In many first-person shooter games, the main character not only is able to take a lot more damage than his enemies (you can get shot numerous times without dying, if the attacks are sufficiently spaced apart), but also recovers within seconds and runs and jumps just as nimbly as before. A character with only 26 units of health still is just as able-bodied as a character with full 100 health units.
I suggest a few changes, for realism:
**1. Bleeding to a slow death. ** If you are shot in the femoral artery, you should be continuously losing 1 health unit every half minute or so. You shouldn’t just sustain a one-time loss of 45 health units (or whatever) but suffer no further harm. You should be continuously bleeding. After a while of hemorrhaging like this, you should bleed down to zero and die.
**2. Different performance at different health. ** A 100% healthy character is fine. A character at 30% health should be seeing grey, shivering, moving very slowly, in shock, maybe convulsing, can’t aim or even hold a weapon well, maybe crawling or immobile.
**3. Pain and disability. **If you are shot in your dominant hand or arm, you shouldn’t be able to aim, hold or use a weapon well at all. If you are shot in the foot you should be limping. If you are shot in the spine you should be paralyzed from the impact point down. If you are in severe pain, you should be curled up in the fetal position, preferring not to move (what many people naturally do when in severe pain.)
Any other thoughts/ideas?
There are games where these sorts of things happen. The simple fact is, though, that these things aren’t really “fun”. In most cases, hardcore shooters would rather just kill you quickly rather than make you curl up on the ground and cry for your mother, however realistic that approach might be.
The Fallout games tackle your numbers 2 and 3 to a degree. As your limbs take damage you lose the ability to aim, run, see etc. The key to doing this well is that you must be able to fix your condition, otherwise it runs the risk of not being fun. For your point 1, I think most people, once it became apparent that they were going to die, would just quit the game and restart from the last save, so why bother with it? Either that or, again, you must be able to fix your injuries with a medpack or something, which takes away from the realism.
IMHO we don’t really want realism, we think we do, but we don’t really. We want a stripped down version of realism that seems realistic but takes liberties in order to keep a game fun. If we wanted realism we would just live life, instead we are playing a game, to escape what is real and to live out some fantasy. Any “realism” that takes away from the enjoyment of playing a game is pointless. That’s not to say that games shouldn’t try and introduce more realism of the type you are after, but realism purely for the sake of realism is not desirable.
The ultimate unrealism in a game is the ability to restart from a save or checkpoint. If we are prepared to accept that, then all the other stuff about taking damage, healing, etc, is small fry.
America’s Army and early titles in the Ghost Recon series went more that route as well. I happen to enjoy it as gameplay. Setting up an L-shaped ambush for the bad guys in Ghost Recon was fun dammit. I get that’s a minority opinion in the market though.
This is realistic but it isn’t particularly fun to play. The problem is that the player quickly enters a death spiral where reduced effectiveness leads to the player taking more damage, which reduces his effectiveness further, and so on.
It also makes it difficult for the game designed to provide an interesting challenge. If the opposing forces are challenging for a player at full health, they’ll slaughter a player who was unlucky enough to take some damage. If the opposing players are balanced to be challenging for a player at partial health, then the player will massacre them at the start, until they become unlucky enough to take some damage. This is my complaint about the NES Zelda games: at full health, Link has access to a devastating ranged attack and most enemies are trivial to deal with. If he takes any damage at all, he has to close into melee range, which makes it far more likely that he’ll take more damage, and from there I tend to get killed rather quickly.
Simulations in general do not make for fun gameplay for most. It’s like the difference between MS Flight simulator vs Ace Combat 5. Being hindered in game due to an injury can make some people just hit the reset button rather than drudge it out but depends on how the game allows you to fix your condition.
I thought it was cool in FarCry 2 when your character would pull out a nail from his hand and bandage it up, it was quick, automatic and visually appealing but if such a game tried to simulate such injuries which might restrict your ability to use your hand for weapons…etc it would kill the fun.
there was a Playstation game along these lines (not fps) called Bushido Blade. It was pretty fun to play and getting hurt wasn’t always a death sentence. In a multi player fps I am having a hard time seeing this play out well at all, basically it would just mean some players would shoot to wound and leave your 90% dead ass to slowly bleed out instead of just killing you because it takes longer.
That’s how it’s like in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games (though I forget whether that’s the base games, or just the mods I play). Unless you’re carrying special equipment to prevent it, most combat wounds (gunshot, beasts slashing at you etc) will bleed some. It will not stop on its own. If you don’t or more likely can’t patch yourself up (it’s a scarcity of resources game), you’ll eventually just keel over.
It’s awesome.
That one’s more iffy. I mean, it’s not like it’s a new problem - any D&D player knows the conundrum of the 1 HP singularity - that one last HP that actually makes a difference, because if you lose it you’re a zero and drop like a brick. Critical existence failure, TVTropes calls it.
But I’ve played games where this was not true, games where wounds would slowly ratchet down your character’s usefulness, sometimes even permanently. The problem is that it turns into a spiral : you get hit, so you’re less likely to dodge the next hit or adequately hit back. So you get hit again, etc… That devolves all combat into “who got the drop on the other ?”. Which may well be realistic, but it’s not fun.
The old ruleset of the pnp RPG Legends of the Five Rings was that way, and furthermore combat was absurdly lethal in that game. Like, you could take maybe two, three good hits before death. And so you wound up in weirdly tense stand-offs all the time even when it didn’t really make sense within the setting or the themes of the game - 4 battle-hardened samurai facing 5 peasants with pitchforks ? “Weeeell let’s hear them out 'cuz if swords flash out at least one of us is going down like a bitch”. This was compounded by the derth of any form of magical healing - only one kind of wizard could conceivably have one spell to do that, and IIRC it wasn’t even that effective…
I would also add that “damage piles up negative modifiers” is also bad from a strategic gameplay perspective, because it both simplifies decisions and compounds the power of anybody with AoE effects. In D&D and suchlike, the wizard has a choice between doing big damage, or reducing the enemy’s chances of doing anything worthwile ; both of which have their advantages and drawbacks in this or that situation or facing this or that enemy - “doing big damage” is not good when the enemy can permanently cripple with a touch for example, if said damage is not enough to drop the critter in one go. And so on.
But with the other system, it’s all fireball all the time. You get to do lots of damage on lots of people, and reduce all of their combat effectiveness in the same action. Rinse repeat until mop up happens. Meanwhile the fighter with the big sword looks like even more of a useless punk than he already does.
I was thinking DayZ. They did a good job of providing some injury effects. At that makes sense in a slow paced roleplaying game where survival is the only goal. OTOH, you can instantly cure someone with blood transfusion or by eating an entire cow in one sitting.
There still needs to be a balance between “realism” and “fun”. For example, I don’t want my character laid up for 8 weeks if he busts his leg. But for games like DayZ and other more role-playing type games where the goal is to keep your character alive long term, dealing with injury and damage adds another facet to the game.
Shooters like Call of Duty or Battlefield, “realism” isn’t really the goal. It’s more of a fast-paced run and gun version of capture the flag.
When did this happen? In most of the classic FPS games of the 90s, the protagonist had only the same amount of health as one of the cannon fodder enemies, and most enemies had a lot more. In Hexen, for instance, you had exactly as much health as an ettin (though of course they were melee-only and had idiotic AI).
Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth had limb damage and wounds that needed to be fixed a certain way (e.g. splints for broken limbs, styptic for bleeding). They of course healed faster than normal, it wasn’t completely realistic. No life bar - you had to pay attention to your physiological state. Not to mention psychological - too much can lead to suicide.
Nowadays, FPS games usually go two ways:
Healing with health pickups, possibly with a slow natural healing rate
Heal rapidly when not in combat; death occurs from taking too much damage too fast. Typically the life bar is invisible and near-death is represented by a red haze or similar.
Fallout New Vegas’ hardcore mode made it interesting while keeping it fun. The unmodded Fallout 4 survival mode seems fun-killing, IMHO. I don’t want exploration to be a chore.
Star citizen is planning on forcing players to deal with criyically injured colleagues and things like feild stabilization for transport to more advanced facilities that can more decisively fix the problem.
Personally I’ve never had as much intensity and immersion in a game as I had playing Doom in the 90s, and I still break it out occasionally to play some of the new mods that are still constantly being written for it.
The Long Dark has a survival mechanic that affects your performance when certain things happen. Injuries are part of it, such as sprained joints, bleeding, etc. Also, if you’re hypothermic or exhausted, you no longer have the ability to sprint, which is especially scary when you hear the wolves start howling and you’re out in the cold.
You can mentally substitute “out of the battle due to extensive injury” for “dead” in games if you want. When your health bar hits zero it doesn’t mean you died, it just means you’re no longer an effective combatant and need to respawn or restore from your last save point.
In real life there’s no such thing as getting injured severely, then getting some quick medical treatment and bouncing back to full health. Yes there are examples of people who get wounded severely who are able to keep fighting, only to collapse later. And from a gameplay perspective there is no difference between “horrible wound that will cause death or maiming soon but the character can still fight” and “just a scratch”. Is the injury judged so severe that the character can’t fight? Then he’s dead, from the game’s perspective.
How about more realism for the player’s own motivations and actions? We’ve all been there…you take a crazy risk by jumping out from cover with guns blazing, and if you get killed, well, you can just respawn, etc.
You can encourage yourself to behave more realistically: whenever your character gets killed, you quit the game and don’t return to it for what is for you an unbearable amount of real time…an hour, a week, a month whatever amount of time represents a real sacrifice to you… You might find yourself taking fewer unnecessary risks or being more cautious.
Or the ultimate in realism: The first time your character gets killed, you delete the game from your system and never play it again. Suddenly the tutorial or training missions would seem a lot more important.
Doesn’t sound like much fun, though. And I guess the real ultimate in realism would entail hurting yourself if your character gets injured…