I've been spending the last ~2 weeks scrambling around the net to see if anyone actually took the time to make a mod that would be anywhere near realistic and provide experience similar to the one we all miss in INF. However even the most realistic ones I've found have some extreme failure points which I will list. As long as I have edit privileges I will edit this post to sum up any relevant information other people post, please add/correct anything you think is needed.
I'm mostly going to try and avoid "complaining" about stuff that require extra animations or modeling and stick with design flaws that shouldn't require much coding to fix, though a few exceptions may apply where critical.
All games I know other than DTAS with random team spawn have the same issue of same gameplay every time, so I won't list it. I believe the DTAS type gameplay results in best realism, and no current game/mod has that (probably mostly because it requires maps that are not designed for linear play and because it's easier to balance linear games).
All games also seem to have a serious range issue, though solving this is a much more complicated manner due to the fact we only have so many pixels on our monitor. See http://www.blackfootstudios.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3172&pid=54076&mode=threaded&start= for more details.
No games seem to have anywhere near real stamina system that has any effect on your ability to aim (due to increased breathing) or to keep running.
Battlefield 2: Project Reality: Listing flaws from worst to not-that-bad:
-Reviving - this kind of ruins the whole mechanics of real infantry combat. This encourages people from staying back so that they can be revived safely or so that they can revive others safely.
-Respawns - not as bad as reviving, but still affects the level of realistic behavior you'll see in game.
-Conefire/stabilizing weapon - Bullet spread is HORRIBLE - something like 0.5m at 100m is just absurd. As far as I understand, you need to aim your weapon X seconds before it'll even reach that accuracy. We all know "bullets go where the barrel points and make barrel control realistic" is the way to go for realism.
-Class system: While not directly unrealistic, it just isn't done right and ends up enforcing people to use unrealistic gear setups. INF bulk system and configurable loadout anyone?
-Country - Like classes, while the idea for itself is not unrealistic, it reduces realism due to a need to balance different countries, and that balance is usually most easy to fix at the cost of realism, either by having to have unrealistic weapon properties, by having an unrealistic limitations on available classes, or by limiting certain classes in unrealistic manners. Realism > storyline!
-Vehicles - Seriously, get infantry combat realism straightened up first, then start worrying about vehicles. I mean making a realistic tank simulator is a project of its own, not to mention a flight simulator.
Source - Insurgency: (won't re-describe issues already mentioned in project reality)
-Respawns
-Classes
-Some weapons done horribly wrong (RPG, shotguns)
-Hip fire seems quite accurate (no freeaim meaning a dot in the center of your screen would make sights useless) - not sure if it's also in project reality?
-Extremely low draw distance (afaik ~90 meters)
-Insurgents VS marines (same as "countries" in project reality)
America's Army:
-Camera placed in your forehead, and bullets also get fired from there, resulting in experienced players often killing you without exposing anything other than the top of their helmet.
-Horribly implemented breathing system: At long ranges you can just aim while under cover and lean out or strafe out right as the breathing cycle is over to isntagib the other guy stalking you around the corner.
-Dancing is feasible - no acceleration limitations combined with good accuracy at CQB ranges while moving results in left-right-left-right kind of dance to be a very feasible strategy.
-Crosshair VS sights - While having the crosshair is bad for itself, what makes it worse is that the actual aiming mechanics also greatly differ between unaimed to aimed. Breathing has no effect whatsoever when unaimed, which helps unaimed shooting in a very unrealistic manner. Plus it's probably way too accurate, especially while jogging. Even recoil effects seem different between aimed and unaimed - favoring unaimed!
-Maps have no official time limits - this generally results in server setting a time limit that's unsuitable for the map, resulting in extremely long camping games ("why attack if he's going to get bored and come to me and be an easy kill, I have 5 minutes and all I need is 1 minute to actually attack the objective" results in 4 minutes of wasting everyone's time).
-Imbalanced missions/maps - Assault VS defense win ratios.
Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare:
This game is so unrealistic that I will not even start, however I listed it because the fact is it seems to have great potential for turning it into something realistic. It has great looking animations, player models and weapon models, sights etc. What makes it unrealistic is stuff like health regeneration, movement speed, jumping height, recoil values, damage values, tuning of the sniper breathing system, realistic reloading, loadouts, and game types - all of these things don't seem like they require a huge effort to adjust. Even the COD4 maps are probably more than great for DTAS-style gameplay.
The only realism mod I could find for COD4, though, was very far from something I can all a realism mod. I wonder why there isn't any made.
Ghost Reacon Advanced Warfighter 2:
-Insanely unrealistic HUD - marking positions of visible enemies and friendlies, having an instantly viewable satellite image that's high enough quality to spot enemies...
-Crosshair system - at least you can see how much it's going to spread, but like in AA I think it's quite bad for realism to have a fundamentally different aiming system for unaimed shooting compared to aimed.
-Knockdown from shots - feels weird and only affects AI which makes it even more weird.
-Leaning is weird - weapon should always be parallel to the ground, even while leaned, or else it won't shoot straight. At least moving while leaning feels nicer than it does in other games.
-Many weapons seem the same - if you're going to make different weapons at least implement their differences.
So why isn't there a realistic game/mod yet?
We probably all know about the upcoming Ground Branch / Sky Gods from Blackfoot studios ( www.blackfootstudios.com/forums ), however since it's a full game and not a mod and based on forum posts from John there, it'll probably be a while before we see a beta not to mention a fully playable game. While I can't wait for this to come out, I can't help but asking myself why this hadn't been done before, at least as a mod.
Possible explanations:
1. Developers not having a clue about realistic combat. You see this in the forum posts, and you see it in game features and design. Some mistakes would be just really easy to not make have you had a clue. For example creating an "engineer" class that carries a shotgun or a "medic" class that shocks people back to life. Players not having a clue really helps make this worse.
2. Balance/gameplay over realism. We all know that if the gameplay sucks or the game is not balanced, people will stop playing, especially when combined with #1. However it doesn't seem like this is a viable argument, as most realism sacrifices I've seen done to improve balance/gameplay were actually making up for some unrealistic feature that existed in the firstplace. Let's use the engineer example again: If he was given a real weapon he'd actually use it rather than perform his "engineer" role, so the solution was to give him a shotgun, while the correct solution would've been to remove the class (that doesn't really do anything "engineerish") or give him some "engineerish" tasks to do, and in any way not make him have horribly unrealistic self defense ability when he's not "engineering".
3. Laziness. This combines well with 1 and 2 but is also a reason for itself. Why bother tuning something to a real value when you can just throw some random numbers and nobody (other than the few that have a clue) will notice? If you're going to end up tuning everything for balance then why bother making the values realistic in the firstplace.
Open question: Will we ever see a good realistic game/mod (other than Sky Gods / Ground Branch that'll hopefully get released eventually?)
Some partial answer (long): http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4255750.html
I'm mostly going to try and avoid "complaining" about stuff that require extra animations or modeling and stick with design flaws that shouldn't require much coding to fix, though a few exceptions may apply where critical.
All games I know other than DTAS with random team spawn have the same issue of same gameplay every time, so I won't list it. I believe the DTAS type gameplay results in best realism, and no current game/mod has that (probably mostly because it requires maps that are not designed for linear play and because it's easier to balance linear games).
All games also seem to have a serious range issue, though solving this is a much more complicated manner due to the fact we only have so many pixels on our monitor. See http://www.blackfootstudios.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3172&pid=54076&mode=threaded&start= for more details.
No games seem to have anywhere near real stamina system that has any effect on your ability to aim (due to increased breathing) or to keep running.
Battlefield 2: Project Reality: Listing flaws from worst to not-that-bad:
-Reviving - this kind of ruins the whole mechanics of real infantry combat. This encourages people from staying back so that they can be revived safely or so that they can revive others safely.
-Respawns - not as bad as reviving, but still affects the level of realistic behavior you'll see in game.
-Conefire/stabilizing weapon - Bullet spread is HORRIBLE - something like 0.5m at 100m is just absurd. As far as I understand, you need to aim your weapon X seconds before it'll even reach that accuracy. We all know "bullets go where the barrel points and make barrel control realistic" is the way to go for realism.
-Class system: While not directly unrealistic, it just isn't done right and ends up enforcing people to use unrealistic gear setups. INF bulk system and configurable loadout anyone?
-Country - Like classes, while the idea for itself is not unrealistic, it reduces realism due to a need to balance different countries, and that balance is usually most easy to fix at the cost of realism, either by having to have unrealistic weapon properties, by having an unrealistic limitations on available classes, or by limiting certain classes in unrealistic manners. Realism > storyline!
-Vehicles - Seriously, get infantry combat realism straightened up first, then start worrying about vehicles. I mean making a realistic tank simulator is a project of its own, not to mention a flight simulator.
Source - Insurgency: (won't re-describe issues already mentioned in project reality)
-Respawns
-Classes
-Some weapons done horribly wrong (RPG, shotguns)
-Hip fire seems quite accurate (no freeaim meaning a dot in the center of your screen would make sights useless) - not sure if it's also in project reality?
-Extremely low draw distance (afaik ~90 meters)
-Insurgents VS marines (same as "countries" in project reality)
America's Army:
-Camera placed in your forehead, and bullets also get fired from there, resulting in experienced players often killing you without exposing anything other than the top of their helmet.
-Horribly implemented breathing system: At long ranges you can just aim while under cover and lean out or strafe out right as the breathing cycle is over to isntagib the other guy stalking you around the corner.
-Dancing is feasible - no acceleration limitations combined with good accuracy at CQB ranges while moving results in left-right-left-right kind of dance to be a very feasible strategy.
-Crosshair VS sights - While having the crosshair is bad for itself, what makes it worse is that the actual aiming mechanics also greatly differ between unaimed to aimed. Breathing has no effect whatsoever when unaimed, which helps unaimed shooting in a very unrealistic manner. Plus it's probably way too accurate, especially while jogging. Even recoil effects seem different between aimed and unaimed - favoring unaimed!
-Maps have no official time limits - this generally results in server setting a time limit that's unsuitable for the map, resulting in extremely long camping games ("why attack if he's going to get bored and come to me and be an easy kill, I have 5 minutes and all I need is 1 minute to actually attack the objective" results in 4 minutes of wasting everyone's time).
-Imbalanced missions/maps - Assault VS defense win ratios.
Call of Duty 4 - Modern Warfare:
This game is so unrealistic that I will not even start, however I listed it because the fact is it seems to have great potential for turning it into something realistic. It has great looking animations, player models and weapon models, sights etc. What makes it unrealistic is stuff like health regeneration, movement speed, jumping height, recoil values, damage values, tuning of the sniper breathing system, realistic reloading, loadouts, and game types - all of these things don't seem like they require a huge effort to adjust. Even the COD4 maps are probably more than great for DTAS-style gameplay.
The only realism mod I could find for COD4, though, was very far from something I can all a realism mod. I wonder why there isn't any made.
Ghost Reacon Advanced Warfighter 2:
-Insanely unrealistic HUD - marking positions of visible enemies and friendlies, having an instantly viewable satellite image that's high enough quality to spot enemies...
-Crosshair system - at least you can see how much it's going to spread, but like in AA I think it's quite bad for realism to have a fundamentally different aiming system for unaimed shooting compared to aimed.
-Knockdown from shots - feels weird and only affects AI which makes it even more weird.
-Leaning is weird - weapon should always be parallel to the ground, even while leaned, or else it won't shoot straight. At least moving while leaning feels nicer than it does in other games.
-Many weapons seem the same - if you're going to make different weapons at least implement their differences.
So why isn't there a realistic game/mod yet?
We probably all know about the upcoming Ground Branch / Sky Gods from Blackfoot studios ( www.blackfootstudios.com/forums ), however since it's a full game and not a mod and based on forum posts from John there, it'll probably be a while before we see a beta not to mention a fully playable game. While I can't wait for this to come out, I can't help but asking myself why this hadn't been done before, at least as a mod.
Possible explanations:
1. Developers not having a clue about realistic combat. You see this in the forum posts, and you see it in game features and design. Some mistakes would be just really easy to not make have you had a clue. For example creating an "engineer" class that carries a shotgun or a "medic" class that shocks people back to life. Players not having a clue really helps make this worse.
2. Balance/gameplay over realism. We all know that if the gameplay sucks or the game is not balanced, people will stop playing, especially when combined with #1. However it doesn't seem like this is a viable argument, as most realism sacrifices I've seen done to improve balance/gameplay were actually making up for some unrealistic feature that existed in the firstplace. Let's use the engineer example again: If he was given a real weapon he'd actually use it rather than perform his "engineer" role, so the solution was to give him a shotgun, while the correct solution would've been to remove the class (that doesn't really do anything "engineerish") or give him some "engineerish" tasks to do, and in any way not make him have horribly unrealistic self defense ability when he's not "engineering".
3. Laziness. This combines well with 1 and 2 but is also a reason for itself. Why bother tuning something to a real value when you can just throw some random numbers and nobody (other than the few that have a clue) will notice? If you're going to end up tuning everything for balance then why bother making the values realistic in the firstplace.
Open question: Will we ever see a good realistic game/mod (other than Sky Gods / Ground Branch that'll hopefully get released eventually?)
Some partial answer (long): http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4255750.html
Last edited:
