RGM-79N_GM_CUstom

I doubt it. We are a niche. If you need any proof just look at the direction Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six are taking. I wouldn't be surprised if the next SWAT game went down that path.

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RX-78-2 Gundam EFSF Protoype Close Combat Mobile Suit Armor: Luna Titanium Armament: 2x Beam Sabers, 2x 60mm Head vulcan guns 380mm Hyper bazooka, Beam Rifle, Beam Javelin, Hyper Hammer, Gundam Hammer, shield
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7th Infantry FTW!!!!!
"Snob? Nah...I consider myself more of a PC Evangelist...converting the heathens to The Way." Prophaniti
"Windows is like Pokemon you gotta catch'em all." kenshinsama1

Elwenil

Ghost Recon hasn't been realistic since the original and the Rainbow Six series lost it's credibility with Raven Shield. I don't know about SWAT, since I never played it, but I don't think I would like it. One of the things I hate about the Rainbow Six series is the fact that it has gone from a elite anti-terrorist force to a glorified SWAT team.

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RGM-79N_GM_CUstom

I think you misunderstood me.

I meant to say that I don't believe there are as many people that want realistic shooters as there are that want action games. I was using the current direction of R6/GR to show that we are a niche.

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RX-78-2 Gundam EFSF Protoype Close Combat Mobile Suit Armor: Luna Titanium Armament: 2x Beam Sabers, 2x 60mm Head vulcan guns 380mm Hyper bazooka, Beam Rifle, Beam Javelin, Hyper Hammer, Gundam Hammer, shield
TG Natural Selection admin. Need anything PM me.
7th Infantry FTW!!!!!
"Snob? Nah...I consider myself more of a PC Evangelist...converting the heathens to The Way." Prophaniti
"Windows is like Pokemon you gotta catch'em all." kenshinsama1

Elwenil

Sorry, I did understand you but the very thought of the direction the GR and R6 games has taken sets me off. You may be right judging by the kinds of games everyone is making but no matter what I play, I constantly hear people talking about modding a game to be more realistic so there has to be something to it that the game makers aren't getting.

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Long Bow

You make a very good point. I know I went and bought COD4 not because I really wanted it but because most of the TG guys were playing it at the time. I simply wanted to play with familiar faces. Now I ended up enjoying COD4 but I would bored with it by now if I played on other servers then TG. Sometimes the people make an unrealistic game play truer to life then modding a realistic game with idiots for players.

Elwenil

Exactly, I bought CoD4 for the single player game really. It's a really great story and is like being in an action movie, but I knew from past experience with the CoD series that the online multiplayer would be a fast paced spam-fest. I played it online for a few weeks and only played the "Headquarters" mode but finally had enough after a match on the map of the incredibly small fenced in yard full of shipping containers. Whatever jackass created that map deserves a vacation in hell.

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westyfield

[sarcasm]No way! That map rocks on an FF: off, deathmatch server![/sarcasm]

Average life expectancy is about 1.5 seconds.

I agree, most game developers don't think of the people who want to play an uber-realistic game. Take the example of EA, talking about BF: Heroes, one person said something like "We wanted to make a fun game, as many people thought that BF2 and BF2142 were too slow paced and tactical, and they thought that the rounds went on too long."

What?!?!

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Strag

A group of us are playing CoD2 again (TG style); join us on Wednesday nights for some games. Because of our server mods, I can guarantee you it won't be a fast paced spam fest. Just watch out for Long Bow when he's using the sniper rifle.

Bamboo

Sad truth and bottom line is that with the industry the way it is (big company at the top buying up all the little guys) there are just about only going to be games centered on the average gamer, so they can sell sell sell as many copies as they can. Part of this is due to the millions of $$$$$$$ it takes to put out a game now, and partly because EA/UBI are in it for the money, not the gamer.
Remember back to my statistics class in college, I think a bell curve would be a good way to demonstrate this.
So I wipped this up real quick: (picture seems to be loading slow)



I added the games in where I felt they fit, you may feel different. Didn't even feel like wasting my time putting crapfests like quake/unreal/counterstrike in because they don't even belong in a conversation like this.

A bunch of us like El and myself are in the upper reaches, but have to rely on small companies like Bohemia Interactive to put out nitch games like ARMA to satisfy our needs. If B.I. gets bought out buy UBI or EA, expect ARMA2 to be noobed down so that they can sell to the average kid on the street and make them happy.

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Uranium - 235

It's true games cost more to develop, but it's an artificial amount of money they put into it. Publishers like to push graphics and eyecandy above anything else, and artists are the biggest expense in a game. It's a Catch 22. However, don't think that game development costs come even CLOSE to that of a Hollywood movie. A 'huge budget' to a video game would be around $5 million, and that's pretty much the 'Waterworld' of video games.

Secondly, games are EXPENSIVE. $50 a pop ($60 if you're a console noob) can EASILY cover a game's overhead with less than half a million sales. The complaining about how much a game costs is a purely fictional one, similar to the complaints about piacy to justify poor game sales. A game doesn't need to sell a million copies to make the publisher filthy rich. Sure, there's a lot of expenses, but just 500,000 sales of a $50 game is 25 MILLION dollars, far more than any game has cost to develop to date. If they just pocket a fraction of that after everyone takes the cut and they pay off the box (keep in mind digital distribution has near-zero overhead - it's almost all profit), that's still several million dollars.

Fact: There's a LOT of gamers who don't like dumbed-down moronic games without learning curves.
Fact: You don't need ridiculous graphics of excess to sell a game to this group.
Fact: If you make a good game, it will sell. Piracy is an overblown myth.

There's almost no publishers who actually care about this, and we just get more and more schlock for the console tard crowd. Games have declined in quality inarguably since 2002 when the Xbox proved that there was a market in 'frat boys'.

Bamboo

I'm sorry, but you are way off in how much it costs to produce a block buster kind of game.
Estimates for Crysis are over $25 million, and you have to think, this was in development for about 5 years, and has to be supported for a couple of years with patches, maybe bonus content, and then you have marketing, which for a world wide release is extremely expensive.

This is a recent article about what it would take to dethrone W.O.W at the moment
WoW Killer Would Cost A Billion
"Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has some words of discouragement for you. According to the big boss, even attempting to take on WoW would set you back anywhere between $500 million and $1 billion dollars, and even once you've scraped together the cash there's still a chance you'd fail."

I will say you are spot on with the Xbox frat comment, but all publishers have now fallen into that trap, with their constant PS3/360/Wii tri-release games.

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Tarenth

Ahh, but a conversation about MMORPG development costs are much different than FPS development costs. MMORPGs have to have consistant support staff to deal with problems in game as well as develop a very large world with dialogue, story, and far more digital design than any FPS in the game.

Lets look at a standard FPS and their weapon mapping. Okay...you might have 10-12 guns. Lets look at WoW. You have 8 classes of weapons with over 200 different skins for each class. You also have to change the way the weapon is held between different races/factions unlike most FPS games where everyone holds the same weapon the same way. Then you have animation and the need to continously create new content and constant stream of patches to add to and improve the current would. WoW-TBC is just about twice, if not three times, the size in terms of content as WoW was on release.

On the FPS side a 'large content patch' would be a few new MP maps for people to play on. If you wanted to add more to the story or gameplay element side then you release an expansion and rake in more cash.

You can't honestly tell me that BF2 or BF2142 has a larger overhead and DEVELOPER BASED EXPANSION than a MMORPG like WoW. That's just be silly. If Bf2142 had a development routine like a MMORPG then we'd be able to drive walkers and tank platoons cross country to beseige a UCB 100 miles across frozen Germany.


As for FPS game realism, I think someone else mentioned it best. There are a lot of people who are gamers and people, for the most part, are stupid. Take a game like Day of Defeat (not source) and you see both sides have 6-7 different guns that each handle a different way. Gamers used about 3-4 of those guns tops. Not because they were more real, but they were the best guns for that side and that role. Why use a grease gun which has marginally better accuracy, lower damage, and lower RoF when you can use a Thompson for with its similar accuracy, higher damage, and higher RoF? Why pick up the automatic german rifle which was similar to the SSgt Carbine when you could be a grenadier and have a 1-shot kill rifle? Was the MG with only 75 bullets EVER used when you had the MG42 with its 200 round belt and higher RoF?

I may play a lot of FPS games, but if you gave me two different assault rifles I wouldn't be able to tell you the differences between them. As long as they shoot at the enemy and act somewhat 'assalt rifleish' then that's good enough for me.

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Long Bow

I read an article in the last few months that really opened my eyes to how much it costs to really build a game. If going from scratch, i.e. building a new engine, it can cost 60 million for an average game The amount of sales to offset costs alone has to be huge. Second games have stayed at about the same price for a long time now, $50. I can't remember when games cost much less then that?

I'm not trying to show sympathy for big game developers but if we want realism in games we need to be realistic about the costs invovled to make them. A company can't just go bust to make a great game that is super realistic. They need to survive and profit to continue.

I think the only reason B.I. is able to bring out Arma is because I believe the software is also used by the military, military contract would be fairly lucrative?

Elwenil

I like ArmA and I am now just getting into really playing it, but I Googled around quite a bit and honestly, I haven't seen anything about the military using it. The characters in the game are US Army, and the US Army really doesn't have much need for a video simulation when they themselves make America's Army.

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SmokingTarpan

One of the major problems that I see is that a sizable amount of people seem to think there's only one level of realism: full tilt, the only thing separating this from actual combat is that you don't die in reality when you get shot. I think that there's multiple levels of realism, and many can be enjoyable once you throw in people that are mature and have a tactical approach to things (ie TG players).

Take for example BF2. We can all agree that vanilla BF2 was basically an enhanced action shooter, designed to be fast, fun and "epic". Now you throw 64 TG players onto vBF2. The bunny-hopping and the majority of "lame" play goes away, squads follow orders and use tactics; it's no longer just an, "I'm gonna run out there as fast as I can and hope I get a frag or two before I respawn," game. Essentially, a level of realism. Then we decided that we wanted to slow things down some and make it possible to really use tactics and maneuvers, so we created TacMod. Now people only take 2-3 bullets to be killed instead of 10-20, radar/UAV/etc are removed so that combat maneuvers can actually be put into play, a small host of other features. This was pretty perfect, in my mind; could maybe use a few tweaks here or there, but the level of "realism" was good.

Then comes PR, and it killed BF2 for me. Now there's dozens of classes that are restrictive and that don't necessarily match up between factions, a ton of weaponry and equipment, building of fortifications... It's just too complicated for someone who wants something more realistic than having to shoot someone 20 times to kill them, but less realistic than needing to fill out forms in triplicate for his helmet.

Silly but fun games like TF2 aside, I think the level of realism in a game is more determined by the approach of the players and their community rather than by chewing up a game to the point that you can even get virtual papercuts. I think there are far more gamers out there looking for "realism" in the form of smacktard-free play rather than games that are near-100% accurate to real life. And that's where communities like ours step in to help. We're TacticalGamer, not RealityGamer; we should be able to play any game in the TG fashion, even if our weapons are shotguns that shoot nuclear bees.

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