somedude98 post=9.68376.626912 said:
thing is with fps's is that realism sometimes eats fun. Think about real war with real shooting. Not fun is it? Which is why if an FPS was majorly realistic it wouldnt be fun. You would die so much more easliy (frustration) sitting in cover wouldnt heal you. And UAV (using COD4 as my example here) would go down the drain. Rather than searching for realistic FPS's i try to find ones with the right ratio of fun/realism. I sometimes think destroyable terrain would be fun on games such as cod4 before the part of my brain that actually thinks slaps me and says "people would level the map cover would be useless youd be blown to bits" the thing is with Fps as well is that both sides are made to be fair by the game designer. this DOESNT happen in real life. if it was "realistic" youd have a stick and the enemy would have a tank. Which sometimes (not literally) would happen in real life. This of course wouldnt be fun. I personally think graphics and physics are the things games should excell on in the FPS market as this is an area wher the gameplay isnt ruined if they make it insanly realistic.
I think you really mean fun to realism ratio rather than pure realism
The problem is that the original 'shooters' had a running score - e.g. Commando, or Space Invaders - with the notion that your success was solely measured in terms of your high score. This should have been recognized as artificial in entertainment software that seeks realism.
Realism in the FPS genre can only come from rewarding the player for keeping their character alive, following orders and securing objectives. This implies scenarios of well-orchestrated retreat, where the 'game' objective is to withdraw forces from a hopeless conflict with minimal casualties, with bonus points for leaving a 'balance of power' between the warring native factions - if not actual peace. It opens up questions that should seem obvious when asked: Why, when there are so many army games are there no Hurricane Katrina aftermath, or Japanese Earthquake ones? Why are there no games where you are not continually challenged to fight (and I don't mean stealth)?
It is easy for developers to give the player a gun.
Instant empowerment. Quick, hackneyed, drama. Well understood, receptive, markets.
To really answer this, a developer must face the problem of player boredom that comes from close-to-genuine realistic simulation. Avatars (the characters the player controls in the simulation) can be distributed anywhere on the map and aren't all necessarily in close-combat in some hot-zone or along some frontline. Some may be back at the base, or on leave... it depends how big the map is. Will it be interesting to 'play' your infantryman as he is allowed home to see his sweetheart - this is more RPG territory. Having a large map with belligerent, but diplomatically restrained, nation states, periodically erupting into wars (some of which aren't called wars until they are won) is realistic, yet is more RTS territory. Giving the avatar interesting things to do may involve semi-structured quests, which is more Adventure territory. What about Sport games? Do they have a role in this reality? Could you play the game as the President of the United States and discuss (via chat) prospective military involvement in a foreign land with your Joint Chiefs over a leisurely game of Golf?
What about the Geneva convention? Should a player be penalized if discovered to be flouting it? If a player surrenders and is captured then does that mean they are stuck in a Prisoner of War camp until the end of hostilities? Do they try to escape? Crucially, what incentive is there for the player to stick with all the restrictions of this scenario? How do you encourage them not to use Quicksave?
My suggestion is to allow players to own multiple avatars so they can start the simulation and see a menu summarizing the choice of roles and responsibilities open to them and pick the one that suits their mood (then if things get dull, pause the simulation and jump into a different 'pair of shoes'). You might also need to support multiple parallel realities - all independently generated whether you were playing them or not (i.e. the President would be a Non-Player Character following a set of adaptive AI scripts, but you could take direct control of them for a period of time).
It would be more likely that you would play against more NPCs than real people and that the people would be total strangers as it would be hard to organize your friends into a 'Band of Brothers' given that at any point it became a "waiting game", or a "siege" your friends would drift away from the party.
If this all sounds like a massive endeavor for the developer, then that should explain why we haven't seen this kind of game yet. It is more likely to come from a small developer that makes no attempt to do simulate the appearance of reality with detailed 3D models with high resolution textures created by an enormous art department (what was Assassin's Creed? A thousand man-years of effort?), but one that deliberately goes for a retro vector 'look' like Introversion and it is only the complex AI and the procedurally generated, "3D" sound effects and "honour-system" (that does not penalize an authorized retreat) that qualify it as realistic.
