March 25, 2008
First-person shooters are murder simulators... The military trains recruits to kill using first-person shooters...While we've all heard such rhetoric from critics of the FPS genre, a Popular Mechanics article suggests that even the most reality-based titles are enhanced by developers to play more smoothly or deliver a more exciting experience than that found in your every day, run of the mill gun battle. From Erik Sofge's PM piece:
Unlike sci-fi FPS games such as Halo or Doom, military shooters have a tradition of so-called realism. Most of the in-game weapons are available now... Firefights look and sound like something out of Blackhawk Down... Will increasingly powerful PCs and game consoles allow military shooters to become more realistic than ever?
If Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is any indication, the answer is a big, fat “sort of.” ...when it comes to the guns, the developers seem to have pushed the Tom Clancy series closer to the battlefield..
Except, of course, when the developers feel the need to cheat. All of the guns in RSV2 start out extremely accurate, based on factory stats and more, before game balance and player expectations come into play.
Ubisoft RSV2 designer Philippe Thieren told PM:
I take these weapons, and look at what defines them, or what people think defines them. For an Uzi, people think it fires lots of bullets, and it’s really inaccurate. So I make it fire faster than it should. It’s about taking the personality of a weapon, and making it shine in the game.
These consoles are so powerful, when you fire a bullet we could factor all of it in: windfall, range, everything about the history of that specific weapon, friction values for the barrel, how many times it’s been fired since it was last cleaned. We could make it as anally realistic as possible. But we’re not trying to make a live simulator.
What about America's Army, the Defense Department's powerful recruiting tool?
Adhering to realism is something of a sticking point for AA, since the last thing the Army wants to do is to present modern warfare as a series of high-octane action-movie scenes.
With consistent access to actual weapon systems and insight from current and former soldiers, you would think that AA’s guns would come out 100 percent accurate. [But] in America’s Army, the limitation is [the user's PC] hardware...
When you’re hit in nearly any war-themed FPS... surviving means finding cover, then jumping back into the fight. This regenerative health system has no bearing on the story line or on reality.
Mega-hit Call of Duty 4 has garnered accolades for its realism, but, as PM reports:
The dev team for Call of Duty 4 also starts out with hyper-realistic weapons, then tweaks them for balance and personality... Realism, in other words, is almost always about the flavor of the game, and it’s as subjective as any element of genre.
Comments
Re: "Realistic" Game Weapons May Have More Game and Less Realism
I hate the very fact that people always associate realism with boring.
Neither arcade or realism is boring or fun in its own merit, how its applied defines the game.
You could very well make extremely realistic weapons and still make a fast paced CQB game no problem.
Or the otherway around, arcade feeling guns but with gameplay mechanics encouraging a more realistic approach.
I for one despise the one thing people always seem to miss, ranges/distances.
You always seem to be fighting in some fishbowl sized town with shotguns that cant kill unless 4meters away.
I vote for a game very close to realism but leave out the bigger waits and runs to battles, but with long enough
distances that you cant knife people from spawn to spawn (relatively speaking) like in CoD4.
Where does reality come into play? I can point out one problem: If I spasm or twitch at the controller(I have never been able to hold still), it's ok as long as it didn't affect the thumbsticks. It might even be okay If I used a mouse. If I do that in real life...
Secondly, I've never seen a aimer pop up in real life. Even if you used the blind skull in Halo 2 & 3, or something similar in another game, it still wouldn't matter. The gun will still always be magically aligned to the center of the screen, or close to it anyway. I can understand it maybe in futuristic games with helmets that maybe there's a computer interface, but that doesn't help us here in the year 2008.
And what about third person? That is not going to happen. Ever.
And how about saves, or respawning? That's not happening either.
To me, "truly realistic" military and/or tactical FPS are very rare : the first "Rainbow Six", its sequel "Rogue Spear", "Operation Flashpoint" and "Armed Assault"... There aren't many. To me, most FPS that are put in a moden combat context ("Call of Duty", "Battlefield", the latest episodes of the "Rainbow Six" franchise...) use this "realism" or "pseudo-realism" as a varnish, but when you take it off, you get the same experience as "Halo 3" or any other sci-fi shooter. It doesn't mean they are bad games : I love many of them and I have a lot of fun with them. But I take them for what they are : fun and entertainment, no more.
Plus reality tends to not be balanced for multiplayer.
Realism for me comes from the complete interactivity with the environment. I may know absolutely nothing about the real specs of an Uzi, but I do know that if you shoot one at a street sign, it will puncture the metal and leave a hole. That hole will be see through and will not spontaneously repair itself as though it were a glitch in The Matrix.
In this way, realism is largely ignored in all video games, as such subtlety rarely influences the factors of the game itself and ultimately waste valuable resources.
Microprose, a company once known for its simulations and now long dead, put it best, I think. To paraphrase (because it's been years...) one of their flight simulators had, in the manual or some other printed material, this goal: "We keep the parts that are fun, and leave out the parts that aren't."
That's what separates a game from a genuine simulator.
I'm guessing you were at Benning, too, given that you have you MOS in your screenname. Are you talking about the qualification range simulator that plugged into an NES? Or the one that looks like a pinball machine with an M16A2 on it? The closest we got to real was reflexive fire simulations in the ESS 2000, but even then we were shooting at black and brown silhouettes.
but ever since Ubisoft bought them out theyve bastardized the games and made them more arcade style in any regard.
theres no realism anymore, once there was a little, not going to say much cause back then tech was more limited whereas now it could be better, but there was a little.
i recall using the MP5 to snipe across the smaller maps just fine in Rogue Spear for instance. Not "fair" maybe to those using rifles, but it was realistic in its imbalanced weapons.
people whine to much at imbalanced games though (as was one complaint i used to hear about Quake 3 and why people hated it)
i miss the attempts at realism that once were as compared to the claim of realism in these kiddied up arcade games.
i agree with Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, FPS games have gone down hill ever since they decided to follow Halo like it was the only one to have ever been a hit.
whats worse honestly is how badly balanced these games are anyways, where an MP5 is more powerful than most assault rifles, and ten times more accurate whereas in reality the rifle should be both more accurate and powerful.
E.G. Gran Tourismo or whatever it is called is boring. driving around a real track in real cars.
Thats not escapism.
If I remember correctly, that game had the most realistic (or so advertised) weapons in a video game.
And it was impossible to hit someone who was 15 yards away with an AK47.
I NEED to get that game.
@11binf
Actually, as far as I know most US developers do field research. As in, they go out and fire the real weapons themselves, in the real world, with real bullets. I certainly know that I have. Let's not push the 'nerdy developers don't go outside and do anything' stereotype, please. :)
Its a really good game, and not like normal FPS. But it can get VERY annoying. You have to Constantly save, because there is no real auto-save feature.
I stopped playing because I went about a solid hour of playing, collecting items, getting this, collecting that. And totally forgot to save.
Got into a random fire fight, and couldn't hit dick. Got killed, and realized I was back at the beginning.
So, if you get it, SAVE OFTEN
Not because of the godamned grey and brown but because they often get things wrong. After a bit of research, the desert eagle is prolly the shittiest gun this side of the galaxy.
If they ditch the realism thing and call it "verisimilidute" instead, then I tolerate it. Because it is its real name. Believable in the story's universe.
Besides, if games were realistic, nobody would shoot for the head.
And it isn't like Halo started all this, I remember Halo as pretty catoonish and that made it somewhat cool. I mean, look at the alien guns!
And Anonymous, the DE. 50 is reffered to as a "Hand Cannon" for a reason. In Stalker, guns where realistic as far as the look and feel, AK-47 is one of the BEST weapons on earth.
AK meaning Automatic Kolisnakov, 47 being the year it was first produced. Here's the kicker, the Ak-47 is still in use to day with only 3 parts of the gun having been retrofitted.
In most games, however, the guns are fired from the hip, and the sights somehow magically align with the cursor/reticle. Even in the zoomed "precision modes" where you actually look down the sights, the sights remain perfectly aligned to the cursor no matter what. At least they have in every game I've played.
As for being based on real equipment, I saw screens of one of the big tactical shooters where the M4 had a $20 Wal-Mart holosight on it instead of an EOTech or Aimpoint. If you used one of these in combat, it probably would break after five minutes. If it didn't break on accident, you'd probably take it off and stomp it after it lost zero from the recoil of the first few bursts of automatic fire.
I'm blown away.
Is it any wonder I haven't read that rag since the 70's?
And as the mother of a real soldier going into real action, that last sentence on the Army page is where I quit reading. I'm sure that was funny in his own head, but it certainly lost something between there and the keyboard.
As far as realism is concerned, I see it more as “authenticity”. The weapons in the games mentioned are more authentic to the “feel” of the weapon rather than getting down into simulating the real-world mechanics of it.
Thats much like what one of the developers for the Brothers In Arms games were saying, they were trying to make it feel immersive rather than realistic.
I'd love to see a genuinely realistic military FPS but I know that practically noone would buy it.
I totally agree. Weapon sounds & looks must be realistic.
And I think, that it always be left-side and rightside of peoples, i.e. left-side - who want _Fun_ and right-side people - who want _Realistic_ games...
Strange, nobody mention NovaLogic games: DeltaForce, Joint Operations: Typhoon Rising...
It's great landscapes.... and great missions, like a mission to kill baron of drugs in a desert.... mmm :)
Call of Duty 4 - haven't landscapes... it's only close-quarter combats :(
P.S. I vote for Realism, and in-game Freedom! :)