Here in the real world there is nothing physicaly preventing baseball players from running the bases backwords. There is nothing physicaly preventing Soccer players from useing thier hands.

Here in the real world its players following the rather abstract rules of the sport that makes the game possable.

Now imagine you are tasked with developing a uber realistic Baseball game. Should you allow players to run to 3rd base rather than 1st? I mean its physicaly possable even in the real world, so souldn't this ability be present in a uber realistic baseball game?

Of course not! because it takes focus away from the sport, it adds nothing to the game...such a "feature" would be there because it can be, not because it should.

Now maybe your CRPG has a complex reality basied combat system basied on real world combat styles, techniques, and tactics...And in keeping with this uber realistic style you modeled extreamly realistic physical damage. Enough so that players must heal physical wounds as they would in real life...heck you even modeled the effects of sunburns, blisters, and skin rashes...But does haveing wounded players to hold up for days at a time support your CRPG focus on character development? on adventureing? exploreing? of course not!

But that is the sort of thing that happens when developers rush to create complex realistic games.

Even in GTA3 there is a game focus on certain gameplay mechanics...I mean you can't get married, start a family, buy a refridgerator, raise a child, hold a legal job, open a saveings account, recieve credit card applications in the mail, go on a camping trip, attend a theater play, write a book, get theorpy, have your apendex removed, buy all the ingredients for a home cooked meal, or even play baseball for your favorite team...the game focus isn't on any of those real world situations and thus they are excluded from the game...and the game is better because of this.

Quote:Here in the real world there is nothing physicaly preventing baseball players from running the bases backwords. There is nothing physicaly preventing Soccer players from useing thier hands.

Here in the real world its players following the rather abstract rules of the sport that makes the game possable.

Now imagine you are tasked with developing a uber realistic Baseball game. Should you allow players to run to 3rd base rather than 1st? I mean its physicaly possable even in the real world, so souldn't this ability be present in a uber realistic baseball game?

Of course not! because it takes focus away from the sport, it adds nothing to the game...such a "feature" would be there because it can be, not because it should.

Now maybe your CRPG has a complex reality basied combat system basied on real world combat styles, techniques, and tactics...And in keeping with this uber realistic style you modeled extreamly realistic physical damage. Enough so that players must heal physical wounds as they would in real life...heck you even modeled the effects of sunburns, blisters, and skin rashes...But does haveing wounded players to hold up for days at a time support your CRPG focus on character development? on adventureing? exploreing? of course not!

But that is the sort of thing that happens when developers rush to create complex realistic games.

Even in GTA3 there is a game focus on certain gameplay mechanics...I mean you can't get married, start a family, buy a refridgerator, raise a child, hold a legal job, open a saveings account, recieve credit card applications in the mail, go on a camping trip, attend a theater play, write a book, get theorpy, have your apendex removed, buy all the ingredients for a home cooked meal, or even play baseball for your favorite team...the game focus isn't on any of those real world situations and thus they are excluded from the game...and the game is better because of this.

Seeing as the entire point was to focus on including realism to the correct degree, this is exactly the kind of post I'm rallying against. The stupidity of including sunburn in a game, for instance, does not lie in the fact that it's realistic - it lies in the fact that it's realistic but unnecesary for building a plausible and cohesive world and serves no purpose. Ironically enough, this post shouldn't even need a rebuttal - seeing as we both agree that too much realism defeats the purpose of playing a game and escaping reality. But you seem to puport that since too much realism is bad, the concept that some realism is good is false. Our arguments are aligned, but your argument doesn't support your claims.

Quote: It's weird that people are avoiding the definitions in the first post just to say "The games I like don't have any realism, therefore all realism sucks". Or the lame "Realism almost always sucks, but maybe sometimes it's ok". It's not 'realism' that sucks; it's bad gameplay design. There are just as many games that suffer from non-realism-based bad gameplay as there are those that people blame on realism.

Flight sims don't sell worse than Quake because they're more realistic; it's that flight sims are less popular than FPS's. Using that logic, the most unrealistic and abstract games would sell the best, while Quake, being fairly based on reality, would sell quite poorly.

Thanks for pointing this out!

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If you're building an ultra-realistic simulator, then there really isn't very much demand for design in the first place: The universe has already designed the game for you and you just need to build the game around reality's specifications.

Very good point.

Isn't that how most games work? Take reality's specifications and tweak them? That's what I was saying, at least...

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Original post by Anonymous Poster
. . .I personally would like to see a game where you die by gunfire realistically. . .

It all depends on how the game plays out. If you just took ye olde Doom and dropped the player's health down so that the average zombie soldier could kill in one shot, the game would be nothing short of frustrating. If the gameplay was coherently designed to accomodate that danger in a fun and entertaining way, then it doesn't matter how lethal a single hit from the enemy is.

Realism does not need to be a factor in game design at all. Super Mario Brothers was not, by any stretch of the imagination, realistic. But it was still entertaining. Flight simulators go to great lengths at being realistic but they don't quite sell as well as Quake did.

A _GAME_ designer should always emphasise entertainment value. If you're building an ultra-realistic simulator, then there really isn't very much demand for design in the first place: The universe has already designed the game for you and you just need to build the game around reality's specifications.

Hmmm....

1) If you just took ye olde Doom and dropped the player's health down so that the average zombie soldier could kill in one shot, the game would be nothing short of frustrating - and it wouldn't be very realistic either. Zombies and one shot kills? That's far out. However, I've already said that by 'realism' I don't mean realism. Check the second post.

2) You play as a human in a world with gravity and you kill enemies to save your girlfriend from an evil dinosaur. It's impossible in reality - but that's because it's a bastardization of reality. It doesn't take a stretch of imagination to realize that even a relatively simple game (INFINITELY less complex than a game like Halo) like Super Mario Bros. DOES have alot in common with reality. Alot of it is in how you look at it. In any case, Super Mario Bros. IS similar to reality in many ways. Dinosaurs, lava, gravity, turf, pipes, plumbers - where did these come from? Something other than the real world? Even if Super Mario was as abstract as Tetris, you'd only be further proving that simpler games don't have to be as close to reality - a point I pupported myself. Complex games that assume something in common with reality (World of Warcraft, for instance, assumes many things considering the fact that the entire storyline is about fifteen pages long. There are theses that long about the behaivoir of individual subatomic particles - that hardly constitutes an in depth look at the inner workings of a world. In fact, all of the information that humankind has ever gained is insuficient to define a world - we don't even know everything about our own. It is assumed that the world of Azeroth exists in a universe where there is gravity, for instance. Furthermore, biological organisms can 'die', albeit with the modification that they turn into ghosts. However, this modification is stated in the game manual. The storyline is a list of specific events and the differences between our world and theirs, therein, there is no lecture on the parts of their world that are assumed to be the same as our world.) avoid being reduntant and time consuming by sparing you having to get ten college textbooks with each game you purchased and having you memorize the world from said books. Simple games can afford to detail every aspect of their much more limited world.

3) I agree. You need to empashize entertainment value. Realism is a neccesary part of this, as I explained in the first post. Building an ultra realistic simulator, while a type of realism, is not a very good solution. Let's look at the syllogism pulled from your argument:

SOME realism increases entertainment value
ALL ultra-realistic simulators are types of realism (Well, duh)
(Error 1)THEREFORE, ALL ultra realistic simulators increase entertainment value

IF ultra realistic simulators do not increase entertainment value
(Error 2)THEN realism doesn't work

This is a logical inversion. Only some realism increases entertainment value. Even though all ultra realistic simulators are realistic, they might not be part of the SOME realistic methods that increase entertainment value. Therfore, because ultra realistic simulators don't work (assuming this is true, anyway) doesn't mean that ALL methods of realism don't work. That's like saying that all black people are bad because some are in jail. Some are also humanitarians and some are also scholars. You can't logically draw that conclusion given the evidence.

Quote:Original post by Drethron
I personally would like to see a game where you die by gunfire realistically.

Would this include urinating on yourself, vomiting and/or paralysis? IRL, these are amazingly common outcomes to getting shot.

Quote:Original post by ishpeck
If you just took ye olde Doom and dropped the player's health down so that the average zombie soldier could kill in one shot, the game would be nothing short of frustrating.

IIRC, the US Marines were using Doom as a training tool in the 90s. You only had 10% health, and the goal was not fun, but to teach team tactics. So you're right, it would be very frustrating.

So Nytehauq, if a game must have "familiarity and some relation to the real world" in order to be fun, what about games like:

* Tempest, where you're ??? in a ??? shooting ???s?

* Qix, where you're a line, evading a big line and sparkling dots while trying to make boxes?

Quote:Original post by Nytehauq

Even the most 'abstract' of titles have lots in common.

Abstraction and realism are orthogonal. The essence of games is that they simplify reality, they offer a surrogate version of reality with vastly simpler rules, but, hopefully, capturing something of essence from reality. Eliminating the parts of reality that don't matter to expose those that do.

So we need both more abstraction and more realism.

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Seeing as the entire point was to focus on including realism to the correct degree, this is exactly the kind of post I'm rallying against. The stupidity of including sunburn in a game, for instance, does not lie in the fact that it's realistic - it lies in the fact that it's realistic but unnecesary for building a plausible and cohesive world and serves no purpose. Ironically enough, this post shouldn't even need a rebuttal - seeing as we both agree that too much realism defeats the purpose of playing a game and escaping reality. But you seem to puport that since too much realism is bad, the concept that some realism is good is false. Our arguments are aligned, but your argument doesn't support your claims.

Now hold on a minute! our arguments are aligned on purpose, I only approched it from a different angle and you want to rally against me for it?

What suggestions did I make? what claims? You are reading into my post far more than is intended.

My entire point has to do with the countless design threads on this board rallying behind more complex, even realistic, RPG sub-systems...from magic systems requireing players to gather, even make, ingredients for potions...to inventory management systems that realisticly portray what can be carried in a ginny sack...All of which doesn't seem to strike somepeople as potentialy bad design choices, hell such things seem encouraged around here as it makes those sub-systems "more complex and realistic". Which seems to be some sort of rallying cry around here. I was only trying to point out that such practices can be overkill as focusing on such small areas of the game makes one loose focus on the bigger gamedesign picture.