Realism is a tough genre to capture in any game whether it be RPG, 1st person, etc. In our case, we'll do the best we can and slowly update our game with more and more realistic characteristics. The current plan is to have StandOff and Classic modes be the most realistic. Deathmatch probably won't change much from the original because there are a large number of people who 'like the way it is.' Both Classic and StandOff will have plenty of options to make it as configurable as possible for people to enjoy the experience that much more. If we add other game modes, they too will of course include the options for realism. And like we always do, we'll take any user input thrown at us and consider it from the standpoint of realism and whether or not it's possible.
As far as being a hero goes, that's evident in almost every video game out there. The fact is, since it's just a game, people take chances they *never* would in real life. Thus you have a teammatch game where it's still every man for himself. Without being in actual ground pounding combat, the closest anyone can see to good (or bad) teamwork would be paintball. It's hard to get people to work as a team and not be their own hero. That's one of the biggest concepts of basic training in the military. As far as the phsycological effects of combat go, that can be a heated debate. In my HUMBLE opinion, games are much more realistic if they can simulate the factors that MAKE a person flinch when they fire a large weapon, or be taken by surprise when a sniper round rips through your flesh. If we can do that, then we can take over and add effects like bleeding- that after time will cause you to be weaker- not carry as much weight- and eventually make you pass out and bleed to death. This effect can be multiplied greatly if a grenade or mine goes off near you and takes away your arm. But you should't die immediatly like you do currently in unreal. To be honest, you might not even realize your arm is gone and you continue firing away until things start to sink in. Total realism of course would be even a couple 9mm bullets in your body would need serious medical attention and you couldn't just grab a health kit and bandage yourself up and increase your health. In our game, possibilities would be that each round that hits you consecutively would cause you to bleed more and more, but once you grab a health kit, you can stop your bleeding, but your health would either increase 1 point every minute or so, if not at all. Maybe each team can have a 'medic' bot back at your base that can 'treat' your serious wounds if you go back to him, but you have to stay 'immobile' for a certain amount of time. Then if an enemy comes, the bot would take minimal defense with a hand gun, but once he dies, no one on the team can really increase their health. That's just a thought off the top of my head, but a possibility to look at for serious realism. If we did something similiar, we'd try to put options in our menu like 'Medic Bot (yes/no)' or something to choose if health packs can actually increase your health or only 'stop the bleeding' and keep your current health from going down only.
I could go on and on, as I'm sure a lot of people could- so instead of me doing that, I'll stop now and encourage anyone with ideas on damage, physics, etc for our mod to be that much more realistic to put their ideas out so we can debate them. We'll consider everything in the view of realism and possibility. A lot of our current features are combinations of what other people have wanted to see and play with.