Realism in gaming

The Game Room
1

I didn’t want to hijack the Total War Shogun II thread, but I’m curious…what do you consider to be realistic in a game such as TW (or any other military game)? I see people complaining all the time that the AI is stupid or inept, but realistically (heh), that’s how a lot of the actual HISTORICAL battles turned out. I remember reading an account of one of the early battles in the War of 1812 where US forces attempted to invade Canada, marched across the wilderness to attack a city and then…just surrendered, without firing a shot.

‘Realism’ would be pretty much a non-starter for fun, especially in any kind of war game that pre-dates the modern era. I mean, how fun would it be to have regiments wandering about, blundering into each other, attacking their own side, and generally completely out of control of the commander (presumably you, the player)? Of, instead of clicking on a regiment and giving it an order, trying to signal it with a flag or sending a messenger over, only to have the message unseen, unread or garbled? Or to have the enemy ‘AI’ be as bone headedly stupid as most of the commanders were throughout history? To paraphrase from the movie Big…what’s fun about any of that?

To me, a game like TW (any of them) is ‘fun’ because it’s enjoyable to play toy soldiers, and amazing because unlike the toy soldiers of my youth, these ones actually move about and fight each other. While I’m no history guru, I know enough to know that in real battles fought by real people, in general the ‘AI’ stunk…badly. And that lead to the great slaughters of the past, or to non-event battles where both sides just marched around, starving and dying from disease. Cannons firing into the ground for a whole battle? Yeah, that happened. Troops getting ‘stuck’ because of ‘poor pathing’? Yeah, that too…all the time. The enemy ‘AI’ just sitting through a battle as if frozen (unless you fire on them, in which case they swarm you)? Hell, that even happened in the modern era in such battles as Dunkirk!

So, I ask…what is this ‘realism’ thingy, and what does it mean to you? What games do you consider to actually HAVE ‘realism’, and why do you believe that? What SHOULD an ‘AI’ do and be to be ‘realistic’? Should it be something that isn’t historically accurate? Where do you draw the line on realism? Should the players controls and view of the battlefield be as limited and ‘realistic’ as those of generals of the past? Should the units be essentially out of control during the battle, and of tenuous control before? Would this make the games more fun?

I’m not trying to rag on people who dislike the TW games (so please, if you want to talk only about TW do so in the Shogun thread, or start another)…I’m asking in general, since I’ve seen complaints for years from gamers about this stuff. It’s not limited in any way to the TW games, but to seemingly ALL war or strategy type games.

-XT

2

Eh. Is the game fun? If so, I can deal with it. If it’s game-breaking, then not as much.

3

Seconded. I’ve never understood the realism before fun approach. Whilst a game being deep and having elements of realism are generally plusses for me I have to ultimately enjoy the experience. If I wanted to spend hours in front of a monitor juggling numbers and having to wade through stupid decisions I’d just go to work.

4

For me Realism means that the playable and AI characters act in a sensible manner throughout the battles. So for example if your character has a shield which they are employing, the AI should have to disable him or her before scoring points against health; or at least be limited to one lucky or skill strike per battle. Likewise, your characters actions should have an effect on the numbers as should their physical statistics. It makes no sense that a tiny female of a higher level does more physical damage then a huge untrained male on a basic strike. There should be a point where everything evens out and then tips the balance. In the above example, the small female character’s skill will probably win out, but her hulking opponent should be able to knock her out with a lucky shot. Therefore a straight ahead, no block strategy should FAIL for her. I like my physics consistent, even when talking about magic or tech as well.

5

Realism helps me immerse myself in the game world. That immersion is what I find fun. So for me realism is often required for me to have fun. It depends on the game, of course. When I’m playing Pokémon I don’t give two shits about realism. But when I’m playing GTA IV, Hitman: Blood Money, Modern Warfare 2 or whatever, the more realistic the game is, the better.

6

Some highlights from this article:

“I want a war sim where I spend two hours pushing across a map to destroy a “nuclear missile silo,” only to find out after the fact that it was just a missile-themed orphanage.”
“Every war sim has a “Fog of War” that obscures the map in darkness until units scout the landscape. Well, I want a hazy, brown “Fog of Bullshit” layer below that. I want it to make a village of farmers look like a secret armed militia, I want it to show me a massive enemy fortress where there is actually an aspirin factory. I want to never know for sure which it was, even after the game is over.”

“…I want a war sim where native townsfolk stand shoulder-to-shoulder on every inch of the map and not a single bomb can be dropped without blowing 200 of them into chunks. …I want to have to choose between sending marines door-to-door to be killed in the streets or leveling the block from afar, Nuns and all. I want to have to choose between 40 dead troops or 400 dead children, and be damned to hell by chubby pundits from the safety of their studios regardless of which way I go.”

“I want my Mission Objectives to change every 30 seconds, without anyone letting me know.”

“Gamers complain about bad “pathfinding” …Well, I want worse pathfinding. I want entire platoons who wander into the mountains because somebody bled on the map. I want tanks to get stuck turret-deep in mud flats and have to be rescued by helicopters while snipers pick off soldiers trying to keep their boots from being sucked off their feet in muck.”

"About every five minutes, I want one of my helicopters to crash, completely on its own, for some fucking reason. "

7

I’m much more of a playability guy. If my unicorn artillery performs in a manner reasonably consistent to the gaming world, I’m good. I don’t care if it would take 3 cylon units to fire that gun in the real world.
:smiley:

8

There was an old game for the mac (I had it on my Mac SE) called “Crucial Battles of the American Civil War” or something much like that. In which your squads would often refuse orders, go off in their own direction, attack for no good reason in directions you didn’t want them to attack, and so forth. If you were a wuss, you could choose to have anachronistic radios that cut down some (but not all) of the bad communication.

The Dominions series has fights in which you set the position of your units in the strategic map and give them general orders (stand; fire missiles; charge; attempt to go around and attack the rear), and more complicated orders to your powerful wizards, heroes, etc. But the actual fighting happens outside of your control based on your formation & scripted orders, the other side’s formation & scripted orders, the unit AI, morale checks, and so forth.

9

The name of the first game above is apparently actually “Decisive Battles of the American Civil War” and it’s available in its PC version on various abandonware sites (which I’m not sure what the Dope rules on linking to are, so google it for yourself if interested).

10

The Command Series (a C64 wargame series that Sid Meier worked on) had some simulation of imperfect knowledge of the battlefield. It was an early ‘real-time strategy’ game at the divisional level (something like the games Paradox makes). Often you’d see a unit suddenly jump position reflecting updated information. Or your units would take forever to get underway.

I think it works best, and even feels most ‘real’ when its supported by the gameplay, even if the extra gameplay elements are ‘unrealistic’. This is because realism often depends on how the player reacts and plays the game, and thus whether they feel their actions and game events are ‘realistic’.

For example, once you’ve given orders (in a bad game) you might have to reissue orders if you couldn’t tell whether the unit was following them, because they got ‘lost’. Then the player has to spend all their time unrealistically issuing every order two or three times just to cover those cases. Far better to assume that unless you want it changed, the order you sent two days ago still stands and takes longer to finish, whether the ‘real’ chain of events was that your HQ reissued the order because the radio line was cut, or the general is lazy, or a dragon showed up on the battlefield and ate all your trucks.

Getting the balance right of just what ought to be modeled as ‘real’ and how they interact with the other elements of the game is the difficult part that few developers seem to put resources into, but it’s definitely worth it for some gamers. (The aforementioned Paradox Interactive games are among the top rank in this sort of realism, but it’s a monumental task even for them to set it up right, and an almost too daunting task for the player to organize it all).

11

Imho, I like realism that adds to the fun. Realism that is boring or tedious is too realistic for me.

For example, in Master of Orion, as new tech was discovered, old tech minaturized so more of it could fit on one ship design. This is a good example of realism. On the other hand, the ships could be in stacks of 100k. Giving each ship a simultaneous command instantaneously is unrealistic, but had to be done.

12

I played the Battlefield series of games quite a lot. There were a 1 or 2 mods for Battlefield 2 that went the realism route. Unfortunately, that realism often expressed itself by the player trudging 3-5 minutes across a map, only to be one-shot-killed by someone you didn’t see, lather, rinse, repeat. There were ppl asking for more fun, and a bit less realism, but the makers didn’t go that route. They got their realism, and I’m sure all 20* ppl that played those mods quite enjoyed it. They did the work, they’re entitled to make what they want, but if I did all that work I’d want ppl to play it.
*- Exaggeration, but it weren’t a lot.

13

On a similar note, I really want to see a FPS war game (e.g. COD) where the following happens:

  1. You enter the combat zone, be it the Normandy beaches, Fallujah, Da Nang or wherever.
  2. After a few minutes of confusing and disorienting action, you get killed. Machine-gunned, shelled, strafed, bombed, sniped, bayonetted, whatever. Maybe it was friendly fire. You almost certainly won’t even see what killed you. In any case, you’re dead.
  3. No really, you’re dead. You can’t go back to the save point, because there are no save points. Since when did soldiers have save points? Also, you’re dead. You can’t restart the mission, because you’re dead. Any further attempts to play the game will merely result in a blank screen. You don’t even get a message telling you you’re dead, because you’re dead so how could you read it? Every attempt to reinstall the game and start again will lead to the same blank screen. Buy a new game? Nope, you’re still dead. That’s what dead means.

It won’t be unfair. Every player will have one chance to make it through the whole campaign alive. The very skilful or the very lucky might make it. But you get yourself killed, that’s it. Game permanently over. Because that’s what death means. The whole save/reload, multiple lives model of gaming is utterly unrealistic - time for a brave new world.

14

Heh, this is actually a major problem with realism in flight sims, especially of the online variety. You can have all the authentic flight models and weapon simulation you want, but the problem is that the players just aren’t realistic. Most air to air victories in WW2 were done by the small handful of truly skilled pilots against targets that generally didn’t even know they were about to be attacked. A mere 5 kills was enough to be called an ace. Group combat was about bringing weight of numbers to bear, because no single pilot could be relied upon to actually, you know…do anything useful.

But in the games, even the greenest newbie has at least a dozen kills, and most of the population is in the hundreds and thousands. Players are using expert maneuvers that hadn’t even been imagined during WW2, and pushing the airframes to the bleeding edge of their performance where real pilots dared not go. Everyone is an elite ace simply by virtue of not being DEAD at the first face-plant into the learning curve.

So the multiplayer combat winds up not being at all realistic, and any single player game has to choose between making every enemy an ace, or having the players complain about it being too easy.

15

Wizardry 8 is the last game I can think of that even came close. It offered a hard mode, where you could only save when you quit the game and it deleted your save if you died.

16

cf NetHack and most other roguelikes. (Though it’s easy enough to get around this).

17

Regardless, Realism is important, but it doesn’t have to mean Real Life Sucks. It’s just that I want the game to be consistent and avoid stupidity.

I’m OK with the AI making mistakes. In fact, one thing I abhor is “perfect” AI which never, ever makes any mistakes, but simply doesn’t play well enough to succeed. That’s painfully dull. The human player has limited information and doesn’t want to take endless time wading through spreadsheets, so the computer shouldn’t do that.

Total War (the thread which nispired this etc.) AI doesn’t make mistakes. It never does anything risky. It’s immensely stupid, and it’s combat options are limited to:

  1. Form up everything and march blindly at you.
  2. Stay put until you attack and the combat times out.

The sole thing they ever do to counter you is twist their line one way or the other. It’s so bad I don’t even bother forming up reserves, because the way the AI handles there’s little to no point in reinforcing your lines (they won’t ever come into contact with the enemy. The only way I ever lose is if I have a big numbers disparity against me or the enemy troops are so heavy (armored) that my units can’t hurt them. Both happen almost exclusively early in a campaign when I can’t recruit much and the enemy has a crapton of high-level units squatting in rebel cities.

To use xtisme’s example: the American invaded Canada based on some faulty premises. We thought the Canadians (French mostly) might join us and it could seriously hamper Britain’s supply lines. The oepration failed because weather and disease mercilessly hammered the troops. However, the invasion of Canada could have succeeded and reaped great gains had the situation been very slightly different. That’s what i want to see: AI which makes reasonable choices.

This is one reason I loved the Europa Universalis series. The AI wasn’t perfect, and if you knew exactly what to do you could utterly curb-stomp them with enough time. But they still put up quite a struggle (conquering France or England, for example, is an excercise in humility and pain), and even small powers were especially tough in a fight.

My concept for AI is pretty simple.

  1. Every so often, it should evaluate its strategy and choose one of several options (this is going to depend on the game and could range from three to a dozen choices).

  2. Once this is selected, it only takes actions which are allowed by that strategy.

  3. It does not have information not available to the player unless the compuer absolutely needs that to not act like a doofus.

18

Think about how most games of Battlefield would play out. The whole squad piles into a Black Hawk helicopter and then some newbie crashes them all into some powerlines.

GAME OVER:D

19

Try “You Only Live Once”:

20

  1. It would be a financial disaster.

  2. That sounds like the total antithesis of fun. In fact you’ve encapsulated in that idea exactly why complete realism is not the apex of a gaming experience.