or Postal. :sick:

:P

PS. Oh, all the silly things we do in games to regain health. Is it true that in FO: New Vegas you heal over time?

...of course, over in the "need more gore" threads, they're arguing "realism" for MORE gore. ("If I hit someone with a sword, there should be cuts / slashes / dismemberment / etc, not just some blood splash!")

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I'm not on board the realism train, myself. Yeah, I know that I shouldn't be able to swim carrying much of anything, and that I should only be able to carry a little, and I shouldn't be able to keep up a jogging pace forever or jump quite so high..... but I'm playing a Heroic Fantasy game. Annoying, pesky IRL human limitations & micromanagements don't make the game more enjoyable, just more annoying. No, that doesn't mean that I don't want the world to be consistant & believable.

There are games where some of these things make sense to have - as long as it's part of the planned design of the game. Not just thrown in because someone thinks it'll be "more real".


Example - needing to eat & drink is fine in a game based on survival & scarcity (like Caravaneer, a game about running a trading caravan in a post-apocalypse wasteland. Having enough food/water/fodder to survive to the next town is a central aspect of the game), but in a game where there's food & water everywhere, it's just annoying bookkeeping.




If you're playing in "hardcoe" mode (need to eat/drink/sleep, etc), Stimpacks heal over time instead of instantly.

I don't care about whether the weapon is properly weighted, if a breeze I can't feel causes onscreen water to ripple, romance, if pixellated characters can procreate, if my character gets sleepy, horny, roid rage, airsick from levitating, a runny nose from underwater breathing, or convulses in pain from the obviously bone shattering blow she just took. It's a game, a tool, athat I am going to use to amuse myself and unwind from the stresses of my all too real life.

I know people have their own preferences and all but if I wanted a game which was that realistic I'd play the game called "real life" -- real enough?

That game is too hard and there are no cheats.

Immersion>Realism

Often for immersion, realism is modeled. It is just convenient, pretty much every problem is solved in RL. Too much realism can hurt immersion. The urination examples of Duke Nukem and Postal are for a toilet humor.(Captain Obvious) In TES, I like to think such matters are taken care of during the rest. I might think the same for Oblivion fast travel but traveling is something I would like to do myself, I would write my traveling adventures in a journal but not those other things...

Survival was a part of Morrowind. I like to see it improved but to do this it should be balanced correctly. I think in Morrowind with inclusion of Almsivi Intervention, one can teleport to a Temple for healing immediately. That is an awesome touch, but healers(in traditional sense) were nowhere to be found. I imagine a scene where I cast AI and teleport to a Temple where I couldn't even move and people come out of temple and in first-person, move my body onto a stretcher and treat me afterwards.

Another thing is necessities. These are designed with punishments in mind. I once again refer to Real Life where you don't eat to avoid punishments but because eating feels good. It is a bonus to stats. Where in the implementations I saw, PC is always in an ill state which can be temporarily avoided by feeding. That's not realistic at all. The "hardcoe" mode I would like to see, includes health regeneration for example. I am talking about daily regeneration rates. The regenerate rates increase with feeding regularly. When there is no feeding, the regenerate rate simply decreases to a complete halt. A PC will likely to lose health one way or another so this is actually pretty hardcoe. All potions work as temporary speed increases for regeneration. My inspiration here is real life. It is interesting to hear about F:NV's hardcoe mode. Some nice ideas like doctors becoming a necessity. Blood loss and crippled organs(deadlier combat(cuts / slashes / dismemberment / stabbing) with more defense). If carefully designed, these can aid self preservation feel rather than becoming an annoyance.(The answers to the question "What would happen if we could feel no pain?" offer great insight and can be applied to video games.)

Weight is easy. It is totally unrealistic to hold that many items, it turns the game into a looting frenzy. Therefore it must turned into non feasible with the inclusion of feasible counterparts. Real Life can be used as an inspiration. You wouldn't want to collect all the junk in real life, you would like to have a small item which is valuable or functional instead. Skimming through 10 weapons is not good. Selection of a good weapon, a secondary and a third one at best which in arm's reach and a side bag with 2-7 weapons which can't be picked during a fight seems a nice idea to me regarding gameplay pace and enjoyment.

And finally, skill atrophy. Pretty much solves every problem regarding leveling. Enemies should be standardized so that some enemies would always be a credible threat. Everyone has a weak spot and there is only milliseconds between a regular athlete and a world record holder. Good sports games have this kind of systems and you can really feel you are playing with a specific player because stats totally reflect that player. Real life is really inspirational.

My views on the matter are rather controversial(health regen, skill atrophy, anti-loot ), but I honestly feel this way. These things should be discussed, dismissing them completely or inclusion of hardcoe modes at the opposite side of spectrum aren't helping the evolution of immersive RPGs, IMO.

Reality check, I have been diagnosed with nephrolithiasis today. Now that's not something I would like to see in the game. (Although I would like to see detailed disease symptoms explained in text form in the game. )

PS. Minecraft is the most realistic game, Farcry 2 and Crysis are close. COD, not so much. Even Duke Nukem Forever will only let 2 weapons to carry. I will try F:NV. Maybe someone there has a mod applying the bonus based food/drink implementation idea.

Depends. I liked how Morrowind and Oblivion used weight and allowed us to pick up almost anything, no matter how useless the item.
I like it in wargames and I prefer war simulators to things like CoD or Bad Company. But that's because I feel the more realism makes for much more interesting games and tactics.

In rpg's I generally don't want more realism, but I don't like it when they take realism away. Like Oblivions fast travel over Morrowinds transportation system.
Not that Morrowinds system was realistic to our world, but it felt realistic to the TES universe, fast travel didn't. Same thing goes for how Oblivions world leveled with you. I prefered being overpowered at later stages of Morrowind and meeting those pesky bandits in leather armor that had me running before and haing my revenge. Oblivions bandits in glass/dwemer armor just felt weird.

When people ask for realism in fantasy games, what they mean is usually not realism in the sense of having a realistic setting, as in, not having elves or magic or anything like that, asking for thatr in a fantasy game WOULD be kind of silly because that would be completely missing the point. What they usually mean is that things are handled in a way that is realistic, where real life logic is applicable. Sure, in a fantasy world, we may have magic and dragons and what not, but that doesn't mean characters still can't have needs like eating and drinking, for example, or that getting hit by a sword wouldn't have a similar effect on someone to what it would have in real life. Therefore, characters needing to eat and drink in a fantasy setting is realistic, now when characters can get hit by a sword ten times and still keep fighting, that's unrealistic, although not necessarily implausible if the game gives an explanation for why your character can do it. If you look at it another way, while things like magic are technically unrealistic, they're departures from real life that are part of the story or setting, on the other hand, things like being able to carry an unrealistic amount of loot are aspects of gameplay that are not meant to reflect an actual aspect of the setting, usually when people ask for realism in games, it's more realism in that respect that they are refering to. Realism may also refer to the overall feel of the game or its visuals, just because your humans live in a world of elves and unicorns doesn't mean they can't be made to look like real humans. For that matter, even when designing the fantasy aspects of a setting, the designers can ask themselves "What might elves look like, if they existed in real life?"

For me, it really comes down to a question of what makes for the most entertaining game, because entertainment is what I play games for, not for a simulation of whatever the game is about, sometimes, a bit of extra realism can add to that, in which case, it's welcome, but just because something is realistic doesn't automatically make it a good idea, some things that are realistic would just be annoying and would detract from the fun of the game. For example, most of us seem to agree that requiring the player to find a toilet would just be unnecessarily annoying. I'd argue that mandatory eating, drinking or sleeping are the same myself (I'd also argue that requiring the player to eat and drink but not following it up with what logically follows is unrealistic too.), but some actually want that in a game, on the other hand, the need to answer a "call of nature" is something that even they do not ask for, so I think it's an appropriate example. Yes, it's realistic, but is it wanted? I'd say no. Needing to do it would not be fun and would not even add any sort of meaningful challenge to the game, it would just be an annoying chore, and that's usually something games seek to avoid, on the other hand, location damage is arguably realistic, I mean, the way it's implemented in games isn't always fully realistic, but the idea that depending on where you get shot, it would have a different effect on you (Which in games usually means that getting hit in vital areas does more damage.) fits in with reality, and that's not something I've ever complained about, aside from realism, it can add an additional element of strategy to combat, especially if aside from different amounts of damage, hitting people in different locations could potentially have other effects, such as shooting them in the arm potentially making them drop their weapons, as you could potentially choose to trade off dealing additional damage for reducing enemies' threat level or making them easier targets. Adding realism to a game can potentially be good or bad depending on the nature of whatever realistic feature you add, it can also depend on the game. Some games just don't lend themselves to being realistic, and having some realistic aspects could actually become awkward because it doesn't mesh with the rest of the game. And yes, I know that by that logic, we could potentially have a game where the examples of undesirable realism I gave could actually be beneficial. however, it would be hard to name examples of games I've played where I really felt that such realism was an important part of what made them work. Thus before developers add a feature simply because it is realistic, they must ask themselves certain questions, is it actually fun? And does it fit the game?



There WOULD be cuts and slashes if you hit someone with a sword, though, you wouldn't need to have seen someone actually getting hit by a sword in real life to know that. I'm sure we've all been cut with sharp objects before, they don't have to be swords, anything sharp will do, if that happens, the object doesn't just pass through you, leaving no visible damage but still drawing blood, which is exactly what getting hit with swords and other weapons did in Morrowind and Oblivion, it would leave a cut, it could be a deep cut or a shallow cut, a large cut or a small one, but chances are you could see where you got hit by the weapon.

Now, outright dismembering limbs on a regular basis might not be realistic, not because limbs CAN'T be severed by a bladed weapon, but because it would be very difficult for it to happen in a regular combat scenario, but the "gore" in Morrowind and Oblivion, at least, is certainly not realistic.

Though when it comes to blood and gore, I don't need or even necessarily want it to be completely realistic, I just want it to be believable, it wasn't believable in Oblivion because there was no sign of any visible damage to characters who were killed with bladed weapons, once the blood faded, they looked like they might as well have died of poison, but Fallout 3's was not believable either because it went in the opposite direction, being too over the top to be plausible, being a little over the top isn't always a bad thing, but when you want your setting to feel completely realistic (Fortunately, I don't consider Fallout all that realistic to begin with and don't ask that it try to be.) having people's heads taken cleanly off by pistol shots is not a good idea. In the end, though, for a "realistic" game, I don't need the gore to be completely realistic, as long as it doesn't stand out as implausible, it works.

Well, it is my preference, but I'm not one to say "NOOOO MUUR TEHN TOOO!!!"