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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.
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.
Anybody who only used the armour mode on the nanosuit needs to reinstall the game and play through again. As a different class of player.
I love Crysis because it is at least three different FPS games rolled into one. You play in the standard armour mode, you head in, kill some bad guys, win the day. You play in stealth and pick off opponents from far away, then slip away into the shadows to attack from another position. You mix it up with speed and strength to charge in and beat the living hell out of something. I've never played a game with such dynamic alterations to gameplay without having to stop, quit, and change class. You're a HW Guy, a Sniper, and a Scout all at once.
If you've completed it and fancy some awesome God-like carnage, edit the ini file to make suit recharging almost instant, clips hold 999 ammo, and run speed twice as fast. Super sweet.
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I loved playing through most of the game using the stealth mode... It's a bit slower but takes more finesse.
However, the multiplayer design of Crysis was absolute shit. Anyone should've picked up from the DX9-clients-can't-mix-with-DX10-clients that Crytek violated one of the first rules of multiplayer game architecture - DO NOT TRUST THE CLIENT. In Crysis' case, apparently they offloaded world physics calculations to the client, and also trusted the client WAY too much.
For example, if a client said, "my 9mm pistol does 9999 damage", the server would say, "OK, 9999 damage to your target. Oh look, it's instadead."
Similarly, if a game client said, "My vehicle is immune to all forms of fire.", the server would happily say, "You got hit with a missile. Oh, you're immune to explosive damage - no damage at all!"
I played multiplayer for two weeks, the second of which was playing with the INI files figuring out what degree of cheating would not get noticed. (Thanks to the blatant instakillpistol cheaters, there was a LOT of potential for nonobvious cheating, such as the 400HP Toyota truck with a tweaked suspension.) After that I uninstalled the game and haven't played since. Cheating was, of course, unexciting other than the technical challenges of modding the game. Playing legit was pointless because of the ease of cheating.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?