One thing about a lot of shooting games is whether or not enemies or the player get ‘stunlocked’ from being shot.
Multiplayer FPS? You shoot a bad guy and this almost always has no stagger effect at all. Maybe ín some more realism themed or tactical games you get a large blood spatter on your screen and a camera punch, but usually it just means your health goes down.
Singleplayer FPS or TPS? All over the place. Some games you can injure an enemy and they’ll do a stun or stagger animation, others none, sometimes the same applies to the player, sometimes not.
Destiny (before it jumped on the treadmill of trash content) was mechanically my favorite shooter, and unless I’m completely misremembering, there was definitely a flinch for at least higher impact weapons hitting you.
It’s kind of a weird category, because a lot of them purport to be hyper realistic, and nail it in some respects, but the actual hits are super gamified. Body armor might save your life, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to take a couple hits to the back, run behind cover, and heal completely 30 seconds later. I’d like to see more games that didn’t do health regen as an unconsidered matter of course, too.
The game I recommend to most people looking for a realistic enough multiplayer experience is Squad, as it is a pretty reasonable compromise between gamey aspects that allow for more action and fun, with realistic aspects that make gameplay revolve far more around group tactics rather than everyone just soloing and screaming at everyone.
… though they are apparently currently going through the same crisis that the mod they spawned from (Project Reality for bf2) did: Time to totally revamp how all aiming/weapon spread works!
I think part of the solution to this problem (Squads problem) would be to have better visual feedback, ie, make the players arms weapon and aimpoint actually be drifting around, instead of just having an invisible expanding and contracting reticle.
And oh god yeah, the replenishing health on a timer thing… its halo’s shield mechanic, but now just widely adopted everywhere with no explanation…
Basically, if you had very realistic portrayal of damage in a multiplayer team death match, it is not fun for all but the most hardcore milsim crowd.
I have played various Arma mods that actually go to the extreme to simulate a person realistically and what happens is 99% of people get angry they cannot carry an RPG, 3 rounds for it, as well as an AK and 8 magazines, then sprint for a mile, because they will literally have a heart attack and die.
With mods like that, yep, you take a round to the chest with plate armor, you get knocked to the ground… and then obliterated by 400 other rounds coming downrange.
the AI in Arma has always been basically laughably bad at tactics and movement, especially in any kind of city, but absurdly laser accurate when they do see you.
A medic has to carry morphine, epipens, bandages, tourniquets, splints, and even blood bags. Turns out a realistic portrayal of bullet and explosive damage is…
… yeah you can get lucky and take a through and through that doesnt hit bone, get patched up and maybe be semi combat effective, though you’ll be limping and grunting and barely able to hit anything…
…but the vast majority of the time youre gonna need an evac or have the ability to set up a field hospital on the fly. Presented with this…? most players just suicide and respawn
It would work much better in a single player game, possibly some kind of co-op game, either with a small number of humans vs ai, or possibly something like titanfall, where there are just a few humans on each side and most of both teams are actually well written AI.
The sad truth is that many of the people who say they want realism actually cry and rage when presented with it.
It’s not that it’s an awful mechanic or anything, in the context of a specific game, but it’s basically just automatically part of most games now. You’re basically only punished for being hit if you die.
I don’t mind a (visible) expanding reticle to indicate loss of precision for whatever reason, but not having an indicator seems like it would feel bad.
Well, for a lot of realism or immersion themed games, its basically taken as a given that reticles are not realistic, that blind firing a weapon is inaccurate, and that ADS should provide an benefit to accuracy whilst usually lowering movement speed and taking a bit to bring up the weapon.
Thats kind of the whole debate back in the early/mid 2000s that led to ADS becoming a thing, but with time, ADS has basically become an expected feature, even if the core mechanics underlying it are now neutered to the point that it is practically cosmetic only.
One solution I can see is doing something like what Arma does, but more immersively, more thought through.
In Arma, your point of viewing is not connected directly to your point of aim. You can look over your shoulder, fire, and the gun will fire at the vector it is pointing, not where your eyes are pointing.
What you could do is make it so that instead of your arms and the gun be pointing directly ahead at all times… they wander about the screen independent of your center of the screen, dependent on your level of woundedness and exhaustion, so that you have a visual indicator of unsteadyness… which is what blooming and closing aiming reticles were originally meant to convey, as 90s FPSs didnt have the technical ability to do that kind of animation.
You could also make it so that the weapon aiming vector chases the eye aiming vector on a delay, and that would go to significant lengths to cut down on the twitch shooter kind of thing where you can do a 180 and basically instantly be on target, cut down on the video gamey ness of many fast paced shooters.
With modern tech its also totally possible to make it so that if you are shot in the arm, maybe you drop your gun, or if shot in the leg, maybe you collapse. It is usually the case that this only happens to NPCs, but never players.
Ive made mods toying with this in Source over a decade ago now, and it was possible then, just the animations were janky as fuck from the viewpoint of anyone who is not the player.
Now we have motion matching doable in Unity and UE5 and that could absolutely make the animations look far better.
One element of online shooters is basically silly animations for a player with high mouse sensitivity doing a 180 and this basically results in them just instantly pierroutting, not needing to take steps and reshoulder the gun. With motion matching and my vector chasing idea, you can make it so there are actually fluid, believable animations, and thus penalties, for doing said 180.
Maybe some day I will be able to mock this up… kind of hard to do game dev with no real internet access (posting on 4g lol)
One thing about a lot of shooting games is whether or not enemies or the player get ‘stunlocked’ from being shot.
Multiplayer FPS? You shoot a bad guy and this almost always has no stagger effect at all. Maybe ín some more realism themed or tactical games you get a large blood spatter on your screen and a camera punch, but usually it just means your health goes down.
Singleplayer FPS or TPS? All over the place. Some games you can injure an enemy and they’ll do a stun or stagger animation, others none, sometimes the same applies to the player, sometimes not.
Destiny (before it jumped on the treadmill of trash content) was mechanically my favorite shooter, and unless I’m completely misremembering, there was definitely a flinch for at least higher impact weapons hitting you.
It’s kind of a weird category, because a lot of them purport to be hyper realistic, and nail it in some respects, but the actual hits are super gamified. Body armor might save your life, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to take a couple hits to the back, run behind cover, and heal completely 30 seconds later. I’d like to see more games that didn’t do health regen as an unconsidered matter of course, too.
I know what you are talking about…
The game I recommend to most people looking for a realistic enough multiplayer experience is Squad, as it is a pretty reasonable compromise between gamey aspects that allow for more action and fun, with realistic aspects that make gameplay revolve far more around group tactics rather than everyone just soloing and screaming at everyone.
… though they are apparently currently going through the same crisis that the mod they spawned from (Project Reality for bf2) did: Time to totally revamp how all aiming/weapon spread works!
And oh god yeah, the replenishing health on a timer thing… its halo’s shield mechanic, but now just widely adopted everywhere with no explanation…
Basically, if you had very realistic portrayal of damage in a multiplayer team death match, it is not fun for all but the most hardcore milsim crowd.
I have played various Arma mods that actually go to the extreme to simulate a person realistically and what happens is 99% of people get angry they cannot carry an RPG, 3 rounds for it, as well as an AK and 8 magazines, then sprint for a mile, because they will literally have a heart attack and die.
With mods like that, yep, you take a round to the chest with plate armor, you get knocked to the ground… and then obliterated by 400 other rounds coming downrange.
the AI in Arma has always been basically laughably bad at tactics and movement, especially in any kind of city, but absurdly laser accurate when they do see you.
A medic has to carry morphine, epipens, bandages, tourniquets, splints, and even blood bags. Turns out a realistic portrayal of bullet and explosive damage is…
… yeah you can get lucky and take a through and through that doesnt hit bone, get patched up and maybe be semi combat effective, though you’ll be limping and grunting and barely able to hit anything…
…but the vast majority of the time youre gonna need an evac or have the ability to set up a field hospital on the fly. Presented with this…? most players just suicide and respawn
It would work much better in a single player game, possibly some kind of co-op game, either with a small number of humans vs ai, or possibly something like titanfall, where there are just a few humans on each side and most of both teams are actually well written AI.
The sad truth is that many of the people who say they want realism actually cry and rage when presented with it.
It’s not that it’s an awful mechanic or anything, in the context of a specific game, but it’s basically just automatically part of most games now. You’re basically only punished for being hit if you die.
I don’t mind a (visible) expanding reticle to indicate loss of precision for whatever reason, but not having an indicator seems like it would feel bad.
Well, for a lot of realism or immersion themed games, its basically taken as a given that reticles are not realistic, that blind firing a weapon is inaccurate, and that ADS should provide an benefit to accuracy whilst usually lowering movement speed and taking a bit to bring up the weapon.
Thats kind of the whole debate back in the early/mid 2000s that led to ADS becoming a thing, but with time, ADS has basically become an expected feature, even if the core mechanics underlying it are now neutered to the point that it is practically cosmetic only.
One solution I can see is doing something like what Arma does, but more immersively, more thought through.
In Arma, your point of viewing is not connected directly to your point of aim. You can look over your shoulder, fire, and the gun will fire at the vector it is pointing, not where your eyes are pointing.
What you could do is make it so that instead of your arms and the gun be pointing directly ahead at all times… they wander about the screen independent of your center of the screen, dependent on your level of woundedness and exhaustion, so that you have a visual indicator of unsteadyness… which is what blooming and closing aiming reticles were originally meant to convey, as 90s FPSs didnt have the technical ability to do that kind of animation.
You could also make it so that the weapon aiming vector chases the eye aiming vector on a delay, and that would go to significant lengths to cut down on the twitch shooter kind of thing where you can do a 180 and basically instantly be on target, cut down on the video gamey ness of many fast paced shooters.
With modern tech its also totally possible to make it so that if you are shot in the arm, maybe you drop your gun, or if shot in the leg, maybe you collapse. It is usually the case that this only happens to NPCs, but never players.
Ive made mods toying with this in Source over a decade ago now, and it was possible then, just the animations were janky as fuck from the viewpoint of anyone who is not the player.
Now we have motion matching doable in Unity and UE5 and that could absolutely make the animations look far better.
One element of online shooters is basically silly animations for a player with high mouse sensitivity doing a 180 and this basically results in them just instantly pierroutting, not needing to take steps and reshoulder the gun. With motion matching and my vector chasing idea, you can make it so there are actually fluid, believable animations, and thus penalties, for doing said 180.
Maybe some day I will be able to mock this up… kind of hard to do game dev with no real internet access (posting on 4g lol)