view."
This article is drawn from his personal experience in the game industry. The images shown are Pascal's personal work and are not related to his work at Crytek.
Crytek can look at making their games fun first...
How about realistic stories and dialogues first? Crytek?
Is anyone really surprised by this?
And further more, who asked for an explanation?
It's quite obvious the rocket launcher from UT isn't real. I never once thought a "rocket launcher" was that easy to handle.
I never expect weaponry in games to be life-like, depending on the game.
Certain games require certain realism, but I also know, too much realism would kill the fun.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
I don't think firing a real gun is particuarly fun. Aim, recoil, reload, inherent danger... A gun is a tool, not a toy. Games are a toy. Besides, the mechanism is bound to be different, mousebound crosshair, point and click. That's kinda fun, but in real life, perhaps not so much.
I like that this is being talked about. I was playing Modern Warfare 2 recently and ended up with an FN-FAL. This was great news as far as I was concerned as this is the rifle I first trained on during my own brief military stint. Of course come the last round being fired the character slowly changed magazine and recocked the rifle. Now this isn't some cheap British SLR, this is supposed to be an FN-FAL. Even cursory investigation would tell you that changing mags before empty requires no recocking and changing on an empty mag only requires a flick of the bolt-locking device to allow the breach to move forward; only a first load would require recocking.
.303 sound to that point was Army Men. And they were just plastic soldiers! Here's some geek in an office who'd only ever played Doom and Duke3D telling a guy straight off the range what was realistic.
On top of that the recoil was vastly understated and I can guarantee you that after putting two 7.62mm NATO rounds through someone they will not still be firing or running at you. I'll give you a laugh, the game that always impressed me in terms of rifle sound effects was Army Men on the first Playstation. I had to read a horrible review of the game from a UK magazine stating that the sound effects and shooting mechanics were unrealistic. I read that after returing from a weekend at a firing range and the only game I had ever seen capture a 7.62 or
Next time a game promises more realism I expect more than just graphics and crazy Dirty Harrry style sound effects. Operation Flashpoint 2 got it right for the most part, firing a sniper rifle mid-air while running and jumping in CounterStrike is nonsense.
I never get used to these constant resurrections
Being too lazy to model a gun so they only make half of it and then mirror.
Orwell was an optimist.
Games are, in the end, games. Inmersion is important, but inmersion withouth fun will be... well.. not fun. So in the end videogames are mostly like complicated boardgames with the rules written in programming code.
In a game where having pistols works as very short distance weapons is not fun or usefull, the pistol will work mostly like another rifle.
( Ex: Games modeled after Rock, Paper, Scissors will force rockets as antivehicle weapons, that will not kill a soldier in a direct hit. )
And who cares? some people care... people that know real weapons, like (maybe) soldiers, and people that love weapons and love to read all details. And this affect games, because these people play videogames and is a very vocal group, and can get his point right.
There are lots of games, so generalization is poor here. There are games that aims for high levels of realism, or different levels of realism / gameplay. In one side of the spectrum there are games like Unreal and Modern Warfare 2, subreal products. On the other side there are "combat simulations" like ArmA. In the middle you have games like Battlefield.
Games are not getting wrong anything, games are remodeling weapons for his own purposes. We all know Kings are not forced to move in only 8 different directions, but is usefull for chess to model kings that way (and this don't make chess 'wrong').
-Woof woof woof!
Well take a sound team and film unit to a part of the world with real arms dealers, a wide selection of special forces, Soviet, US, South African bush wars, UK, NATO, and current weapons...
Then set up as needed and test, test, test.
Perhaps build a rig to measure push back and chart the different guns?
That will give you the laws of physics, you will have sound and visuals from every aspect.
This is not the old days of a quick sketch, a low res gui and a royalty-free gun audio license on a cd.
Why is the young digital generation of artists so sheltered should be the only question.
If they are unable to travel and work with real life, time to rethink the staff?
If your an aspiring 'artist' turn of the anime, xbox, sony time wasters and learn to draw in the real world.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You mean to tell me that my BFG 9000 was simply made up, it does not match a real world device?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
http://xkcd.com/359/
Actually, as someone who's had at least the basic infantry training (our main role was to shoot down aircraft) it seems to me like it is indeed very very easy to handle. Ever since some guy tied a bow to a plank, weapons have been point and click basically.
And I imagine we'll probably find some parchments where the old guard argues that command line weapons were better, and how you should give lusers an IQ test before letting them anywhere near a weapon. ;) Actually, that is only half joke. A pope actually treated the crossbow as some kind of WMD and prohibited its use against fellow Christians. But I digress.
Anyway, a non-guided anti-tank rocket launcher like the one in most games is the epitome of easy to use. You don't even have to compensate for distance as much as with an assault rifle. The only thing that's unlike the game is basically that you should be sure there's nothing behind you, and shooting most rocket launchers in a room is an awfully bad idea. When the rocket comes out the front end, a jet of flame comes out the back end, see? You don't even have much recoil to deal with, since the hot gas just goes out the back end instead of pushing against something. Truly point and click, really.
Now guided ones that can take down a low flying helicopter may need a tad more training, but the basic principle is the same.
As for the other point, while I'll concede the general point that too much realism kills the fun, there is a difference between lack of realism because you understand exactly why it would be less fun, and lack of realism because you have no clue how a weapon works. The latter can be unrealistic without gaining any fun, or even being less fun.
Heck, probably the most baffling weapon-related example comes from the post-NGE SWG, where one quest gives you a sniper scope for a sword. No, literally. I can't even imagine what they were thinking, what were they smoking, and what's the phone number of their dealer so I can get some of that good shit too ;) And I can't even start to imagine why that would be more fun than a more believable (i.e., realistic) attachment like a mastercrafted grip or pommel.
Or take the meme that assault rifles kick so hard that you spray bullets in a 30 degree cone, or make that 45 degrees if it's an AK-47 or SAW. Such a weapon would be fracking useless. I once calculated that if a real SAW had the spread from counter-strike it would be useless even for suppression at its rated effective range, because you'd need to fire many many full belts and more ammo than a squad carries, to even put one bullet in the same square metre as the guy you're shooting at. Sorry, that won't make me keep my head down. I'll take that kind of chances.
And anyway trained soldier (most games pretend you're one) wouldn't spray lead like that. Except maybe if he's shooting from the hip while dancing the Macarena ;)
And the AK-47 is actually a very manageable weapon, although the larger calibre tells the average clueless gamer nerd who never shot one "OMG, higher calibre must kick like a mule." The key there is that it really was designed as a mid-range weapon, in the same line of thinking as the German MP-43/STG-44 (the first assault rifle) it was trying to imitate. It has a shorter cartridge case and shoots a larger but slower bullet, which means you're not really putting more impulse in the bullet. It's also why its effectiveness takes a nose dive beyond 300 metres: the slow bullet needs a too curved trajectory to hit the target and increases the chance to estimate wrong and shoot over or too short. But even then (A) it's 300m, not the distances on the average game map, and (B) it's the ballistic problem described before, not some kind of spraying lead in all directions.
At any rate, exactly what fun does that inaccuracy bring? Games have been balanced just fine and had interesting weapons even in the "stone age" when guns were hitscan weapons. And games like WoW still are such a bad offshoot of hitscan that you can even see the projectile curving and even zig-zaging to its target, and sold more copies than a lot of the "but it's realistic!!" (if you don't know how guns work, that is) idiocies. _Someone_ must like that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment." So what exactly is the problem? I always was under the impression videogames are products to provide entertainment. If you honestly think weapons have some sort of artistic value you can visit the shooting range.. or join the army.
I'm a bit of a war.tech.geek. My favourite subjectmatter is ww2 weapons; and so I get a thrill out of detailed games that portray such creations. I love to see and interact with a detailed pletora of weapons that i recognize. I do, however, get more picky when the weapon systems get "up close and personal". When the game portrays the notion that you control an existing weapon directly, I do expect some of it's characteristics to be reflected in the game.
:/. Most ww2 hollywood tank portrayals pre-"saving private ryan" are horrendous.
Immersion & "draft damage": Having been a conscript for 8 months, I've had my perception of small arms altered. I know now that regular infantry man usually engages the enemy with single fire, and that the precision and stopping power afforded by a modern assault rifle is something thats too often is only portrayed by sniper rifles in games. I tire of the inability to take proper aim, and alter the firing mode in many games. Crouching and going prone is also something that's often being shunned by the industry.
We're are, as the article puts it, often left with a hollywood version of weapons. I'm not suggesting that each virtual m16 should come with a virtual cleaning kit, but I would like to see more "portrayed" realism in the handling: that the (deadly) tool can be operated with some of the freedom and functionality that it provides in real life. I realize that this approach is not for all types of games.
I realize that games are abstractions and aspects of realism can be costly and complex to implement in carefully balanced game mechanics; especially if they're intended to provide a competitive space for players.
For gun nuts: I was trained with a Diemaco C7 with an elcan optical sight
P.s: We we're missing a proper ww2 tank movie
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
"there is nothing on it that does not have a function -- because guns are tools for professionals"
Spoken like a man that has never been inside a gun shop.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
You mean you can't surive a .50 cal sniper rifle to the face?
I don't *expect* a BFG 9000 to be realistic. If it were, it would kill half the fun.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The fact is that we are not trying to simulate reality but are creating products to provide entertainment.
Thank you Captain Obvious. Hollywood, with its disintegrating fruit stands, good looking and extremely slutty women and exploding cars, has known for a long time that reality is pretty boring. In fact, most people LIKE it that way.
because guns are tools for professionals.
Save that BS for your next NRA meeting. There's nothing professional about most of the people who own/use guns. They are tools for killing. It is their sole purpose. They may be used by professionals (SOME soldiers, SOME law enforcement, SOME private gun owners), but gun ownership does not confer professional status. "Ganstas" and drug traffickers have a lot of guns and use them regularly, and there's nothing professional about that. Nor is there anything professional about the husband who shoots his wife, or the guy who shoots his neighbor. I say this as a responsible gun owner, and I hope I never ever have to be in a situation where I have to think about using it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Fantasy weapons are for fantasy games.
So, you're telling me that game designers are sacrificing realism to produce entertaining weapons?
Shocking!
Next thing you'll tell me is that there is no secret Black Mesa research facility.
Sure, for some games some degree of realism adds to the enjoyment. STALKER, for example, benefits from having vaguely realistic settings and weapons. But even if you're playing something that's genuinely set in the real world - like one of the Call of Duty games - you're still playing a game. You still have to simplify things down to the point where information can be conveyed quickly and easily with nothing more than a screen and some speakers. You have to be able to interact with the world with a keyboard and mouse. The world needs to be altered and constrained and limited enough to run on a modern computer. And it all has to ultimately be fun to play.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Hey guys, first of all, this headline is misleading. I didn't wrote this article as a Crytek Dev, I just happen to work at Crytek and this is my personal opinion. The article was written for gun-nuts to explain to them why guns are often portrayed wrongly in games, not for gamers. Also, since I just joined Crytek I'm not responsible for anything you've seen in our released games. So, remember: This has nothing to do with Crytek. Also, I want to make it very clear that my article was about games that are set in "realistic" environments, like MW, Crysis, CS, BC and so forth. I absolutely agree, that realism is not at all needed in games like UT, Serious Sam etc. The job of the gun-designer in these sort of games is completely different: he has to create an "Icon" or a recognizable shape so the player knows what he is holding without even directly looking at it. Something like the rocket launcher in Q3 or the flak in UT99. This weapon does not need to be designed around internals, but have to have a certain feel for the power and limitations of the weapon. A good "funweapon" is designed around a unique shape, something a kid could doodle on a desk at school. I personally don't like the UT3 Weapons because they are overly detailed and not as recognizable as the original guns. Thanx, iPeg
Maybe some designer from epic games will read this and stop designing all the guns like barrels and bananas glued together in various ways and painted in random colors!
Kelly's Heroes. 'Nuff said.
In the real world, the US has better weapons. No surprise, they spend a shitload on them. [...] Nobody would want to play on the weaker side
I think you answered your own implicit question. Make the weaker side free to play.
I dont care what you all day, my KF-7 Soviet is a real gun, I have seen them on TV.
That's because the Goldeneye 007 guns are mostly renamed versions of real guns. What you're seeing on TV is an AK-47.
guns are tools for professionals
Really? So when I was a teenager hunting rabbits with my .20 guage shotgun and squirrels with my .22 caliber rifle, I was a professional?
Lot of weapon designers in the game industry get that wrong. They think of guns like products for consumers
So my dad wasn't a consumer when he bought those firearms?
Unfortunately 3D artists often only get access to the photos that Google Image Search comes up with if you enter 'future assault rifle' or, even worse, pictures from other games and movies that also got it wrong.
I was brought up around guns; my dad had a lot of them, and the guns in movies, with few exceptions, look real to me (kudos to the property masters). About the only thing I see the movies getting wrong is John Wayne firing thirty shots from his revolver, but newer movies (like ones made in the last 40 years) don't even do that. "I know what you're thinking, punk; did I fire six shots or only five? To tell you the truth I kinda lost count myself." Even Die Hard IV, little of which was very realistic at all, had McClain as well as the bad guys reloading.
True, I haven't seen many realistic looking weapons in video games, but come on -- nobody would think Quake II's BFG was a real gun. And come to think of it, the pistol in the original Wolfenstein looked about as realistic as you could get with the era's possible graphics.
Maybe if Crytek hired people with three digit IQs they could make some fun games; this guy's obviously one of the 50% of humanity with a two digit quotient. If they're all that dumb, I can see why their games would suck (I don't know that they do suck, I'm taking your word for it; I haven't been into gaming for a long time and haven't played their games).
Free Martian Whores!
Try www.BattlegroundEurope.com This is a World War II simulation/game where they try to duplicate the realism of a weapon with the correct physics and sounds. If someone does prove them wrong about a weapon and backs it up with historical accuracy and details they will make changes to the weapon to reflect that change.
Next thing you'll tell me is that there is no secret Black Mesa research facility.
I see my cover-up is effective! Mwahahahaha!
G-Man
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Slashdot prides itself on the accuracy of its headlines. I don't believe we've had a misleading one since the 2003 incident.
Any other other old Mac gamers out there that remember this title? This was Bungie's original FPS (afaik), before the whole Marathon series. What I really like about it was that you really had to account for every damn bullet. You had to manually consolidate partial clips. you could fill clips with alternating AP and HE rounds. Hell, you even held onto empty magazines to refill with bullets you found on corpses. In addition, reload time was painfully (realistically) slow. While I may not have played nearly as many FPS titles as some of you young whippersnappers, I would have to say that this was the most realistic weapon handling of anything I've played.
The most fun guns are the most impossible/ridiculous ones. Gravity gun? Riiiiight...but sure is fun!
I'd guess that the difference you see in the (lack of) effectiveness and (un)realism of guns in video games has a great deal to do with video quality and fairness.
Sounds strange, but true.
The most amazingly realistic simulation of small arms (and large, but that's not relevant here) in combat is WW2OL aka Battleground Europe. (http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/) The problem is (from a gaming perspective) is that it's nowhere near 'fair' according to most peoples' terms.
The problem is that modern combat engagement ranges are in the 300-500m range, often significantly more. Combat rifles are intended to be fully lethal at these ranges, obviously.
If my math is right, on a monitor 0.5m from your face, a 2m-high man standing @ 500m is 2mm. If he's lying prone - extremely common in combat - he's 30cm real life or 0.3mm on the monitor. That's nearly approaching the minimum dot pitch of most monitors. So for a 'typical' combat game, realistically representing lethal rifle fire at realistic ranges, you're shooting at a SINGLE pixel, which is extremely ungratifying, not to mention impossible to distinguish a 'man-pixel' from a 'bush pixel' at that range.
Monitors simply cannot support the resolution needed to allow people to fight at realistic engagement ranges.
Further as regards 'fairness' and Battleground Europe: this hypothesis was illustrated clearly to me when I was running the game on a marginal-spec machine. Running at 800x600, I was having trouble fighting effectively and dying a lot. Once I spent significant $$ to upgrade my system, and run it at 1600x1200, it became MUCH easier it identify targets and hit them at useful ranges. Part of the explanation about why BE remains a niche-game to this day is that difficulty, of course. But I can't see any mass-market designer building a game where the amount of money you put into the hardware so DIRECTLY affects the success of the player - not when the simple (simplistic?) solution is to cut the engagement ranges down by a factor of 3x or 4x, and correspondingly lower the lethality of weapons. For most purposes, that would seem an ideal compromise.
-Styopa
I am not a gun fan... but I do know something about them. The giant economy size superguns in some games are ludicrous - all the bad guys have to do is wait five minutes, and then they can walk over an bash your brains out, while you're lying on the ground, utterly exhausted, from carrying that much metal that way.
The same is true for the fantasy swords, many of which - esp. in games, but including the ones I see in dealers' rooms - way more than a great weapon (which requires two hands), and folks expect to use them standing out front being brave (and not having people in front with shields and one-handed weapons protecting you.
Go look at *real* weapons in a museum.
mark, who remembers learning to fight heavy in the SCA, and discovering, while
in *good* shape, how exhausted you are after 5 min of trying to beat
someone with a baseball bat equivalent
I found this blog post to be a fascinating read. I've grown up with more realistic shooters, so I always laugh a bit when I play COD or similar games. Now I understand more of the reasoning behind MP40 9mm rounds doing more damage than 9mm fired from a p38.
One of my favorite games is the Forgotten Hope mod for Battlefield 2, which is one of the few WWII games that has the balls to make their weapons accurate and lethal. It shines in online play, where 64 player servers, beautifully created, large maps, and a huge variety of tanks, vehicles, planes, and weapons create an experience like no other. Bolt action rifles (the standard weapon of almost all armies in game) will drop a player in one shot to the chest, and a shot to the arm or leg will leave you barely alive and bleeding. SMGs are not just cone of fire spray and pray weapons that are useless at distance. Firing from the hip will do this, but aiming down the sights gives the gun accuracy it deserves, and with proper control of the recoil, you can be a master of medium ranges as well. heck if you account for bullet drop you can hit long range targets no problem. These guns shoot where the sights are pointing, and will kill with 2-3 solid hits. As such, Machine guns are ungodly. They fire rifle rounds full auto. This is reflected.
Because it is made on the Battlefield engine, the game counts ammo strictly by magazine/stripper clip rather than a pool of bullets. Reload animations are excellent, and are timed to be realistic. Getting caught reloading a No.4 in an engagement, and running for cover while you slide the two clips into the magazine and lock the bolt forward is an exhilarating experience.
Anyways, check it out if you want a great game made by fans of WWII history and weaponry.
So many guns in games are modeled backwards. These guns are designed to be fired by right-handed shooters. In that case, you don't want the empty cases to be ejected on the left side of the gun. No one wants hot brass (or steel, if you shoot Russian surplus garbage ammo) coming at their face while they're trying to shoot. But you can't see the ejection unless they reverse it for the game. I've had a hot casing land in my collar. It's not pleasant. I find it annoying and thing it's stupid that they do this for in-game guns.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
...but even in the (according to the rest of the world) "Gun Happy" USA, most children today are brought up in a world where everyone from the media to politicians to schools all universally say "Guns are bad, m'kay?" (European designers are probably doubly crippled along this line...)
They grow up to be game designers that not only have never fired a real gun, but have never even SEEN one firsthand.
The media likes to, for example, portray Columbine as an example of guns run amok. Schools expel kids for drawing a PICTURE of a gun.
Is it surprising then that these individuals then are hard-put to try to simulate a gun in code?
Heaven forbid we go back to the days when I was in high school, we actually had shooting classes, and we could even bring in our own shotguns if we wanted. And you know, nobody in the history of our school was ever shot. AMAZING.
It's almost like guns were treated as serious, potentially-dangerous tools that nevertheless had a valid purpose and the best way to deal with kids and guns was to teach them how to use them properly and with respect, in order to prevent injuries from inappropriate use. Crazy stuff, I know.
FWIW though, I know friends that have come back from Iraq who claim they owe their lives to moronic young Iraqi men that thought they could fire a handgun sideways like in the movies, probably not a few cops would say the same.
-Styopa
Whiny article. All complaints, no solutions. I reached the end of the article expecting another page which would discuss how real world weapons should behave in games. No such luck.
For a better analysis, see Gatling Good on TVTropes. Also More Dakka.
America's Army has realistic weapon mechanics, of course. (It's sponsored by the U.S. Army). Players have complained about that.
My only problem with FPS games is that for some reason pistols are so god awful accurate and smg's and rifles have horrendous random spread patterns that put shotgun's to shame. (I.E. Half-Life, Half-Life 2, and just about every Bungie Game).
Yes and no. While trying to capture and ransom enemy nobles _was_ a staple of warfare, they also _did_ think they're more special than the plebs.
The medieval notions of "honour" are anywhere between non-intuitive to baffling, by modern standards. E.g., although it makes no sense if you only think in terms of ransom, it was actually fairly OK to execute even prisoners if it looked like too much a pain in the butt to keep them for ransom, and the English did just that. Killing wounded knights with a dagger thrust to the heart was even a virtuous thing to do. Although you'd think washing and bandaging them might be worth a try, just in case one actually recovers and can be ransomed. Killing unarmed children (even of nobles) who were with the baggage train when you ambush it, that was perfectly honourable, and the French did just that. Killing everyone because they rejected your first offer to surrender, that was chivalry gold. But send some lowly mercenaries or conscripted peasants to do any of those, and it would become something unthinkably villainous. (And it was the beginning of England's reputation of completely honourless bastards.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
If you want to sound the least bit credible, for the love of monkey, learn the difference between magazines and clips.
Clips:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Clip_M1-SKS.JPG
Magazines (except for the en bloc on the left):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/M1-M14-M16-magazines.JPG
If you use a clip to load a .
Magazines are what you change to reload the weapon.
In other words, YOU DO NOT CHANGE CLIPS.