The Scourge of Realism

News & General Discussion
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Advancements in hardware allowed in recent years development of highly realistic games. Whole genres are dominated by realism. Almost all shooters are military shooters. Almost all driving games are sports car games. There is marked trend towards more and more realistic graphics AND AT THE SAME TIME a trend for simplifying gameplay. Call of Duty is very realistic graphically and EXTREMELY primitive in terms of gameplay. Hell, even Doom 1 had armor pieces pick-ups. Not in CoD, AFAIK. Need for Speed driving model is pathetic but cars look better than in photos. RTS games are dominated by historic approaches: Total War series.

The problem with realism is that it REQUIRES more sophisticated gameplay systems to suspend disbelief. Consider recent Thief game. It looks SO GOOD comparing to Thief 2: The Metal Age. However the game is about the same in terms of gameplay complexity. The result is that older players bash it for having shitty stealth mechanics. The problem is realism. If a guard looks like a guard then you expect that he will BEHAVE like a REAL guard.

That influx of realistic games is insulting for older guys like me. When I play Modern Warfare I don’t feel like an “operator on a mission”. I feel like a retard who is manipulated by greedy mofos. I heard they even hire real operators who during marketing presentations talk with the press and describe “differences” between real action and CoD games. How naive can you get? Maybe for a 10yo boy it’s ok. I feel insulted. Duke Nukem 3D wasn’t treating itself seriously and PRECISELY because of that it was very enjoyable. I wasn’t pretending to be “real”. It was just a cool shooter, where you could watch porn, play pool, shrink monsters and smash them under your foot. I remember a racer called Slipstream 5000 for MS DOS. You were flying jet there in a canyon. You could shoot down other pilots with various weapons and there was even some radio banter between them. Nowadays you can only play games with sports cars which can take L-turns at 200 miles per hour. Or a realistic driving game which is about… drifting. I forgot its name. You can’t take normal turns. You must drift and it looks like a photo. You must be retarded to enjoy something like that. Do you remember Carmageddon for MS DOS? That game had some style. You could run over pedestrians for points. Megarace anybody? Destruction Derby?

I never liked Tomb Raider but those modern reboots are repulsive to the max. I see when barely legal girl with 10 inch arms easily brakes neck of a 300 pound commando. Ahhh… feminist wet dream… to be sexy as hell and break necks of alpha males. I see lame left wing propaganda there.

At the other end of the spectrum we have indies. Most of them are at least 20 years behind the curve technically. There are a lot of indie 8-bit style 2d games on Steam. There are FAR fewer in 16-bit style. Why? Because to make something looking 16-bit you need at least ONE proper pixel artist.

And now we come to the depths of Hell. The Bottomless Pit of… mobile. I HATE mobile games!!! A few years ago I thought that you can’t go lower than TheBigFishGames of GameHouse/RealArcade. I thought that Hidden Object genre was the rock bottom. Now we have “hits” like Flappy Bird… I played over 1000 hours of Diablo 2 and more that 1000 hours of Warcraft 3. I played less than 5 hours of ALL mobile games in my life. I would never spend a DIME on a mobile game. However I would gladly spend up to 100 bucks per month on a good PC MMO… but they are all shit. Mobile is a plague… It’s setting new lows for casual gaming. Most of those games are about touching screen so that something happens. That is mildly amusing when you are 5yo. I’m past that phase though.

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You don’t appear to have a point, other than being angry at your interpretation of the current state of modern games.

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Why do you say that? Imho it isn’t even close, and I played through all 4 Thief games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPqwDGXxLhU

Wasn’t the biggest strength of retro Duke that the game had unprecedented levels of interactivity and attention to detail in the game world? I mean, what other shooter before it came even close? Duke Nukem Forever was kind of similar in the “seriousness”, but still a very lackluster and stale game, because in the context of its time nothing about it really felt “fresh”.

Maybe check out “Redout”, I’ve heard that one is good. Totalbiscuit did a video on it.

I only played the first Tomb Raider reboot, and I have to say I enjoyed that a lot more than I expected. I didn’t perceive any of it as “propaganda”.

That we can agree on ^_^.

Did you try Path of Exile? I thought it was very much in the same Spirit as D2 and played it for quite a while in its early beta. Not sure though how it developed exactly.

Hm, does it? It’s an interesting question, I need to think about that for a bit. Wouldn’t it be possible that it’s a correlation vs causation thing with your personal experience? I’ve gotten the impression that immersion or suspension of disbelief gets harder accross the board, for all of us, as we grow old and bitter. That correlates with graphics in AAA gaming getting more realistic, and it correlates with gameplay systems in mainstream games becoming more streamlined, casual and simplified… but is it really the cause? I’m not so sure. I think there’s a big aspect to the power of novelty and what it does to our brain while immersing ourselves in an experience. 20 years ago it was relatively easy for something to look fresh, new and creative, compared to nowadays. What felt “new” about the Thief reboot? What could even have felt “new” about it? I’m not saying there no longer is room for innovation, but a “novelty factor” certainly get’s harder and harder to achieve. The original Thief was revolutionary! It basically created a new genre (afaik).

What would you like to see happen in the gaming scene in regards to realism and gameplay? I’m not yet really sure on what you actually would like to play. Interesting topic though!

When I played the Doom multiplayer beta (and hated it), I thought someone should do a game in that same setting, but with ARMA-style hardcore realism - just because it has never been done before in any shooter. I think the juxtaposition of a silly ScienceFantasy setting with milsim realism could be “interesting”.

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Although I agree creativity seems somewhat lacking these days (damned kids, get off my lawn!) I have to take exception with this point. Using NFS is cherry-picking – there are quite a few driving/racing games with very high quality driving simulations. Forza, GRID, the GT series, just on console alone. And even better options on PC (if I remember right, you also rail against console games).

I wouldn’t blame realism, though, it’s simple market forces. The simple fact is a wider variety of people are playing games today and that naturally encourages dumbing everything down for the lowest common denominator. I also don’t have much respect for the majority of mobile games, and that’s probably the ultimate expression of that factor in today’s world.

This kind of thing is what I see people around here claiming indie games are uniquely positioned to solve … so what are you building? :smile:

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I have to serious question the mentality of people who don’t understand it’s on themselves to suspend disbelief.

Your argument completely undermines what a symbol is. I am willing to bet you have never looked at a sprite of a guard and thought “this is a visual representation of a guard-like entity,” but instead you have only thought “this is a guard.” The thing is that I have always heard people wanting things to act realistically. They have always wanted their real world knowledge to be applicable to the depictions of real world concepts. It doesn’t matter if they were looking at an ascii character colored red, they have always wanted it to act like fire.

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Well I loved the reboots. I am a man, so I felt attracted to this hero (in the reboots - I didn’t like or play any before the reboots much).

So she was a hero I felt attracted to and I was kicking ass with her and it was fun. I thought it was rough around the edges but it only keeps getting better. I don’t see the feminist agenda at all. Is it a buzz word or something?

Since I kinda didn’t like the originals with the over-sexualization much at all. Triangle tits? no thanks. New Lara is strong and small, and I like her more.

I feel happy to be playing a game women just might enjoy as well (crazy, right?)… that is not an agenda, that is simply good design.

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Shhh, its how we identify the remaining neanderthals.

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Correlation is not causation?

Also, you seem to be ignoring the resurgence of a lot of the things you mentioned. There are now quite a few good old school shooters around (Doom, Ziggurat) and while I didn’t like Dishonored that much, it was a lot more gameplay focused than the new thief and had quite a few good ideas thrown in, we have old school adventure/puzzle games (Obduction?), there’s also a ton of good indie stuff (pixel art or not) in a variety of genres, that you seem to ignore. And crazy racing games are still around, there’s the flatout series, the “Next car game”.

Yes, there are maybe too many “Modern Military Shooters” and a lot of them are bland and yes, and it seems a lot of games try to follow the Uncharted formula, which I enjoy in small doses but it seems every “Action Adventure” tries to be that and it’s kind of tiring. But if you take the smallest step outside of the super mainstream games there’s a ton of good things to be found.

So, all in all… Not sure what’s your point.

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The main thing I would say is that rather than modern games having taken any sort of fiendish direction, the graphical realism simply exposes more clearly what games are - unrealistic, pleasure-driven abstract experiences. Producers these days are trying to figure out how to merge realistic graphics with the simplicity of old games that people still want. Just because a realistic helicopter has a hundred gauges doesn’t mean anyone has any more interest in actually having to pay attention to them.

The truth is that what a lot of games sell is the experience of being someone or something without having to do the hard work of actually being that person (not only in terms of training and practice, but dealing with the danger and risk). So in fact the experience of seeing Lara Croft break the neck of a 300 pound guy is no less farcical than the idea of you or me doing it (assuming that we’re both not in that line of work) - which is exactly what goes through our heads when we play it.
However, although I wouldn’t pick that game as an example, I really do find it distasteful to see a good game having to wear all these ‘modern cultural influences’, my least favourite being cool-teenage/hiphop themes. But that’s beside the point really, since most of the people playing it probably are just that.

See, the problem is that players don’t want what they think they want. Ask any gamer if they’d like more realistic experiences in games and they’ll say “YES!” but they wouldn’t last 5 minutes in a game that required you to do even half of what you would do in real life, whether it’s a shooter, driving game, flying game or whatever. It’s just too boring. Companies like Activision know this, and they’re smart enough to simply give people what they actually want and ignore the abuse.

And really, I have to agree - if I’m going to spend a significant amount of time learning something, I’d rather it was a real-life goal rather than playing a game. Generally I just play games for narcissistic fun or mental relaxation.

PS all that said, I do think that games are going to become more sophisticated, but rather than ‘operator training’ for flying a plane or driving a car, it will be sophistication in dealing with AI, managing social aspects of the game - i.e. things that, although complex, we consider to be generally a fun group activity. This is helped by the fact that multiplayer can introduce this complexity by default, with no extra effort.

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This thread is making me realize racing games are a huge exception to the observation you’re making (with which I agree completely). Driving is mechanically simple for the player or driver, it’s something people can do poorly yet still enjoy, and it’s something that isn’t diminished by highly-accurate simulation. Quite the opposite, in fact – people routinely complained about the unnatural feel of the driving physics in games like GTA5, for example. I’m not sure that applies to any other genre. Perhaps it’s because most people have a lot of driving experience as a point of reference.

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Though the alternative might be that people routinely complain how their car flips on the roof and becomes useless. As far as I remember the physics where super heavily tweaked to prevent that from happening, to the point were it started to feel really obvious. Though I think that’s still the right call for GTA.

When people say “this isn’t realistic” they usually just mean “this broke my expectations in an unpleasant way”. If expectations are broken in a pleasant yet unrealistic way, then it’s “This is so cool!”. Special snowflakes aside, no one complains in a shooter when they got hit but aren’t dead or incapacitated instantly, but many complain when a sniper rifle headshot they land on an enemy doesn’t eleminate the target, because “That would totally have killed him, this game is so unrealistic!”

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Yeah that’s definitely true - it comes down a lot I think to the simplicity of the controls themselves - in the case of a car this being the steering wheel and pedals. The sophistication of the wheel’s interactions with the ground however can be more complex without making it feel cluttered. On the other hand with something like a plane or a shuttle simulator there can be quite a lot of controls, which also don’t involve a lot of real-time feedback.

It’s interesting that I was listening to a talk about developing driving AI once where the researcher was saying that in some tests on a racetrack, according to MRI scans of the driver’s brain a lot less brain activity occurred during what would normally be considered a highly complex behaviour - namely traction control through a curve - compared to what was considered a relatively easy behaviour - plotting a trajectory through the curve before entering it.

Basically I think this means that behaviours that appear sophisticated but take advantage of instinctive motor control can be relatively sophisticated but still very enjoyable - because they don’t take a lot of conscious effort.

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The MRI thing doesn’t surprise me.

I’ve spent many hours on the race track (and more money than I care to think about, lol) and it’s definitely something that only works when you’re “in the zone.” About 10 years ago me and about 10 other Viper owners went to a one-week racing school with Panoz at Road Atlanta, and it’s all about building good habits. Braking, turning, managing momentum and weight transfer… You literally learn to feel your way around the track, there is a lot of physical feedback to process all at once. The good racing games communicate this through controller vibration or force feedback wheels, as well as sound effects. Hitting the apex on a curb, in particular, practically requires rumble-strips to approximate a real-world feel. I’m always impressed when a game gets that right. Forza does really well in this regard.

For some reason, though, most racing games totally screw up grip (also Forza, lol). Racing would be impossible with the terrible grip in most games, and I’m comparing my real-world on-track experience to games and simulators that include those same tracks – and some even simulate my car, which is convenient.

My dad is a pilot, and he longs for realistic flight simulators that will run on normal-people hardware (or even console). But there isn’t much market for that.

Generally I think you nailed it, though, in terms of what good games actually deliver versus what most people think they’re getting or want.

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Its business. It’s about sales. It’s about making money. It’s about showing you what they think you need to see in order for you to ‘buy into’ it and be impressed and have your ego stroked and tempted, so that they can all go vacation later.

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The rant basically amounts too “I’m getting old and life is not as interesting as it was when I was a teenager.” Its a complaint that comes up every few weeks. And I’m not sure there is any real basis to it. Lets ignore the rant and discuss the suggested premise.

Realism != Fun.

That’s one of the first lesson that game designers learn. Its been that way from the beginning. Doom set the path by having a player move faster then physically possible, giving the player more weapons then they could physically carry, medkits, and basically having the player as a super bad-ass. That tradition continues through to modern FPS games, players can take a fair few bullets, and hide behind a rock until their health regenerates.

Civ is another great example. At one point in the design Sid added in revolutions, the idea that a leader might lose control of his civilization. It wasn’t fun, and it didn’t last. And he conveniently glossed over the fact that no civilization has survived more then a few hundred years.

From my own work Pond Wars actually became less interesting to play the closer the waves and boats got to a realistic scale.

So its fairly well established that realism in gameplay is a bad thing.

The OP contends that realism of graphics is counter productive because it leads players to expect realism in gameplay. And the dissonance between realistic graphics and unrealistic gameplay makes games worse. I’m not sure I buy this.

For one, no one actually expects the enemies in a FPS game to behave like real people. That would typically involve shutting down the entire city to flush out the mass murderer (you). As soon as one enemy was discovered dead, the whole place would go on high alert, and stay on high alert for months. There would be none of this beating the enemies one at a time, in the approximate order of difficulty. The big boss would turn up straight away and deal with the threat.

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A shit mechanic is a shit mechanic though. It doesn’t matter if the reason it was put in was because of it being realistic or just fucking cool, it still has to benefit gameplay. Revolutions were just a penalty for unhappiness that made a bad situation worse. There were no new gameplay opportunities to be had, whereas a grand strategy game might have a dozen options to deal with revolutions that all impact gameplay differently.

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Graphical realism has also one other strong negative effect: it kills imagination. When I played games like Doom 1 or System Shock in 1 VGA mode (320x200 256 colors) I imagined monsters more than I saw them. Today with HD graphics you can’t do that since everything is in your face.

With abstract, low poly models with low res materials you can subtly suggest things instead of directly showing them.

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Graphics aren’t the enemy here, although they do lead to larger teams being required for AAA games. Game Design and resources of project are the main problem. In older games the constraints caused the developers to have to limit their scope and get the most out of what they had. These days big budget games need to spend huge dollars on the visual assets. Bigger teams, bigger companies, more management, more business.

If you are a shareholder and I tell you i need to make a game that will either appeal to a small demographic or a large demographic, which one are you going to be happiest about? Do you want customers to hold onto this game forever, or get bored of it just in time for your next release?

AAA games are about making money. They have a strategy of release “safe bet” games with a spattering of “innovation” games hoping to hit on the next big thing.

Most of the gameplay innovation these days come from smaller teams that take on the risk of the innovation flopping.

You want scary but with good graphics with deep game play and genuine terror? Try Dark Souls, honestly. As much as people harp on about its difficulty (it isn’t that bad), its main shining light is its deep game play mechanics with a focus on fair challenge. It offers genuine risk reward with exploration and a real feeling of “I want to see whats around that corner but god i’m scared i’ll lose all these souls”.

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I’m not sure I buy this either. There are still huge amounts of games with stylised or abstract graphics that you can play if that’s your thing. Nobody is forcing you to play HD games. While sales indicate that the vast majority of players do enjoy the higher quality of graphics, there are still plenty of games that cater to your stated tastes.

As to imagination, that’s entirely subjective. I personally find HD games are more evocative of the theme then the earlier counter parts. I can’t remember ever stopping a game to admire the view in something like Doom. Pretty much every corridor was the same. I never actually felt like I was on Mars, in hell, or wherever else the games were set. Doom was far less evocative then the environments of today’s games.

I still contend you are just getting old and jaded. Go play a modern game with low poly, 90s style graphics, there are plenty out there. If you are right you will find the game enjoyable, and I’ll shut up and agree that realism in graphics was a bad thing for you. If I’m right you’ll find it still doesn’t capture the feel of actually playing Doom in the 90s. Something will still be missing.

Its not because the games have changed. Its because you as a player are different.

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I totally agree here about realism in terms of design, but I think that if you have realism in terms of lighting/materials etc, and make a point of keeping the design creatively unrealistic, you can have a really good go at making something fun and imaginative. Destiny’s art didn’t suffer from the fidelity, nor does Doom’s - I think it’s a question of whether you take on realism sort of as a ‘moral imperative’ rather than simply something to enhance the experience in such ways as it can.

I always wondered how Metal Gear pulled off seemingly supernatural events when 99% of the game was realistic - you’d think it’d piss off the people who no doubt bought it thinking that it was a realistic game. But when you think about it, the games have been creatively unrealistic for a long time in terms of the characters, their stories, particular scenes in the game that while not supernatural are dramatised to the point of being irreconcilable with realism. In short, nowhere in the game does realism have a full license to shape everything, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t look and feel generally realistic, and it doesn’t make the game feel childish. I think the Metal Gear games (for me) sit in a class of their own as walking the perfect line between creativity and realism.

Basically I guess it’s all about congruence, if you want people to be comfortable with highly unrealistic aspects of the game you have to build it up slowly until seeing something crazy actually becomes a half-expected and enjoyable event.