Well, for a lot of realism or immersion themed games, its basically taken as a given that reticles are not realistic, that blind firing a weapon is inaccurate, and that ADS should provide an benefit to accuracy whilst usually lowering movement speed and taking a bit to bring up the weapon.

Thats kind of the whole debate back in the early/mid 2000s that led to ADS becoming a thing, but with time, ADS has basically become an expected feature, even if the core mechanics underlying it are now neutered to the point that it is practically cosmetic only.

One solution I can see is doing something like what Arma does, but more immersively, more thought through.

In Arma, your point of viewing is not connected directly to your point of aim. You can look over your shoulder, fire, and the gun will fire at the vector it is pointing, not where your eyes are pointing.

What you could do is make it so that instead of your arms and the gun be pointing directly ahead at all times… they wander about the screen independent of your center of the screen, dependent on your level of woundedness and exhaustion, so that you have a visual indicator of unsteadyness… which is what blooming and closing aiming reticles were originally meant to convey, as 90s FPSs didnt have the technical ability to do that kind of animation.

You could also make it so that the weapon aiming vector chases the eye aiming vector on a delay, and that would go to significant lengths to cut down on the twitch shooter kind of thing where you can do a 180 and basically instantly be on target, cut down on the video gamey ness of many fast paced shooters.

With modern tech its also totally possible to make it so that if you are shot in the arm, maybe you drop your gun, or if shot in the leg, maybe you collapse. It is usually the case that this only happens to NPCs, but never players.

Ive made mods toying with this in Source over a decade ago now, and it was possible then, just the animations were janky as fuck from the viewpoint of anyone who is not the player.

Now we have motion matching doable in Unity and UE5 and that could absolutely make the animations look far better.

One element of online shooters is basically silly animations for a player with high mouse sensitivity doing a 180 and this basically results in them just instantly pierroutting, not needing to take steps and reshoulder the gun. With motion matching and my vector chasing idea, you can make it so there are actually fluid, believable animations, and thus penalties, for doing said 180.

Maybe some day I will be able to mock this up… kind of hard to do game dev with no real internet access (posting on 4g lol)

I know what you are talking about…

The game I recommend to most people looking for a realistic enough multiplayer experience is Squad, as it is a pretty reasonable compromise between gamey aspects that allow for more action and fun, with realistic aspects that make gameplay revolve far more around group tactics rather than everyone just soloing and screaming at everyone.

… though they are apparently currently going through the same crisis that the mod they spawned from (Project Reality for bf2) did: Time to totally revamp how all aiming/weapon spread works!

I think part of the solution to this problem (Squads problem) would be to have better visual feedback, ie, make the players arms weapon and aimpoint actually be drifting around, instead of just having an invisible expanding and contracting reticle.

And oh god yeah, the replenishing health on a timer thing… its halo’s shield mechanic, but now just widely adopted everywhere with no explanation…

Basically, if you had very realistic portrayal of damage in a multiplayer team death match, it is not fun for all but the most hardcore milsim crowd.

I have played various Arma mods that actually go to the extreme to simulate a person realistically and what happens is 99% of people get angry they cannot carry an RPG, 3 rounds for it, as well as an AK and 8 magazines, then sprint for a mile, because they will literally have a heart attack and die.

With mods like that, yep, you take a round to the chest with plate armor, you get knocked to the ground… and then obliterated by 400 other rounds coming downrange.

the AI in Arma has always been basically laughably bad at tactics and movement, especially in any kind of city, but absurdly laser accurate when they do see you.

A medic has to carry morphine, epipens, bandages, tourniquets, splints, and even blood bags. Turns out a realistic portrayal of bullet and explosive damage is…

… yeah you can get lucky and take a through and through that doesnt hit bone, get patched up and maybe be semi combat effective, though you’ll be limping and grunting and barely able to hit anything…

…but the vast majority of the time youre gonna need an evac or have the ability to set up a field hospital on the fly. Presented with this…? most players just suicide and respawn

It would work much better in a single player game, possibly some kind of co-op game, either with a small number of humans vs ai, or possibly something like titanfall, where there are just a few humans on each side and most of both teams are actually well written AI.

The sad truth is that many of the people who say they want realism actually cry and rage when presented with it.

Hah, I didn’t notice that, was a long time ago.

I know that sort of thing often happens in … well just many games, period. It used to be a sign of a less than stellar PC port, or back in the day when mod teams became full game devs, but it is still a persistent problem.

That and timing some things along with the framerate and others not.

Its wild that these kind of things that are basically novice game dev mistakes are still being made by novices and huge studios alike.

Physical Therapy.

Whole lot of my tendons and muscles got torn, shifted into the wrong places and misused as I had to keep moving with the muscles that were not completely fucked, bones broken, etc.

I still can’t really walk for long periods of time without massive pain, but it is slowly getting better.

Thanks for the well wishes =)

One thing about a lot of shooting games is whether or not enemies or the player get ‘stunlocked’ from being shot.

Multiplayer FPS? You shoot a bad guy and this almost always has no stagger effect at all. Maybe ín some more realism themed or tactical games you get a large blood spatter on your screen and a camera punch, but usually it just means your health goes down.

Singleplayer FPS or TPS? All over the place. Some games you can injure an enemy and they’ll do a stun or stagger animation, others none, sometimes the same applies to the player, sometimes not.

I have played Intruder off and on since its initial alpha, and while it does have some very interesting ideas, (i believe there is a whole mechanic that makes you less balanced and more liable to ragdoll and fallover based off of your movement speed, turning speed and narrowness of what you are standing on, ie a railing vs the floor) it is fundamentally a multiplayer, round based team deathmatch game, whereas SC and MGS are single player.

Does any one actually play it any more? Last time I checked there were maybe 50 players, max, online at any given time.

Agreed, that really set it apart. A few modern games at least claim to use similar systems for enemy awareness, but usually it is more common to just do line of sight + distance.

I believe it is in the first game on PC, and yeah I thought this was/is a very good way to handle variable movement speed with a M+KB set up.

On a controller with a thumb stick, you can vary the degree to which you push it in a direction, unlike the 1 or 0 state of a key being pressed.

I am still surprised more games did not at least allow for this kind of control on PC, IIRC it was only even a thing with some earlier tactical shooters.

‽

KEEP CALM AND REMAIN STILL

1. Sure, ok. A huge part of stealth action games is precisely that if you fuck up, you can very easily be overwhelmed, and only with usually a combo of significant skill and luck can you recover from this. Generally speaking, the idea of a stealth action game is that you are nearly guaranteed to be fucked should a full alarm be raised.

2. You are describing two ARPGs as examples, further lending credence to my assertion that AC is faaaar closer to an ARPG than any kind of stealth game.

3. Personally, I call games that set up queued attack sequences against the player artificially easy, an obvious power fantasy for casuals. There are games that are very melee centric that do not do this (Kenshi w/ attack slot mods, Sifu, Mount and Blade, etc.) which are generally significantly more difficult so long as you don’t cheese them.

4. Oh right, I’m fairly certain you are just wrong when it comes to Dark Souls. One huge reason why at least the original was seen as so hard is that the enemies do not queue up to attack you following some kind of group rules, they’ll all go by their own individual AI, not waiting to take their turns.

True on both counts, I guess I should have qualified with ‘In the past 5 years’ or something.

I think Dishonored 2 came out in 2017? I did quite like those games.

And yeah, the Thief series arguably invented the stealth action genre in 3d, though I am fairly sure that MGS was basically the direct inspiration for Splinter Cell, can’t say I’ve heard any of those devs ever mention the Thief series.

Only other things I can think of are other immersive sims (which I /know/ the creators of the dishonored series would either say their game is or contains elements of), the better of which have pretty good sneaking missions and are highly similar to stealth action games in many ways, you could even say that stealth action games are basically streamlined immersive sims… not many of those get made or become popular though, SS2 remake being the only recent exception I can think of.

Finally, there is Alien Isolation, which … is sort of a stealth action game, but also a horror game. But again, that was quite a while ago.

And then the Splinter Cell franchise shortly went off the rails, crashed and burned as soon as they decided that some of the most fundamental of those rules should just be abandoned, for the sake of basically more broad appeal via making the game easier.

Its honestly kind of shocking that someone has not just made an indie, more graphically simple version of some kind of melding of Splinter Cell and MGS core game mechanics, perhaps without the relatively costly voice acting and grandiose, superbly animated cutscenes.

Im waiting to live somewhere with an actual internet connection, and I am convinced I could put together a proof of concept build in UE 5 in 6 months, a comprehensive level.

Stealth Action games seem to be highly regarded and in great demand, but for some reason no one really makes them in 3d anymore, unless there are some hidden gems I’ve somehow not heard of.

PS: Assassins Creed doesnt count, the AI is braindead when it comes to stealth, takes turns attacking you… using modern terminology its just a 3d ARPG.

Well, the final straw was when a number of them made me homeless, and the rest were either too busy or too emotionally burdened to help right now.

So after losing all my possessions, losing my job, being homeless for nearly a year, getting the shit kicked out of me regularly by fentanyl addicts uh… well, I should not have survived.

But despite nearly being killed more times than I can count, being held hostage by madman (who the police held for 30 days and then let loose), and witnessing a number of people I’d met along the way die…

It was not exactly easy.

But, by basically dumb luck, I survived.

And, being alive, having not only hit rock bottom, but having been dragged and kicked along its jagged ground… well, now I am free.

It is only after you lose everything, that you are free to do anything.

And for me, that means not having to deal with anyone while I do a whole lot of PT on disability.

Also, I now have a great deal of self confidence, as I am 100% certain any of those dumbfucks would have died going through a tenth of what I went through, yet I persist.

I totally agree with you that systemic failures require a systemic evaluation to figure out what actually happened. Most of the jobs I’ve worked have been as an analyst of one kind or another, so I of course know that many things do not have quick answers.

So yes technically I should have added some kind of qualifier, but you seem to get that I mean that common, routine job functions or system functions pretty much always should have fairly simple explanations as to why something routine happens or does not.

So, it takes me a while to do a root cause analysis of a quarter or years worth of one kind of failure in a complex process or another, but I very rarely have to manually investigate some specific totally unknown thing in person, as the system is (or should) be designed in such a way that tbis stuff is tracked and easily analyzed.

Contrast that with: Why isn’t the report released yet?

Oh, because a data set I need access to is offline right now, or some dumbass changed the access creds without informing me prior, I emailed them a week ago, and they have not responded.

That is a simple answer.

Solitude.

I appear to have had extraordinarily bad luck in my life, as nearly every significant friend or lover or family I’ve ever had is consistently some.combination of abusive, exploitative, duplicitous, violent, criminal, hypocrite, never willing to hear my side of any story.

Been by myself with a new phone number in a new state for some months now and I’ve never been less stressed out, never felt less burdened, never felt more free.

Took me 35 years to figure out… wait, what if I did what I wanted to do, enjoyed things because I enjoyed them instead of pretending to like some other thing because someone else does, what if I stopped bending over backwards to solve everyone else’s problems when they usually just go out of their way to cause more problems for me, and never give anything meaningful back, and in fact usually blame me for things I have no control over, and then spread unfounded rumors about me due to their own massive neuroticism and guilt complexes?

I am quite happy now. I’ve never needed much to be happy, and nearly no one who has ever claimed to care about me has ever once been able to handle my honest opinions about what they have put me through.

Its been astounding to realize that actually, I make friends quite easily and get along with most people I meet great, whilst everyone I used to know has spent decades convincing me I am an unlikeable asshole who is merely to be tolerated.

I legitimately thought that Buick had been entirely shutdown/dissolved/reorganized into other existing GM brands.

Guess not.

While one part of me fucking absolutely hates the Mac Goggles for many reasons…

…the other part of me kinda really wants them to become normalized precisely so that Ghost in the Shell offensive hacking type bullshit can just ruin the lives of anyone who regularly uses one.

It doesn’t have to be as immediately malicious as cutting the feed while driving…

…You could do that watermelon green text from 4chan. Just have a watermelon, every day, thats always… not quite in the same position, but always there.

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade, the gym teacher would play Mambo # 5 all the time… a song about boinking a different woman every day of the week.

Oh god, unrelated but more cringe school song memories: Assembly before high school prom introduced the football team for some reason.

To… let the bodies hit the floor, followed by I Stand Alone, which does not make any fucking sense as football is a team sport.

Ugh.