Something The Long Dark did really well -- developers please take note!

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When you shoot or stab things – living things – they don’t just instantly die. Most of the time. In fact, even a large caliber bullet through the heart is no guarantee that an animal, be it a bear or man or a squirrel, will die within the next minute or three.

But who cares about realism for realisms sake? No reason to hold video games to any arbitrary standard. They are just supposed to be fun (or at least an experience that has some kind of positive value). The thing is, when you shoot a buck or a wolf or a bear in The Long Dark, and it realistically runs away frantically and disappears into the woods, a lot of great gameplay tension is introduced. A minute goes by and you wonder, is it dead? Do I dare go look? Anxiously you follow the blood trail for a while, and then a) you come over a hill and there’s the lifeless body, to your great relief, or b) you come over a hill and OH S*** theres the bear at five yards and it is not happy to see you.

In shooters, I’d like to see more of this. Stop giving us the gigantic blood splatters, bullet trails, hit markers – all of that stuff is supposed to supply instant gratification, but sometimes delayed gratification after a prolonged anxiety can be more rewarding! And please, if you are going to call your game a tactical shooter, talk to somebody who hunts. Don’t bother with the gun nerds who spend hours discussing terminal ballistics on online forums and have 20,000 rounds of .22lr tucked away in the basement (as if they could ever shoot that many squirrels in a life time, let alone carry that much ammo anywhere), find people who actually shoot living things on occasion and ask them what really happens.

It seems that so many things have become commonplace just due to the ovine nature of humans, “juicy” things like bullet trails and excessive blood splatters, that people just can’t make games without them. Kind of like how in movies whenever somebody is on a computer it makes lots of bizarre whirs and beeps – without those totally unrealistic noises it now seems strange because we are used to it.

But please, the games are better without all the little helpers! I mean, maybe a game like Doom or something can benefit from all the pizazz and instant gratification multipliers, but if your game is going for any degree of believability or you just want to up the tension and make a firefight feel more like a firefight, get rid of that stuff.

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I think you are missing the point. Most people don’t want to experience a real firefight. I haven’t ever experienced one, but I’ve heard plenty of stories from war veterans. Its not a pleasant experience.

For the most part shooter games are a power fantasy. Its about being awesome, not about realism.

There might be room for some of this in the survival genre.

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I agree that there is no need to strive for realism for realisms sake. I just think that, in some cases, eliminating certain video-gameism’s actually makes for a better video game.

And developers shouldn’t worry about making a shooting game too realistic for fear that it wouldn’t be fun – unless the player is legitimately afraid they are going to die it just can’t be the same. In my experience, firefights don’t usually suck because you are afraid you are going to get shot. I guess everybody is different, but I always figured that if you get shot you get shot; if you haven’t got shot yet then don’t worry about it. For me, firefights usually suck because it always too hot and they go on too long and your exhausted and it seems like everybody around you is confused and you just want the damn thing to end so you can go home and sleep.

So, yeah, that’s an experience I don’t want from a game. But the uncertainty and tension that goes along with shooting at a distant target and not getting some immediate hit/miss indication – that is something that is a good video game experience.

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Only if the audience wants it. Just look at the Fallout series, for example, if you want to see an audience that offers wildly different opinions. There are roleplaying enthusiasts that loved how New Vegas brought back the playstyles of 1 & 2, but there were people who loved the casual approach of 3 & 4 more.

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Are you still talking about your real life experiences here?

I actually would disagree on the hit/miss indication - that’s imho the most important part of the shooting. I don’t mind realistic bullet trajectories and travel time, but clearly being able to see whether you hit or missed is massively important for getting better at the game, enjoying the experience and not raging in competitive multiplayer. It’s just communicating vital information.
I can see the appeal of not knowing whether a hit was a kill, but that’s a different thing entirely. It can make for interesting situations in games like Insurgency or Squad.

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Yes.

I agree that seeing where your shot hit is important for you to get better at the game, but there are better ways to do this than a UI image. Some games, of course, are perfectly suited to an immediate UI indication that you hit or killed or missed the target, but I really think any tactical or semi-realistic shooter would be better if the only clues were entirely realistic. Most surfaces will give some kind of feedback about where your bullet hit, as well as the animations for the hit target. I just think its so much more exciting this way.

This is kind of a far off analogy, but I was hunting moose a few years ago and took a shot from like, can’t have been more than 15 yards. After I fired, the bull just stood there calmly for a second, then casually trotted off into some trees. I thought, “My god. Did I miss? How on earth could I miss.” I was completely in disbelief.
Then, standing there trying to figure out if I should try and track the moose or just wait awhile (in case it was wounded and not far away), about a minute passed and I heard a big thud from not far away. Sure enough, I’d shot it through the lungs and because it had come as such a surprise and I didn’t chase after it and scare it, the moose just plopped down and died pretty quickly.

Anyway, the range of emotions was very dynamic. The excitement of finding that I had made a clean kill was basically inverse to how shocked and confused I was when I wasn’t sure what had happened.

Playing The Long Dark recently, I had a similar experience after shooting a bear in that game. I never found the carcass because I sure wasn’t going to go look for a wounded bear (especially with only two bullets to spare), but later I saw in my stats history that I had indeed killed a bear. I was excited, frustrated, awed, relieved – I don’t even know – but it was great.

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Moments like that can really make for some good stories – single player or multiplayer.

I’ve been playing console only for a while now, but I was checking out some videos of Day Z on youtube and I watched this one episode where the player and his squad ambushed some other guys at dusk. They must have spent twenty minutes shooting back and forth from a good range before all went quiet. I’m not normally one to enjoy spectating, but it was tense. There was a lot of “I got him, I know I did.” and then, “Oh shit, he’s still alive!”
That entire scenario only played out that way because there was no flashy indications to tell them whether or not they had hit their target.

Granted, not everybody likes the slow pace of Arma and its descendant games, but I think there are plenty of gamers out there who appreciate some good slower paced tension versus high-speed instant gratification type games like COD, etc.

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I played a hunting game about 5-8 years ago.
I hated it.
I hunt and fish for consumption. I enjoy the hunt and prefer to catch/shoot larger prey because it puts more food in the freezer.
The one annoying thing I didn’t like about that hunting game or other videos/trailers of more modern hunting games is the fact - where ever you shoot the prey they usually die.
This is not true, and I agree with bigtime if hunting games were more accurate with shot location - what happens after a deer or large game is not shot with a kill shot, it would add some complexity, anticipation and risk/reward to the player experience.
I don’t like to hunt with people who do not perform proper shot location hunting. It makes for a terrible experience to track a deer miles to finally find the body, if the deer doesn’t bleed internally so the tracks can not be followed.
Also the animal suffers needlessly.
With a proper kill shot large game animals can still travel a good ways - but not too far.
Small game - flop around like a chicken with its head cut off, regardless of the shot location. Its messy.

Regarding realistic true to life reactions, I’ve shot a deer with a 30x6 directly through the heart and it ran for half a mile. While another time I shot a deer - near it’s heart and it dropped instantly. I also witnessed a deer drop instantly - and kick twice before laying completely still. This is an anomaly compared to what usually happens - but I have seen it happen twice. I’ve also seen a rabbit shot with a 22 completely explode! I don’t know.
So what happens after a shot to an animal can not be scripted for reality, unless we take the ‘what usually happens’ approach.

However for shooters - which I hardly ever play - I think making the experience entertaining and visceral is more important than realistic. Although a realistic shooter could be an interesting play through.

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I think it’s highly situational, and there’s room for both in games. I mean, I enjoy the over-the-top asskicking of DOOM, while the slower gameplay in The Long Dark also has a certain appeal.I remember playing the_Hunter in a previous version some years ago - it was fun, but I don’t think I have the patience for a hunting simulator like that.
I like the realism of games like ARMA, but at some point it just gets too clunky. PUBG became way better when they switched from BattleRoyale’s ARMA to UE.

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I think it’s an interesting topic but really doubt it is going to see any kind of significant adoption in mainstream games any time soon.

Especially with competitive games you usually need a large degree of consistency which probably means traditional health values, critical hit points doing semi-fixed damage amounts and at least some predictability in the gameplay. I remember in COD the ‘Down but not out’ perk (or whatever it was) was probably the most utterly annoying thing in the entire game for me.

For realism I think things like bullet penetration, bullet drop, better physics, stuff like that is pretty great. However I really feel a huge falloff of interest when the gameplay related to the character is too realistic or has so much risk that I feel more constrained by faux realism than freedom to enjoy playing it.

In some spaces like Survival games there’s probably a lot of room, like DoT, bleed out, more realistic ai, stuff like that can make a nice experience. I don’t think really like most of that in my multiplayer games though. CoOp perhaps, but for PvP I much prefer fantasy power and consistency.

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I think one of BIGTIMEMASTER’s points got lost in the discussion about realism.

Completely separate from realism, to me the interesting difference is in gameplay design. When the player shoots something and it dies virtually immediately in DOOM, it drops out of the player’s attention. But when the player shoots a bear in The Long Dark and it runs off wounded, the player has effected a change in the game world that needs to be kept in mind. There’s now possibly an angry bear, or life-saving sustenance, right around the corner. The player’s agency has changed the parameters of the game, making the game world more dynamic than DOOM. From a design perspective, you could do the same thing in a game that doesn’t involve any combat at all.

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Well said. In short, instead of just subtracting a variable from the game world, you’ve multiplied it and now it’s a risk vs reward decision to find out what the new result is.

Now, in your typical shooter which involves shooting people who are trying to shoot you, rather than bears, the potential ramifications of a wounded human versus a wounded bear might not be as severe, but they might still be interesting and at least something different than the norm.

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Or sometimes more severe. In some games, like stealth games and single-player tactical shooters, a wounded guard will run around the corner and get reinforcements, or hit the alarm.

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This is probably the most interesting description of a real life firefight I’ve ever heard.

There is a great game to be made out of that, but it isn’t a traditional fps at all.

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It’s just a matter of degree. Do anything that sucks. Say, go running. Maybe you are a good runner, maybe not. Doesn’t matter. There will come a point when things start hurting. You get tired, thirsty. Your body starts telling you on a second by second basis, “Okay, thats enough running. Time for some rest.” But keep running. Maybe for a few more days if you’re pretty tough. Then find a cold damp place to stand in one spot all night, trying to remain alert to spot anybody creeping up who wants to kill you. Then in the morning start running again. By now you’re covered in blisters and chaffed in the worst places possible. Sometimes you fall asleep while you are actually moving and when you come to you are confused about where you are and what you are doing.

Keep this up and eventually you might run by a cliff and think, “Maybe I’ll just go off the edge? That might be nice.” But you don’t do that because you don’t want people to think you’re weak. Eventually you finally run into the bad guys who want to kill you, so you go through the motions of fighting them, but all the while in the back of your mind you are thinking, “I just don’t care! I wanna go to sleep!”

That would be the worst video game ever, if it could somehow replicate an experience like that, I think.

Additional note: This is all just based on my personal experience. Perhaps if you were in a more aggressive type of war where you fought with bayonets and freaky things like that, the trauma of close combat might be a whole different ball game. For me, bad guys were always distant things and bullets and rockets were never consistently accurate enough to really inspire terror.

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It’s way too hard of a game for someone like me to make. But I think that could be an awesome experience if a well funded studio took it on. Maybe a little too much of an artsy game - but it could be a hell of an experience.

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This thread reminds me of the movie Dunkirk. It was not a traditional World War 2 movie. It really focused more so on tension and the psychological impact of war. I usually get bored of FPS games because the ones I have played lack consequence or any form of tension when facing the enemy. I would love to see a non-traditional FPS that explores the psychological toll of war, and the consequences of killing. Again it does not have to be super-realistic. However, I feel that FPS games often lack a sense of psychological tension and emotional impact when you do kill an enemy.

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I don’t remember which CoD it was that I played, I believe it was PS1 era, but the tension and emotional impact of storming the beach was pretty high - this translated pretty well - I thought - when attacking the gun nests after crossing the beach. I don’t remember the rest of the game much, but I remember those opening moments.
Just wanted to add a one time personal experience - that was brought on from the previous post.

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So violence in games, too much realism isn’t a decent sellable product IMO, people love bacon not how it got in the packet.

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IMO, that’s all Hollywood nonsense. Humans are predators. We have been since forever. Killing and devouring things is what we do, just like all the other heterotrophs. Humans have been warring with each other since we were chimps-- just like chimps war with each other. It there was any terrible consequence to killing another of our own species, it wouldn’t be done with such frequency.

Though I never killed anybody while I was in the army, I did shoot at people. What did that feel like? No different than shooting at an animal while hunting. I do kill animals (for sustenance, not trophy) on occasion. I understand the need for respecting and empathizing with those who are either our enemy or below us on the food chain, but does that mean there is any emotional burden on me when I pull the trigger? None whatsoever. The bottom line is, if I don’t know and love the thing I’m killing on a personal level, there is zero emotional impact when it is killed. And don’t write this all off as, “Well, this guy must be a sociopath.” That’s a cop out speculative answer, because I’m not – I’m just aware of my own feelings and honest about them.

Some people are more strongly given to empathy than others. Certainly there are people far colder than me and people who cry every time they watch Bambi, too. I’m not the litmus test of human emotion, but I am a human and we aren’t all that different.

So, point of all this is that making players upset over something getting killed in a video game means making them care about the thing that will be killed. That takes time. Probably quite a bit of time for someone like me. Only time I ever remember being upset about someone killed in film was in The Sopranos when Adriana got whacked. I liked her because, 1. she was hot, and 2. she was the only decent person on that show – always loving and supporting her lousy boyfriend.

Few movies accomplish this – especially war movies. I think they are at a disadvantage, because in war you are expecting people to die. Your already tuned for it. Every attempt I’ve ever seen usually results in some boring, artsy, annoyingly long scene that makes you want to cringe. Think Mel Gibson war movies with soldiers dramatically exchanging final worlds while the enemy (which seems to always be some mindless barbarians bent on destruction) is frozen in place for this prolonged emotional journey.