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Getting shot in games. A broken mechanic?

protonion

Member
I've been playing the mgs series recently and in each of them I noticed how the experience goes from awesome to shit every time you get discovered. You are in stealth, there is tension, nice level design, everything follows clear rules and BAM! Alert mode. It hit me then that having to deal with bullets in games sucks.

Call of duty. Enemies spawn. Shots all over. Blood splaters, camera shaking... It's chaotic.
Most people I've asked say that their favorite cod levels are the sniping ones. It's because in them you don't have to deal with this bullshit.


And what really pisses me off is that in such games you can never play in a perfect way. I mean I can finish mgs without being seen. Or a mario game without getting touched by an enemy. But when guns are involved you are bound to get hit. It's all a matter of being quick and precise and finish the enemies before you die.
Think how many times you read in a review as a con that the camera is bad and you are getting hit by unseen enemies. In shooters this is the norm. FPS, 3rd person cover, whatever. You just get hit all the time.

I have high hopes for The Last of Us for this reason. It's like they made the Demon's Souls of shooters. With every bullet being important. It would be great if there is a realistic difficulty where you die in one or two shots (depending where).
 
It's like they made the Demon's Souls of shooters. With every bullet being important. It would be great if there is a realistic difficulty where you die in one or two shots (depending where).

You never hear of the Tactical Shooter genre?
 
What they said. Man, I do miss a good Tom Clancy RBS game. Damn you UBI.

Also even COD has non bullet sponge mode where basically one good shot kills you.
 
It would be great if there is a realistic difficulty where you die in one or two shots (depending where).

Not "depending where". In real life, you take a bullet anywhere you either pass out because of the shock or hold your wound rolling on the floor screaming because of pain. Either way you are incapacitated and can no longer have an influence on the battleground. That or being dead, it doesn't matter for your enemy (or the game).

Realistic is the same rule as paintball: one shot = you're out. Even on the tip of the foot, glove, etc.
 
Honestly in most first person shooters you're not playing as a human being, you're basically a walking tank.
 
It hit me then that having to deal with bullets in games sucks.

You know, Ive never been shot at IRL, but I could imagine it would suck just as bad (maybe even worse).

I bet the deer in DeerHunter are thinking the same thing OP, youre not alone.
 
I have high hopes for Zombi U for this reason. It's like they made the Demon's Souls of shooters. With every bullet being important. It would be great if there is a realistic difficulty where you die in one or two shots (depending where).

fixed

Seriously, I'm so hyped for that game.
 
Or they could leave it the mechanics relatively the same as they are in CoD/Halo, but design paths into the maps that are a bit more difficult to be detected and the like.
 
Games like Halo, HL2, Deus Ex are fine because suit/nanomachines.

But any military shooter just feels weird to me when you are soaking up lead throughout the entire level.
 
One of the reasons I like RE 4 so much.


Exactly! Having a gun against melee attackers is the way to go.


And yes tactical shooters. We can't turn every game into them.

Having Drake die with one shot would make the game unplayable. And this is my issue.
I'm in my cover. Three enemies are in front. I find the perfect opening and headshot one enemy quicky. Still I will eat some bullets. In Favela in mw2 the screen is red all the time.

I just find it a bad mechanic because getting shot should be a punishment for bad play.
 
Exactly! Having a gun against melee attackers is the way to go.


And yes tactical shooters. We can't turn every game into them.

Having Drake die with one shot would make the game unplayable. And this is my issue.
I'm in my cover. Three enemies are in front. I find the perfect opening and headshot one enemy quicky. Still I will eat some bullets. In Favela in mw2 the screen is red all the time.

I just find it a bad mechanic because getting shot should be a punishment for bad play.

But you started this thread saying that shooting is broken in most games and every bullet should count, as if this was a new idea. It's not. There's an (unfortunately waning) genre entirely based around the concept.

You've sorta answered your own question here, too. Yeah, dying in one shot in an action adventure or a "looser" game like Uncharted, Gears, whatever wouldn't be fun. That's why they're not tactical shooters. However, if the way bullets work in these games doesn't do it for you... there are tactical shooters. An answer to your question of taste exists.

Different kind of genres require different kind of shooting.

Bam.
 
I'm hoping next gen will be different, and we'll see games get their identities back. Trying to beat CoD at its own game is FAIL, its too late. Give them their identities back, developers.
 
In this regard, 2d games are still superior. Ever played Contra?

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Combine the amount of bullets with red tint on the screen or screen shaking or blood on screen when you're hit and you have an explanation of why i hate most recent fps titles.
 
So I haven't been following that closely as I want to retain some surprise when I play it. But does TLOU impose a strict use of bullets in the game?

I.e they are few and far between. I liked that element in 'I Am Alive'
 
But that isn't a tactical shooter then. "Tactical shooter" isn't the term for quickly dying, there's a bit more to it than that.


Yeah I know. The Drake part wasn't a follow up to the above sentence (though it seemed like this).


And regarding TLOU that I mentioned in my first post...
I'm hoping to solve my problem with the limited bullets plus advanced AI. An enemy with a couple of bullets will hesite to shoot when you are very mobile (and if he does he misses etc).

But in a standard fps you cannot have that.
Just to throw an idea. What if sprinting in cod made you avoid every bullet. And since you cannot sprint forever you would sprint to a safe spot. And the levels would be designed so at least a safe spot is within sprint rage from every location. And make the bullets more deadly. Stuff like that.
 
I never thought about this. It kinda explains why people love RE4 and zombie games: the enemies are often using melee or very slow projectile weapons and you aren't guaranteed to take unavoidable enemy shots.

Tactical shooters deal with this by making the pace much slower and giving the player more ways to be aware of enemy positoning. For fast paced games the only way I can imagine is doing it like in action movies and have bullets miss the player instead, but I think people would find it weird to have a danger bar instead of a life bar.

Maybe the way Virtua Cop does it could be applied to FPS games: in VC enemies are constantly spraying bullets, but some of them get a round marker around them which starts green and gradually changes into yellow and the into red. If you don't kill that enemy before the circle turns red, you'll get shot.
 
And what really pisses me off is that in such games you can never play in a perfect way. I mean I can finish mgs without being seen. Or a mario game without getting touched by an enemy. But when guns are involved you are bound to get hit. It's all a matter of being quick and precise and finish the enemies before you die.
This is my biggest gripe with many of the big shooters. My playstyle in modern shooters is to NOT get shot, ever, and that just doesn't fly with all but the rarest games nowadays.

I forgive it in games like Halo though, where the conceit is that you're a dude with shields and heavy armor - if I was the Master Chief, getting shot enough to get absorbed by my shields and provide me with an opening is just smart tactics. Trying to do the same in Black Ops though just comes across as idiotic.

I think a lot of game developers have allowed that regenerating health mechanic to weaken the overall game design.

On a side note, you mention how stealth games are awesome until you get spotted. I'd recommend taking a look at Splinter Cell Conviction and Mark of the Ninja for two examples that try something new here.
 
Even if realistic FPS's have a pretty good damage distribution system and realistic damage there's absolutely no feedback. Getting shot without armor should make the player's character model stumble and tumble, aiming down the sights should be ended also after getting pelted.
 
I find the 'health' system in games like CoD/BF3 silly and partially taking the challenge out of the game (regenerative health) but getting killed in 1-2 hits is also quite annoying. I like it when it's something like Halo 1's health system.
 
Even if realistic FPS's have a pretty good damage distribution system and realistic damage there's absolutely no feedback. Getting shot without armor should make the player's character model stumble and tumble, aiming down the sights should be ended also after getting pelted.
GRAW and GRAW 2 did it best I think (on the consoles). Its enough of an audio-visual snap to make you fully aware you've been hit and to make it an unpleasant experience.

Treyarch and Black Ops does it worst, followed by the Infinity Ward installments.
 
I know this isn't the point you're trying to get, but I am getting really tired of fighting AI opponents with guns. I think facing a human with a gun is interesting, but most AI enemies with guns I just find so much less interesting than other types of enemies.

There's exceptions to the rule, but I feel the mixture of the over-saturation of games with shooting enemies and the fact the AI in these things are often either too easy or too cheap provide them to be in most cases either be boring and just not interesting, or in worst cases really broken and infuriating. I hate to sound like the Joker here, but there's little personality of enemies who just shoot. I appreciate interesting enemies in games, and hate how so many lack how interesting their enemies could be if they were more than just shooting fodder.
 
And what really pisses me off is that in such games you can never play in a perfect way. I mean I can finish mgs without being seen. Or a mario game without getting touched by an enemy. But when guns are involved you are bound to get hit.

I'm a bit of a perfectionist too, but within a reasonable limit. Doing a no-hit run of any action game is well-nigh impossible until you've practiced for a long time. Just be realistic, and dealwithit.
 
There's always been something really non-intuitive about first person shooters with heavy gunfire for me personally, maybe it has to do with spatial awareness or something but it always feels so off kilter, I always really struggled with them as a kid in particular and I'm not sure why. Goldeneye used to do my head in because I could not avoid getting shot and I had no sense of where I was positioned in relation to the bullets. Hard to explain actually.

I've always preferred games which have close range gunfire as a last resort or pretty much a sign that you're defeated. The whole idea of these gun battles going on between people at distances of about 10 feet or so just always felt wrong to me.
 
I've been playing the mgs series recently and in each of them I noticed how the experience goes from awesome to shit every time you get discovered. You are in stealth, there is tension, nice level design, everything follows clear rules and BAM! Alert mode. It hit me then that having to deal with bullets in games sucks.

Call of duty. Enemies spawn. Shots all over. Blood splaters, camera shaking... It's chaotic.
Most people I've asked say that their favorite cod levels are the sniping ones. It's because in them you don't have to deal with this bullshit.


And what really pisses me off is that in such games you can never play in a perfect way. I mean I can finish mgs without being seen. Or a mario game without getting touched by an enemy. But when guns are involved you are bound to get hit. It's all a matter of being quick and precise and finish the enemies before you die.
Think how many times you read in a review as a con that the camera is bad and you are getting hit by unseen enemies. In shooters this is the norm. FPS, 3rd person cover, whatever. You just get hit all the time.

I have high hopes for The Last of Us for this reason. It's like they made the Demon's Souls of shooters. With every bullet being important. It would be great if there is a realistic difficulty where you die in one or two shots (depending where).

Did they explicitly tell you that was the reason?

I would imagine for most people it was the change of pace - the fantastic stealth elements and just the general tone of those missions.

EDIT: Sorry dont want to move away from the point of the thread but I just dont think I agree with your assessment of why people liked the Sniping levels so much.

I think that in some ways because most games focus on the player being a full on assualt guy, the things you mentioned hating come part and parcel of that package. I imagine if your a grunt being forced to run at people with guns in the real life military things would be equally messy.

Although I kind of see where you are coming from, ultimately a game where you can be so skilful you never get shot would be interesting - as others have mentioned there are games that try and emulate realism, but I kind of agree with you in that none of them probably emulate what a real life specs op team would have to deal with.
 
Not "depending where". In real life, you take a bullet anywhere you either pass out because of the shock or hold your wound rolling on the floor screaming because of pain. Either way you are incapacitated and can no longer have an influence on the battleground. That or being dead, it doesn't matter for your enemy (or the game).

Realistic is the same rule as paintball: one shot = you're out. Even on the tip of the foot, glove, etc.

Not really true either.

But in a real gunfight, anyone can be John McClane. Or the dude who dies immediately. It's kind of a crapshoot. We've already noted that gunshots are only fatal around 5 percent of the time. But you probably assumed the other 95 percent of gunshot victims were still out of the fight as soon as they felt an impact. That assumption isn't borne out in the facts of real gunfights, like this shootout in Miami, where eight FBI agents emptied their side arms (and a shotgun) into a pair of unarmored bank robbers for four minutes.

"Even in the end, it took multiple shots from a shotgun and six additional rounds from a handgun to end the fight ... some of the shotgun pellets hit the assailants in the head, but did not stop them immediately. The toxicology report showed no drugs or alcohol in either [assailant's] system. Handguns (guns in general) are not the powerful one-shot stop instruments of immediate death portrayed by television, movies and the media."
Assailants have been documented fighting on after being hit more than 100 times. At least one bank robber has received upwards of 60 bullet wounds from authorities and lived to tell about it. We mentioned that Roy P. Benavidez fought on for six hours despite receiving 37 serious bullet, shrapnel and bayonet wounds. But we didn't mention that he also completed an 80-yard run after taking a rifle bullet to the knee. In the real world, the power of a bullet doesn't have shit on the power of adrenaline and sheer cussedness.


Read more: 6 Stupid Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies) | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_1978...lieves-thanks-to-movies_p2.html#ixzz28eTazSZv
 
But in a standard fps you cannot have that.
Just to throw an idea. What if sprinting in cod made you avoid every bullet. And since you cannot sprint forever you would sprint to a safe spot. And the levels would be designed so at least a safe spot is within sprint rage from every location. And make the bullets more deadly. Stuff like that.

And all the safe spots were oh, chest-high or so?
 
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