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[BigBooper]

This linked comment made me think about how far we still have to go in software and game development.

When will developers put effort into modeling materials? When will I be able to play a game where when I hit someone with a sword, it actually cuts the flesh and clothing where I hit based on how hard I hit and that is rendered visually? I don't mean gibs or like in some games where you shoot an NPC in the foot and their leg breaks off at the hip, or attacking the dragon's tail 50 times until their tail falls off. I mean each hit is rendered according to where and how you hit them and a cut is shown on the NPC accurately. Not health bars or just a generic redness all over.

Think that would be a worthwhile development? I don't see why it couldn't be done if one of the game engine developers really wanted to, but we might not have the processing capability to handle it right now I suppose.

What would you want from the Elder Scrolls VI?

Besides the release date.

www.neogaf.com

 

[JeremyEtcetera]

What you're describing reminds me of the many, many promises and descriptions behind Everquest Next.

From what I read on that game, it was way, way, way ahead of it's time, not only in MMO features, but in features for video games in general.

 

[ManaByte]

What you're describing reminds me of the many, many promises and descriptions behind Everquest Next.

From what I read on that game, it was way, way, way ahead of it's time, not only in MMO features, but in features for video games in general.

Yea some of the AI stuff they were doing was amazing. Poor healers.

 

[JeremyEtcetera]

Yea some of the AI stuff they were doing was amazing. Poor healers.

That and the massive amount of voxel implementation too. The budget for it would have been as big as a GTA game.

 

[Dream-Knife]

Maybe in 10 years. Casuals are still all about resolution. Next up: 8k.

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

Think that would be a worthwhile development?

Worthwile?
Probably not, even if you come up with an automated system, you still have to manually create the complete "inside" for a character, and the system would still have to pick the nearest vertices to create the "gap", otherwise you'd get some weird looking triangle errors.
I guess tesselation could help with that, but it's still a lot of extra work for no real benefit, most gamers don't appreciate the ton of work artists already put in their work currently; that chair someone worked a few days on? Run right past never saw it.

 

[MiguelItUp]

I'd love to see that kind of fidelity. But I feel like we won't see that for another 10-20 years. If that. By then I'd imagine it'd just come much easier rather than being something "worthwhile".

I actually can't wait to see more games utilize new physics and stuff again. I feel like we haven't seen that in quite some time.

Until then I want more gibs because I feel like games have been severely lacking in the gibs department.

 

[Kerlurk]

nvm

 

[LordOfChaos]

Or even bullet hit reactions, clearly not a hardware problem as we had this in 2009

 

[BigBooper]

I'd love to see that kind of fidelity. But I feel like we won't see that for another 10-20 years. If that. By then I'd imagine it'd just come much easier rather than being something "worthwhile".

I actually can't wait to see more games utilize new physics and stuff again. I feel like we haven't seen that in quite some time.

Until then I want more gibs because I feel like games have been severely lacking in the gibs department.

Yes! I miss the experimenting with physics systems. Seems like that was completely abandoned with PS4 and XBONE.

 

[BigBooper]

And here I want green blood, and the gore to be toned down.

Could get you a pair of these.

 

[MiguelItUp]

Yes! I miss the experimenting with physics systems. Seems like that was completely abandoned with PS4 and XBONE.

Right?! I wasn't sure what was to really blame for that either. I felt like we were "ooo'd" and "aah'd" a lot more in the 360/PS3 era. Hell, even PS2 and Xbox! I think the only thing that made me go, "Whoa, that's neat" with PS4/Xbone era were the rope physics in Last of Us 2, lmao.

 

[Kagoshima_Luke]

Sadly, I feel the industry is less creativity and technology driven these days. Money is the key motivating factor.

Instead of new AI that creates realistic worlds with lifelike human patterns and interactions, they create AI to track how the player interfaces with the game to better sell the player more shit. Instead of investing in making a mind blowing new experience or feature, they invest in ways to keep the player hooked and funneling money into the game over weeks, months and years.

VR and the Nemesis system are like the only two interesting new features/technologies brought forward in the past 10 years. But, hey, at least we got Lara Croft in Fortnite!

 

[Kerlurk]

nvm

 

[Krappadizzle]

Doomed Eternal has localized damage modeling I believe. I could have sworn I've played a few other games too that have it, but none stand out to me enough to remember. I feel like God of War 3 or one of the offshoots kind of did it too. Still, if I am struggling to think of examples there's obviously not enough of them.

But we aren't far from even Soldier of Fortune which is sad.

 

[harmny]

 

[fatmarco]

Resident Evil 2 and 3 has a really great system for reacting to where you shoot etc.

 

[CamHostage]

If you hit somebody with a sword in real life, they get a traumatic wound which may possibly lead to their death.

If you hit somebody with a sword in a video game, their health bar drops a bit and you need to hit them 75 jillion more times before they explode and drop their gold.

Video games are different from real life.

(*Not that the OP didn't know the difference, of course, but we can't always get what we want, sometimes for reasonable reasons.)

Localized damage is cool when done well (and we seem to have a lot of games that frustratingly don't do it well,) but the point of a video game is to give you the illusion of awesome action that wouldn't work that way at all in real life. If they make action look too "realistic", that can be a problem actually for the play balance they're trying to achieve. If you blow a sizeable hole through somebody with a shotgun in CoD, but they keep coming because they've still got some health left, that's a LOL for you that the character is walking dead while the player on the other end just sees the stats and knows he's still in the fight. If a kneeshot permanently hobbled a character, that would look cool to you as the shooter but would be a real sucky way to play if you're limping around waiting for somebody to kill you so you can respawn. Car damage in a racing game tends to be similar, you want some semblance of wear on your car and you want crashes to be spectacular, but tiny bumps in a high-performance racing vehicle will fuck that thing up, you don't want one little tap to jam your F1 front wing into the wheels and end the race.

Damage has got to be balanced with gameplay, and ultimately, gameplay must be the priority.

 

[RoboFu]

We are decades away from what you want.
we still cannot have full collision detection for every polygon face to every character on screen let alone every object on screen.

 

[LazyParrot]

When will developers put effort into modeling materials? When will I be able to play a game where when I hit someone with a sword, it actually cuts the flesh and clothing where I hit based on how hard I hit and that is rendered visually?

Yeah, I'm sure a lack of effort is to blame here. If only those lazy devs got off their butts and did some work for a change!

Seriously, though. You seem to have no idea how much extra time, work and processing power something like this would require. Any VFX artist will tell you that accurately (or even not so accurately) simulating cloth/object interactions and material physics isn't really something you can just "do", especially not in a real-time game engine. People use high-powered workstations and dedicated simulation software for this stuff and it still takes ages.

 

[Kuranghi]

Resident Evil 2 and 3 has a really great system for reacting to where you shoot etc.

Not a lot of people know this but even though they downgraded the way the limbs can be shot off in RE3 remake they upgraded the damage on Paleheads massively, you can shoot them with a magnum and it makes a hole through them where you shot, after noticing this I turned on infinite ammo and shot a palehead corpse for ages (I'm not mental I swearr lol) and you can actually blow all the flesh off the arms, legs + blow away all of the body except the spine and pelvis. Its absolutely disgusting.

You might be able to do this in RE2 Remake too but I can't find footage of it so I think its new. Its pretty insane amount of work for something most people will never see and even if you fired every magnum bullet you can find up to that point into one of them you probably wouldn't see what I saw when I had infinite ammo:

 

[hybrid_birth]

When I watch smut I don't wanna fib.

 

[Captain Toad]

If a game showed "realistic" damage caused by sword slices and gun shots, everything (including the player), would be a 1-hit kill.

 

[Bartski]

I guess what OP means is more towards real-time mesh deformation tech, rather than gore effects based on model swapping, particles, and shaders which are the inexpensive standard even if done incredibly well like TLOU2.



Not happening anytime soon for the same reason why the last-gen was such a disappointment in the physics department - for some reason it's a hard sell and not a priority.
Everything that informs actual interactivity in a game world - physics simulation complexity of rigid bodies, collision quality... all that is sacrificed the same way as game world permanence is - it's a trade-off for having nice lights and high polygon counts at 4k.

 

[Bartski]

If a game showed "realistic" damage caused by sword slices and gun shots, everything (including the player), would be a 1-hit kill.

great, that would be amazing while the hard part is building gameplay around it to make it playable and fun. There are many systems working behind the scenes in modern games already defining enemy behavior that eventually could get us there. Probably not this gen.

 

[JeremyEtcetera]

If a game showed "realistic" damage caused by sword slices and gun shots, everything (including the player), would be a 1-hit kill.

The Metal Gear Rising 'first edition' conundrum. How much fun do you sacrifice for realism? And where does one draw the line?

 

[BigBooper]

It doesn't have to be a one hit kill deal either, depending on the game design it can be more or less realistic. The Wolverine movies for example, have (fantasy)"realistic" damage where his skin is torn and bullet holes go through him. There's even games with a similar level of ridiculous, like the Tomb Raider games or Far Cry where the player is constantly resetting broken bones and patching huge punctures. It's all just triggered model swaps, but wouldn't it be cool to try to simulate that?

Obviously it shouldn't be every game and we are probably at least a decade+ away.

 

[CuNi]

You mean like metal gear rising revengence?

 

[mortal]

Maaaan, I get the love for Revengance and I enjoyed it for what it is, but THIS is what I wanted. Rising's mechanics looked so interesting, shame they were incapable of balancing it.

 

[Warablo]

It can't be too hard, just like bullet impacts but instead have flesh wounds or specific limb animations.

 

[Neff]

Games cost money and time to make. What you propose would require a ridiculous amount of money and time for something which isn't really worth it considering other possible advances to pursue.

It's 2021 and we still have model clipping.

 

[tassletine]

This is pretty close, although the clothing isn't being cut.

Hit someone in their hand and the fight is over because they can't hold the sword (which is the best tactic in a real sword fight). They put a lot of effort in, even if the animation and modelling isn't great it seems to take everything into account, sword angle, depth of cut body part etc. Apart from that the best mainstream example I can think of is RDR 2.

 

[Bartski]

How much fun do you sacrifice for realism?

I wouldn't call it a sacrifice, it's a concept that requires a very different approach to gameplay and many additional layers of smoke and mirrors that go on top to work.

For example, to expand a bit on my last post - most enemies in games have all kinds of very deliberate behavior programmed in order to "miss" in combat in a way it's unnoticeable to the player.

Here is a great video about how that works in Doom '16 (timestamped although the whole panel is amazing, highly recommended)





Another example: Uncharted 4 combat is designed around the idea that Drake never really gets shot

Nathan Drake Doesn't Have A Health Meter In Uncharted, He Has A Luck Meter

Nathan Drake doesn't actually get hit by multiple bullets. He just runs out of luck.

www.gameinformer.com

There is hardly a noticable situation in something like TLOU2 (on higher difficulties, which is IMO the right way to play this game) where you see yourself getting shot point-blank and surviving, it's supposed to look like a scrape.

But that's just the beginning. The more realistic the behavior the more defensive, damage-avoiding mechanics should be invented and implemented.

We already see all kinds of contextual dodges and "bullet time moments" happening in combat-heavy games and I don't think they will stop evolving in this direction.

I hope it's obvious not all games should go down this path, I wanna shoot dragons with lasers for gens to come. Long live arcade!

But I love to see when devs try going this extra mile in games that tell stories in grounded, real-life emulating worlds. It is just so much harder to do.

I hate the word "realism", it's not about that, it's about designing gameplay consistent with the fiction portrayed on screen, verisimilitude if you will.

A concept of a "health bar" hasn't really evolved much since Commodore64, it's about time.