I wish someone would make a multiplayer FPS that more realistically simulated infantry combat. I want to be able to participate in the realistic infantry combat that I see in movies like Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers and read about in military history books. I think games like Bf1942 and Call of Duty are good but inorder to make those types of games way more realistic and fun in my opinion, two little things need to be done. 1) Simulating death In real life if you get shot and die then thats it. It's all over for eternity. In games like Bf1942 and Call of Duty if you die you respawn within a few seconds. This difference has a huge effect on gameplay. If you know that if you die you'll be able to respawn you're going to be far less concerned with running over open ground and just generally less careful. Anyway the finality of death could easily be simulated by not allowing people to respawn and the server could remember their IP address so that they can't reconnect when they die. 2) Realistic health system Most FPS games have a health bar. A more realistic health system would involve any hits to the t-zone being an instant kill and hits outside the t-zone causing a reduction in mobility. If the injuries aren't bandaged in a certain amount of time by a medic then the player dies. Operation Flashpoint had a health system similiar to this. These two things would be so easy to implement in an FPS. And I think these two things would make gameplay way more realistic. Teamwork would come into play because you'd have to work with teammates inorder to stay alive. Covering fire would come into play because you'd just have to spray an area with bullets to keep the enemies heads down. MGs would have more of a role to play unlike in bf1942 where the MGs never get used. And I think if these two things were implemented there'd be way more fire fights over long distances. It would be really cool to have two teams firing at each other from behind cover.

America's Army uses the Unreal 2 engine, is free to download, and is promoted by the most powerful organization on the face of the planet (bar id software). Not having heard of it is inexcusable.

Quote:Original post by Obscure
The majority of gamers hate waiting for a new round to start in CS. They will just about tollerate that but they wouldn't tollerate "one death and your out of the game". Not only wouldthe good players get fed up and play something else but it would be impossible for newbies to even learn the game.

lol CS

That would be another advantage of my game - it wouldn't attract CS players

A couple of things to make games more realistic to change the gameplay:

1) Make hitting a lot harder than it currently is
You'd be amazed how many rounds get fired before anyone actually gets hit. In the famous bank heist that happened in LA in 1997, about 1,000 rounds were fired and about a dozen hits were scored. In other words, roughly 1 in 100 shots actually hit someone. In your average FPS game, it takes maybe 10 shots to hit someone if that. In an FPS game, you only have to control the position of the cursor onto the target. In the real world, you have often more than one axes to control (when you hold a rifle, you are controlling the butt end of the rifle as well as the muzzle with your hands, this has the effect of creating more imprecision in the control of aim). While some FPS games simulate that where the cursor is only an approximation of where the round is going to land, they need to go one step farther and introduce random movements of the targeting cursor itself. A skill level of the shooter could reduce the erratic movements, and a more accurate weapon/firing mode would make the precision of rounds more accurate.


2) Players have no fear
In the real world, one is often reluctant to stick one's head out from cover if there's a lot of fire or explosions going on. You can have a Stress meter that relates the character's Willpower to the probablity that a lethal event might occur. If the Stress level is too high, the character is forced to drop down for cover or dive for the nearest cover.

For example, if someone is blanketing an area with suppression fire, in today's game, big deal...the only consequence is that the character might get hit and therefore may or may not avoid it. The action the character takes is totally in the hands of the player however. But with this system, psychological reactions force the character to do something the player may not want to happen, even though it may be more realistic. So in the above example, the player may want his character to charge forward, but instead, the character will be forced to take cover. A way to override this mechanism is one I talked about in some posts on roleplaying...you can have a pool of points (I call it Discipline and Focus) which you can use to lower the Stress rating and continue your action. However, these points are limited and refresh slowly, so you have to be wise in knowing when to use them.

3) Diminishing Effectiveness
While damage is the best example of this, there are other factors too. Fatigue, both mental and physical are important. Another is your psychological or emotional state. There is an old dictum that it's far easier to break a man's will than his body. Depending on a character's actions, his physical fatigue will increase, affecting how fast he can run as well as his shooting ability (try shooting accurately while your sucking in air). Constantly being stressed out from battle will have long term consequences as well. If you are terrified of what's happening, usually your effectiveness also drops (which would happen if out of group of 30 players on your side, only 2 of you are left).

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head. I can agree with the idea of making death permanent for the character, but only if some of these suggestions are follwed. With the current model of how FPS game work, it simply wouldn't work very well. Current FPS games makes large scale warfare way to easy to get hit and therefore die. It also makes the characters perfect rambos willing to charge the machinegun nest with nary a thought as long as he knows he can suck up a hit or two.

I think if you make the death final, then players will naturally be more cautious. This in turn should make them more tense when they enter combat and also force them to be more tactical in their decision-making. If you include things like the Stress meter which may force the character to do something the player doesn't intend (but have the means to override if possible), then it introduces another layer of unpredictability to keep the player on his toes. Combat should always be about minimizing one's chance of dying while maximizing one's chance to eliminate the enemy. Almost always, the former has priority over the latter. Heroics usually happen when the latter dominates the former, but is done so only with motivation to save other lives (rather than for glory). Only if you make the consequences steep will heroics have true meaning. In other words, if you the player wre actually fearful for your character's life, yet made the decision to put the character in harm's way to do something, then heroics has a more profound impact. But if you just think, oh so what, I'll just get to respawn or reload the level, no biggie", then heroism is utterly meaningless.