The most important question to ask when considering realism is "What does it add to the experience?" If the answer is "nothing" or "minor inconvenience/annoyance" then I would say it's best not to include that. For me, realism is most important in terms of world building, having things behave in natural ways and look as they would in real life. Immersion is everything, and the more realistic the things before you appear, the less likely you are to be taken out of the experience.
Yea but for me world building and what things look still depend on the genre..maybe graphics or something like that, then probably yes, while still having a fun & enjoyable gameplay
tl;dr Even outside of gameplay functions realism could be a hinderance narratively. I personally feel like there’s a good separation point between realism and believability. With current trends in gaming things have strived so much for realism that it’s gradually constricted just how much the medium can really express itself. Disco Elysium is a game that takes liberties with the artstyle but is able to convey much more to the player through its world building because of it. Early on there’s a statue you see suspended in large chunks by simple rebar poles. Obviously from looking at it the thing should topple over at any second but the game goes into detail about how the statue ended up being destroyed due to social conflicts only for some pretentious artsy types to rebuild it in a way that looks like it’s exploding off into different directions. I feel more immersed in the world with the knowledge rather than if it were just having a poorly repaired realistic statue with some subdued additions.
"Too much realism" is when it starts to detract from the experience. Games are meant to be fun. So mechanics should be fun, or at least engaging/fulfilling. They should not be there simply to be there or at worst, to be annoying. Realism can go far in certain genres like RPG's. For example, in Fallout 4's "Survival" difficulty, you have to eat, drink and sleep regularly or suffer stat penalties/death. This adds to the experience because it makes all the food, drink and beds you encounter in the game not 100% pointless (Since outside of these you can just heal with the millions of Stimpacks you can accrue and you can pass time by literally just standing around with the Wait function...) Meanwhile, things like limited inventory space in things like ARPG's, is just annoying. All it adds to the game is annoyance where you have to go back to town repeatedly to sell your junk (And/or get loot filter mods to let you ignore all the junk) So yeah, realism can add depth to a game and can make certain mechanics more engaging and should be used to make more cohesive and interesting games. But games developers need to always keep in mind "What does this add to the game?" which, to be honest, is also a good thing to keep in mind when looking at any part of game design. Far too often there are mechanics in games that simply don't add anything to the experience and are simply something annoying that players have to deal with.
There's a point where "realism" can actually highlight that what you're doing isn't real. If you had 100% virtual reality, it might be fine to have to put up with that ... but when you still have a screen and controller, it doesn't really help
Imagine if Activision decided to make a game set in The Civil War, but they actually went full on realism. 🤣 Shoot reload for 2 minutes shoot again, exciting Gameplay right there
The food/sleep aspect is missing in a lot of games imo. The elder scrolls fe have a ton of houses, hotels, inns, tents and a bunch of different drinks and food....and it's all basically unnecessary. You can win the games without eating or sleeping once. Just have your character require sleep and food after some time and reduce first stamina and later health if the need isn't fulfilled. It would raise the stakes, make tze game feel more real and it would use the whole infrastructure that's there already
That's funny since the realistic aspects of videogames are mostly shallow and inconsistent. For example a fps using actual projectiles instead of hitscan only determines whether or not you have to lead a target at range, depending on how clean the hit detection is. So basically the more complicated programming makes no difference 95% of the time, and 5% of the time you just aim an inch ahead of the guy.
@@dandre3K It's a little more complicated than that, for me, more realistic shooters have additional things like making you feel more weighty or having heavier feeling animations. It's never really as simple as aiming the gun slightly in front of the enemy, there's usually more recoil and stuff, or even gun jams like Tarkov. Having small stuff like this can add to the immersion in a way and some people like to play more realistic games. They're slower and methodical. I mean why do people play games like Truck Simulator. There's a market for games like this.
@@dandre3K that's only true if you are basically in melee 95% of the time and only a few dozens of meters off for the remaining 5%, which is quite frankly not the norm. Games that have normal maps where you can actually shoot things at range will actually reward people for minding distance drop and also leading isn't just "one inch" but can vary on the enemy speed.
Yup. It's always nice when logic is present in place of "video game logic". This was one of the things that made me transition from console games to PC games, and it's not the realism most people here are thinking. I couldn't stand having invisible walls everywhere preventing you from getting off the beaten path to any degree, 95% of doors not working, not being able to shoot through normal glass, or Resident Evil's "puzzles" that revolve around not being able to make like a 3 foot jump in the library. PC games with actual physics and designed around the principle of being able to go where you should be able to go won me over and I never looked back.
@@boredgunner that's really not a pc Vs console thing, just video games being able to do more as over time with more computing power. So many games run on both these days
I think Kingdom Come Deliverance nailed the perfect amount of realism. You gotta eat and sleep once in a while or you lose energy and your combat/stamina takes a hit. Your weapon requires occasional repair/sharpening after combat and you actually see the edge damage on the blades, which you can repair for free on grinding stones. Stuff that can be easily managed with some planning ahead of time, while giving you the freedom to roam around without resupply for weeks in game if you pack your saddlebags appropriately. The enemies even carry necessary supplies that are themed on their culture/profession. A poor bandit will have lots of cheap booze and some bread or uncooked vegetables, while the Cumans will have dried meats and fruits for travel, as they've marched for weeks or months to get where they are. Rich or high class bandits such as the Robber Barons will have fresh meats, fine wines and even the occasional bowl of soup/stew on him. The Cumans and higher status bandits will also usually have repair kits for their armor or weapons that you can loot.
I was going to bring up KCD as well, with one exception. I found it to be too tedious to make potions and after the first playthrough I just bought them. Maybe if you had to make, say, 5 or 10 of each potion and after that could make them automatically it would suit my level of patience better.
Well, it was meant to be a more realistic game..many other games are in different genres so that amount of realism aren't needed at all..in fact, it would make the game dull & boring, and put you completely out of the experience
Kingdom Come Deliverance was tedious with some of the silly realism they focused on instead of improving key game mechanics or writing a story. The "being dirty", "sleep" and "hunger" mechanics were nothing more than nagging at you and really offered nothing to the game. I modded them out after the first hour of game play. I just wish instead of working on those mechanics, they'd made combat into something more than a quick time event or had put a little more thought into the horseback riding.
I mostly agree, though I think KCD needs more realistic horse gameplay - a real horse AI and bonding, more NPCs on horses, horse thieves and horses running away if not tied down. RDR 2 is better in this regard.
Realism and story should reinforce the gameplay. Something interesting that Gears of War did is that it makes reloading weapons fun, because sitting in cover while waiting for the reload animation to end would be boring, so they decided to add reload cancelling which gave a damage increase. Game Maker’s Toolkit also talked about how dialogue options have the problems of very little involvement or thought placed into it.
I agree to realism and story should enforce gameplay but then you said reload is tedious. Reload is a core mechanic. You are the most invulnerable during reload animation so that you have to mind your positioning. I guess if you want super high octane gunblazing action, even the act of reloading might feel tedious to you. But for most cases, they are already the integral part of any shooter mechanic. Unless you are talking about a game that has ridiculously long reloading animation, which thankfully i haven't encountered any.
@@snowmanleblanc6053 You’re actually VERY vulnerable while reloading, because you have to move your eyes to the top right of the screen to time the reload correctly. If you screw up the timing, your weapon becomes jammed increasing the reload time.
@@snowmanleblanc6053 The intention was the make reloading an engaging part of the gameplay, and not thoughtless, so it became another layer of danger. A great example of the same idea is in VR shooters. Many of them require you to manually eject your magazine, grab a new one, put it into the gun and cock the slide. If its a bolt action gun you'll also need to cock each new shot in as well. In games like Hotdogs Horshoes and Handgrenades, the interaction leniency for all these things is not very large, so you are forced to pay attention to the gun itself. This is why a lot of people like VR shooters, because it gives a lot of engaging gameplay based around your motion controls. A non-VR version of this is the game Reciever and its sequel. Both are extremely engaging games and I highly reccomend them.
I feel like it depends on what you are trying to do and what your audience is. Like, do you want to create super detailed simulation or do you want to use your game as a means to convey your setting and story? At what point does attention to detail become obsession? As far as storytelling goes, I think realism is good for as long as it adds to your enjoyment of the game and affects your choices rather than just being a bunch of chores to keep track of. A personal favourite of mine in that regard is Kenshi, a post-apocalyptic fantasy survival RPG that basically plays like the stoner offspring of Mount&Blade and the first Fallout games. Kenshi combat isn't neccessarily super realistic in every regard, but it pays attention to detail. Say, if your armour is an assymetric piece of garbage that only covers one leg, then the other leg is unprotected. Unprotected legs don't take kindly to abuse. If it gets abused too much, it will fall off. If you lose a leg, walking becomes a tad difficult, so you need prosthetics. Proper prosthetics that allow your to walk properly are expensive and rare. If one of the major factions catches you wearing a robot leg, they will assume that you are one of the mechanical minions of the evil daemoness that opposes their god and thus they will attack you on sight. In other words: Because the game pays attention to detail, making poor choices about your equipment can have major narrative consequences, all the way towards an all-out war with a major faction. That's an interesting degree of realism, where most games will simply pretend like losing a limb is something that doesn't happen to player characters and also just slap a static defense value onto your character. At the same time, the kind of realism where your player character will get constipated if they don't eat a balanced diet would probably go overboard.
I think there are other games that have that too (losing limbs) But it''s not a bad thing though if losing a limb is something that doesn't happen to the player's character in the game..just the game's mechanics to make it simpler & less hard. I would prefer it..in many cases, losing limbs feature would just simply make it more frustating & less fun
It also works if it uses realism to reinforce a theme or idea, like games that are anti-war are often hurt by having the combat be too fun and making it more realistic is the easiest way to make it less fun, it all depends on what the game wants to achieve
@@jonnysac77 actually, games are made for people to have fun..so idk with "too fun", that's actually an advantage. Making it more realistic & less fun would make the game more boring.
@@caesar7786 if being boring and miserable is the point, than it should be boring and making it fun would actually make it worse at acheiving it's point, most games are made to be fun so I agree that most of the time realism hurts the experience but there is room for art that doesn't try to be fun
Regarding weapon durability: I think Mount & Blade did this just fine, where the weapons are indestructible, but the shields have a limited durability during the battles (they get an instant repair after every fight). That way you get the fun of smashing shields with your giant two handed axe or, if the odds are working against you, you suddenly have to defend yourself with your one handed sidearm if your shield gets hacked into pieces by the enemy.
I personally would add a weapon break mechanic as well. It can nerf the mounted lances in a quite realistic way. Though this durability of the weapon could be bind to characters skill with the weapon, so as your character grow more skillful, he learns how to save his weapon's edge)))
Btw your shield can get weaker or break if it gets destroyed often also your horse can get lame and if you ride the lame horse and your horse dies it actually dies and removed from your inventory.
Realism, just like suspension of disbelief is not a single entity. You can have realism in one aspect (like how weapons handle) and no realism at all in another aspect (like how quickly you heal from wounds). The same way you may be able to suspend your disbelief when it comes to magic, but not when it comes to physics. And this also differs from person to person. So wanting more or less realism by itself doesn't mean much without specifying what kind of realism and why.
Well, DOOM says fuck it and allows you to shoot without the need of reloading. Reloading isn't fun, blowing shit up is. Videogames are supposed to be fun, when realism gets in the way of it then realism be damned.
@@andregon4366 Not going to disagree that video games should be fun. What people find fun however is subjective. Some people enjoy a bit more realism and immersion in their games. There's a huge market for a ton of different types of games. Just play what you enjoy.
There's at least two types of realism: realism on what is depicted (think graphics, animation, your character appearing wet when you enter water, that kind of attention to detail) which can be nice to have, and realism on the game mechanics. The more realistic the mechanics are, the more you go into simulator territory, which can be fun in its own right but it's a different experience.
Regarding eating/healing, I think that out of all games, Minecraft handles that pretty well. It's not that food=HP, but rather it's your organism needs nutrients to get energy to heal itself naturally. Which interestingly enough, in a way, is the most realistic "healing by food" system out there.
I would really honestly like to see him do a video series where she's his co-host. I imagine that this is same reason they got married: they're just perfect compliments to each other.
I think it depends entirely on the purpose of your game or fiction. Sometimes making things much more realistic, even brutally so, can be used effectively to get a player or reader to have a more genuine emotional reaction. I would point to the Bloody Baron quest in the Witcher 3 as a prime example. It hits so much harder because of how realistic the scenario is, even with fantasy woven in. It would not work as well otherwise. Now, as far as minor details are concerned, I also think this entirely relates to what your goal as the video game designer/developer or author is. Take the horse balls in RDR2. If your goal is to just make a fun western game with good gameplay, that kind of detail is unimportant. If you're trying to make a game where the goal is to make the player feel like they're in the old west, that kind of detail suddenly becomes important. It's something that you would see and expect to see if you were really there. It's not something that should ever be highlighted, but it's a part of the reality of the situation. RDR2 does it's best to build player investment by making the world feel as close to real and alive as possible. Every detail is in service to that purpose. Now, if say, Borderlands started to bring that stuff in for any reason other than the sake of satire, I would think it was weird because Borderlands isn't intended to be some kind of hyper realistic game series - it's comedic, satirical. But, if they wanted to include super realistic details to make fun of something like RDR2 it would serve the purpose of the game to do so. The overall point is this - every detail and the level of realism should be dictated by the purpose of your game or story. If being hyper realistic benefits your game or story, then no detail is too far. If it doesn't, then the same writing/design rule of old applies - do not dedicate any time to something that does not matter.
after playing hitman i came up with the "good enough" theory for realism. in the game the characters pats himself down while the dishuise teleports onto him. it convets the idea without taking too long and being intrusive to gameplay. as for sharpening, dark souls 3 has a weapon who's skill is to sharpen the blade for the next few attacks. i think it's done well there.
The AI in hitman is also very stupid, therefore easy to manipulate. I choose to see it as an extension of 47's view of the world and his job. He's a professional killer willing to do what needs done, and tends to know how and when to do it. Being that he's so far removed from the average person, he likely sees normal functioning people as, well, stupid and easy to manipulate. Who cares if it's an awkward social interaction? It keeps their eyes off of the dude I just killed! Although, it's a bit stupid when you literally just bump into your target's bodyguard for 10 minutes and the target just... walks off without them.
@@DopaminedotSeek3rcolonthree Or when billionaire stops his routine to pickup a single coin. But the bumping into someone was one of few things that seemed way to cheesy, I expected that after 2-3 tries armed npc goes hostile or civilian runs away. I was very surprised when in one mission the bodyguard calls my bullshit and does a background check on my disguise - one of many jokes from the devs.
just as general statement: It completely depends. Sometimes I wish some stuff was more realistic (for example, using RDRII since it was mentioned, the guns there: The stats are rather arbitrarily for game balancing... I'd prefer it if the Cattleman, a CSAA with .45 long colt was slow and powerful... rather than a weak, fast gun, when the fucking Volcanic pistol pea shooter is one of hte most powerful pistols in the game!) It's always the question of: What does the game want to be. Does the realism add atmosphere or a nice addition or does it just get int he way? Is it hte only thing "realistic" for the game, or is there other stuff? What personally semi-annoys me is, when the try hards enter such talk and it goes: "X should be changed and made more realistic to be harder! However food should still only fill you up for 5 minutes and it should spoil in 10 minutes, so that the game isn't that easy!" Imho that "10 hits and your blade is trash" durability nonsense is basically in the same "Look how hardcore we are!!!" difficulty realism game balancing bullshit i just mentioned. It's in those games to add 1) "difficulty" and 2) Force the player to swap weapons or constantly repair them, potentially costing the player money and/or items. "There are still areas that are completely empty! Who wants that?" Me... to an extent. Going with the RDR Example: It's still meant to be a frontier area for the most part... but the amount of people you run into in 5 minutes (/Hold ups etc.) at times makes it feel far more eastern than it should be^^ As much as i loath both games, World of Tanks and (old) War Thunder (before the cold war craze) showed a nice contrast of "pure Arcade" VS "Attempts at realism". Or games like Rising Storm/Red Orchestra and Squads and that like VS CoD and Battlefield
@@chumuheha 1) New Austin is on the map and that was, as per John in RDRI, an area the gang actually wanted to get to because it was still quite lawless. 2) The Heartlands (and even the Grizzlies) ARE frontier, however civilization is creeping in. There is also the dispute if Dutch ever truly wanted to "get out", because he rejoiced too mich in the outlaw life.
@@undertakernumberone1 Regarding Dutch's desire to leave, I think its both. You have the part of of Dutch that genuinely cares for those under his wing, and wants to act like a leader and father to them, fighting against his other desire for personal glory, and rebellious heroism against the "change" that civilization is pushing into his world. And personally, i don't feel as if the realism in the red dead series is misplaced or hurts the games at all, from having to manually cock weapons after each shot to the "empty areas" I only ever felt like those aspects made the experience more immersive (though i do admit i wish they had added a few options for the crafting, specifically when crafting split point ammo, i wouldn't have minded the ability to make it in batches of say, 10 or so).
I like the meta idea of integrating gameplay mechanics with the story & lore, like how Dead Space integrated its health bar into the armor as an-universe way of characters being able to gauge each other’s medical status. Or the way Metro 2033 replaces the objective screen with an in-game journal that Artyom updates in marker ink. Basically, the video game concepts we take for granted as “just being game items that NPCs don’t know the existence of and never talk about” end up being actual parts of the world. It makes the world feel more real and immersive IMO.
I think there's a relevant distinction to be made between realism in details (attempting to simulate as many specific aspects of the experience as possible. Hunger meters, extensive walking distances, etc.) and realism in outcome. You can have a very mechanically simplistic system, like many table-top RPGs, that don't attempt to mechanically simulate the minutia of the experience represented but nevertheless balance options and concerns that encourage realistic outcomes. You might not have a hunger meter, but have a simple procedure of deducting a ration every adventuring day, achieves the same basic desired outcome.
Accuracy to "real world" is nowhere near as important as believability within the setting, and consistency with theme, style etc. Real-world based simulationism is rarely the way to go, especially for TTRPGs. A degree of abstration is not only useful, it's necessary, and style is an important part of any fiction. Walking down a corridor in a building would be a very different sequence in a Hitman game, a John Wick movie, and a military thriller, and it's all down to style, realism isn't really essential here. People who fly the "unrealistic=bad" are frustrating, because it often feels like they are deliberately missing many points just to rant about realism. I appreciate that you always use even the silly and unrealistic stuff as a good starting point for some good-natured education.
Realism doesn’t matter at all, immersion matters a ton. If I’m a magic medieval knight fighting dragons, I won’t question the physics of my spells, but my immersion will be shattered if I whip out an AK. We play video games so that we can get a power fantasy without any of the tradeoffs of real life, and it feels like games frequently forget this. It made red dead 2 feel tedious to me, and makes cod worse since they added mechanics like bullet drop, slow handling weapons, and a shit ton of visual clutter that increase realism while making gunplay suck.
I WILL question the physics of my spells - if they go against established rules. If the setting says magic of X calibre can only do Y, then it should not be violated. Like, using D&D, a 3rd circle transmutation should not give equivalent results to an Epic Spell. Likewise, if magical armour requires X to beat, you shouldn't break that. Like, DR/+4 should require a +4 EB weapon to pierce, otherwise it soaks damage and whatnot.
@@runakovacs4759 never been a fan of DnD or ultra-hardcore realism in fantasy... If i can throw fire of my hands , don't tell me what can and can't be done . Period
@@Dan_Kanerva That takes me out of the setting. It should be internally consistent, where the rules are never broken - at worst, expanded upon. There can exist rules that SEEM to be broken, but only as long as those rules are just misunderstandings by the character and actually make sense in the greater scheme of things. Like - Mercury's orbit breaks the rules of physics (according to Newtonian Physics), but if you actually expand your definitions in an internally self-consistent manner, it doesn't break physics actually (Einsteinian physics).
@@runakovacs4759 it doesnt seem to break any physics... the sun makes planets go wee wee around it and Mercury does just that. But i agree with you on not breaking stablished rules... i would be upset if Superman was invulnerable to Kriptonite
@@Dan_Kanerva I've had a DM before that absurdly broke estabilished rules. There's a spell that can heal a master swordsman snipping your tendons/ligaments, tearing your muscle fibers with critical hits. It takes multiple casts, maybe multiple days of treatment. But, it will restore you 100% with zero loss of functionality, zero lingering pain, anything. DM came along, asked the party's archer to make a strength check to hold onto the ship's railings during a storm. She passed it with critical success. DM? Ruled that by holding on, she tore her muscles off her bone. The spell from earlier? did 0 help. The spell's super powered variant that heals even internal organ damage, fixes injuries sustained by the very soul, and practically restores you to your best state physically (minus regrowing missing limbs)? Did nothing. The spell that regrows missing limbs? Did nothing. DM just wanted to ruin us because we would have won the encounter without losses.
Realistic COD game: Stand sentry for 14 hours. Walk 20 miles, get a radio call, turn around and walk back. Drive in a convoy for 8 hours, get blown up by an IED you never saw. You have no legs now, and can buy the new DLC: Fighting the VA where you fill out paperwork over and over until you rage quit.
If it gets in the way of gameplay is when it gets annoying and feels like it shouldn’t be there in RDR2 you have to repeatedly go through animations in order to do basic stuff like buying things and crafting I found that I never used special ammo just because of me having to go through the tedious animation multiple times just to get the max amount
@@aaronsmith4940 I do too and a way to fix that would be to just allow items to be made in bulk instead of just individually and to lessen the time of the animations or even just skip them outright
Probably wouldn't be tedious if the animation is tied to gameplay. Like, what if you have to do a certain minigame to do those activities correctly? Rockstar did this well with Bully where every class you take is basically a bunch of minigames.
@@aaronsmith4940 You're not weird, you just have patience and an attention span longer than 6 seconds. People are pathetic and need instant stupid dopamine, the TikTok generation. If you complain about RDR2 it's not for you. Stop trying to change something that was never meant for you.
One of the stripes of the rainbow jalapeño on She-Skall's sweatshirt is picked up on the green screen. I generally hate durability too, but enjoyed in in Breath of the Wild. Once you embrace it you can actually make it work for you unlike other games where it is purely detrimental.
This was a good topic to get into. Since too much realism kills the escapism that is entertainment. If you want actual realism in your games, taxes on every purchase would make you feel pain.
I can understand the desire for realism on something that's supposed to provide an authentic experience to something in real-life. Like people wanting realistic bullet drop in games, or a fighter jet simulation that isn't simplified and instead tries to mirror the real experience of flying a jet. I don't get the people that just want tedium in their games, like no fast travel over a vast world. Unless it's a survival game that's deliberately trying to simulate navigating in the woods with map and compass, then I just see the reason for just wasting people's time.
There's a simple reason why you wouldn't wanna fast travel in Skyrim Immersion!! Fast travel breaks immersion and takes away the need to plan ahead for your journey. It also means you wont run into the 100s of map markers which is part of Skyrim's fun It also for me makes quests feel like a chore where i simply do the "go here get this complete" thing. Like what's the point of a fantasy adventure if I'm not adventuring lol On top of this the games before oblivion where kind of simulators
@@chrisnorris3641 Because travelling is fun in Skyrim. If travelling isn't fun in a game, then travelling shouldn't be part of that game at all. Instead you can have the player select a fun part to play without pretending that the world exists outside of the game areas, or just railroad them.
It strongly depends on the game whether travelling is a waste of time. If travel isn't fun, it should either not exist or be skipable. Personally I am annoyed by two too common things in games: Boring travel (i.e. anything with a "go there" part to a quest) and boring looting. I don't want to open 100 urns for a 0.1% chance at a set item, I want looting to be interesting in itself. TES:Online did it quite well for an MMO where you only find very specific items in certain types of containers, so there's no need to open urns unless you need those specific items.
@@bramvanduijn8086 I usually do travel from 1 town to the next since you have to anyway, but to return to places Ive already been I'll just fast travel. Why not?
You made a number of good points I agree with. I don't care for a lot of realism in games. Games are meant to be fun and an escape from reality, adding too much realism ruins that immersion. I like Skyrim's systems and don't want the bowel movement thing though is an entertaining idea.
The only game I can point out that nailed realism is KCD, like it's the only game I can think of where taking care of myself and my clothes actually affects gameplay, riding on a horse is more than faster transportation, like it prevents you from actively running through mud and feces, hunger makes sense and isn't too in the way, crafting, brewing and sharpening takes actual skill and time, I find that immensely immersive.
I agree, durability mechanics aswel as "needs" suck because they don't really make sense how they are implimented like, having to eat every five seconds because arbitrary time speedup bull. Great vid, back scabbards are cool and have a great day.
Still, it really depends on game. Open world adventure game? Keep it out. Though something like Mount and blade, where you have "separate" battle locations and your weapons would wear during fights but automaticly restored between them, it is is completely sound game mechanic. Then you can have some overly realistic, say, mercenary simulator strategy, where managing resources to repair arms and armor, feeding and paying your company is a core mechanic. Lastly, we have famous Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. It is beyond boring to level the Smithing skill in Skyrim, but it is as well a MASSIVE way to improve your character. If they didn't take away the equipment-breaking mechanics from previous games - it would be a way to constantly advance in this skill instead of making thousands of daggers and hundreds of dwemer bows. And on the previous game, Oblivion, as you can't make your own items or improve those you have, the repair mechanic is boring and tedious.
@@dilen754 I think smithing could be done better in general without a repair function or at the least have the repair function be different than just outright breaking, maybe having blades get blunt and doing less damage but still be usable. Smikthing could be more involved and be more like say fallout 4 where you do specific things like adding langets to polearms or adding a nagel. Things that dont outright make weapons op. Like shad said in his vid, damage in games is already not realistic so in a better damage system smithing could be more like designing a weapon and forging the metal to have better edge retention.
@@devanpretorius451 I personally think the same way, it was just an example of how you can make the smithing skill less boring in that particular game with minimum efforts. Personally I love the "modular" version more as well.
The uncanny valley is kinesthetic as well as visual. The closer a game edges towards realism, the more unconsciously inclined a person is to use real world logic instead of game logic. When the game inevitably responds negatively to this, the player's connection to the experience is permanently damaged. It's even worse when the game covers subject matter you're familiar with. Survival games are frequent offenders; "Look Bill, this abandoned shed we cleared of zombies and looted three days ago is full of gardening tools again! What luck for zombie survivalists like ourselves! We can put these hoes, rakes, watering cans, and whatnot in our Loot Scrapping Machine, recast the assorted metal bits into high-grade alloy ingots in our solar powered crucible, and fashion high-tech automatic defense turrets to protect our hideout from other survivalists! Then we can loot their corpses for food! Here, Bill, put this pitchfork in your wooden backpack while I spend six minutes individually reloading each of my obsessively-detailed-and-textured Thomson SMG drum magazines one bullet at a time. "You know, I feel like my vitamin B6 and leucine levels might have dropped a bit in the fifteen minutes since I last ate. I should probably eat that bacon and eggs I made and stuck in my pocket yesterday using ingredients I found in our rodent traps and pigeon nests. It was just about to go rotten anyway." Tragically, Bill and his friend were killed the next day by a zombified Hooters waitress when momentarily distracted by a Colt 1851 Navy revolver w/ ACOG sight they had found in a cake shop.
Kingdom Come Deliverance did weapon maintenance well in my view. If your sword was damaged, you didn't bash it with a hammer. You took it to a grinding wheel, and there was even a mini game involved where you would grind the sword at a perfect angle to get the right amount of sparks instead of smoke to repair the edge. It made you feel invested in the maintenance in a good way.
There is a balance that is needed but I think having optional survival modes like in skyrim anniversary or fallout games works well turn it on if you want it, and off if it gets annoying. Options are king in RDR2 they should have had a skip animations you have seen before option. Added note many of the players skin with there horse on the animal to skip animations, after you have seen the realism for the thousanth time some people don't have all day to watch animations over and over and over as they only have a couple hours to play. More options is always better I didn't mind the animations in RDR2 but it can get tedious for many.
@@simonrockstream care to explain why players shouldn't have control over the level of realism in a game? I should clarify that I didn't literally mean a slider
@@metalman6698 I just don't remember any realism being annoying in red dead. What do you want to skip? The skinning animations? That just seems like a lot of work to make an animation light option to please a few people.
@@jamesfitzgerald1684 tbh I wasn't referring to RDR2. I was really referring more to survival games, or like in some Bethesda games where you can add in survival elements if you want them.
i felt the thirsty/hungry thing. But theres a really good and realistic game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and your hunger meter is really just your stomach capacity meter so it goes down quickly but you can actually survive for really long times without eating or drinking, only suffering some stat drawbacks if it goes on too long, what it does have a problem with though is your armour overheating you
what about Minecraft ? I find epic how humans in Minecraft can regenerate if they don't feel hungry... No magic needed , just a biological miracle . I get stabbed and i am about to die ? then eat , you wont be instantly healed like Skyrim . But you will start to regen like Wolverine
C:DDA really picks and chooses its realism. On one hand you have the survival mechanics, vehicle physics, individual pockets and carry capacity, and other stuff, while on the other you have zombies, cyborgs, superpower mutations, and mushrooms, and that's not even including the optional mods that come with the game.
@@pinkliongaming8769 That depends on your definition. For the zombie survival game genre, you don't need zombies. Just some zombie-like analogue. It's beside the point, though.
5:36 That's just the first shrine. It was difficult to find materials on the great plateau. I never ran out of weapons after that though because there are so many lying around.
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to this question. It’s subjective from the viewpoint of the person. Me, I love sims. Being a real world horseman and rancher, and loving everything to do with the old west, I absolutely loved RDR2 because it was an immersive experience. But again, that’s my opinion and preference. Not everyone shares it. Another example, and a hardcore flight simmer. There’s a huge community who love to get in a plane and fly and blow stuff up without having much thought or realism involved. That’s why you have games like war thunder or ace combat. Then there’s people like me who want it to be as realistic as possible without being in the actual aircraft. For us; we have games like DCS and Xplane. End of the day, there’s no right or wrong answer for how much realism is too much or not enough, there’s just the answer that’s right for you.
Imo red dead 2 wasn't made for people who play fast. It's kinda like playing an elderscrolls game but only doing the main quest and then complaining that the game is too short. Rdr2 wants you to interact with the world and male your own discoveries. It encourages you to take your time and look at little details by making the game so slow. One of the biggest pieces of evidence for this idea is the fact that playing fast makes the game bug the fuck out lmao. The gunplay is satisfying and cool but ultimately wasn't really the focus of the game! Looking around and solving little mysteries while being utterly immersed is what the game is about. You can have a perfectly fine amount of fun playing through rdr2 fast but I think that robs you of the game's beauty and artistic value.. Another good example of games encouraging you to play slowly is arma3. Game is janky as hell and hard to control because it wants you to think tactically as if you where a soldier and shit.. idfk i never played it get off my back lmao
5:48 It's like a super meter or a transformation meter in games, I legit beat both Darksiders 1 and 2 without using the transformation, because I thought "but what if i need it for a potential second phase, or a follow up boss right after this one"
The most annoying thing with weapon degradation is when it's dialed up way to high IMHO. Most games with gun degradation are completely overdoing it: a pistol/rifle doesn't go bad after a few hundred shots fired and there sure is no need to replace any parts in that timeframe. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to go back to some mechanic or search for parts after this short time. A cleaning mechanic would be much better in terms of realism and frustration IMHO. Just keep your gun clean and it'll degrade very slowly, don't clean it and it'll degrade a bit faster and get progressively more unreliable. Game designers really like to abuse this mechanic as a cheap way to drain player resources and i hate it.
A survival game called "The Long Dark" kinda has this. There is no "Repair kit", just a gun cleaning kit, and as you use it more and more (both weapon and kit) you repair more and lose less durability. Also, since it's a winter wilderness survival game, the level of degredation that your weapons suffer is...not realistic, but at least explainable. (Poor user skill, handmade ammunition, extreme cold, etc.) Edit for grammar/spelling
@@caesar7786 Yeah kind of. It's less realistic, but the main point is that it's annoying as hell. There are some games that do it right, but there are many more that abuse gun degradation (and similar degradation mechanics) as a cheap way to keep the player busy. I liked the way some S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods (not the vanilla/base game) have implemented these cleaning/degradation systems where it gives you multiple options for keeping your stuff in good shape (consumables/mechanic/spare parts/etc).
@@vatterger but isn't this video talking about how much realism is too much? If it's less realistic but more fun, then it's an advantage..but does this have anything to do with being less realistic & more fun or not? Or it's actually hard & annoying?
A lot of times, even if "fast travel" is available, I still like walking around and exploring the world, I got myself in a lot of trouble in Fallout and Elder Scrolls.
I think the Problem with realism is often that it is just tacked on instead of integrated into the gameplay itself. And as Games tend to follow a different logic this creates all sort of weird ludo-narrative disconnects. I always find that what is the most weird in these games is how they handle time in game, especially within Fantasy. I hate open world games where time just does not matter. Like Someone tells about this big world-ending threat that is coming and you are just "Cool story- imma go in the other direction and collect 500 rat pelts and the day before the attack I will just churn out 200 greatswords in one sitting". Why not attach realistic time frames to stuff (while still being one-click instant build) and have that aspect of it be a mechanic in itself. Who cares if I have to sit for a week to recover from an injury when I can use that time to do stuff I would do anyways? Want to craft an absurd amount of cod-pieces? Sure go ahead I just hope nothing bad happens in the 3 Months it takes you to do this...
That is one thing that annoys me in some games. A Bad Thing is going to happen, we have to hurry! Wait, some people in the other direction need help milking their goats, I'll do that for a while. If a game is going to make it sound like you have limited time to take of a problem, then make time matter! Have a village burned down because you took to long. Then another if you don't pick up the pace. People start turning against you because you're not helping. Have *consequences.*
Fable 3 was really bad example of this, the threat was comeing and you needed cash to fight it off only time only moved when wen you said to. So you save the world by getting a job or becoming a land lord.
I was in a D&D game once, where the DM would ask us to roleplay out finding a place to relieve ourselves every time we stopped to camp for the night. That was a little too personal and took some of the fun out of the game. Conversely, in a Werewolf game I was going to roleplay a minor ritual on behalf of another character and another player yelled at me, “Shut up! You have it, you do it, LET’S GO!!”
I don't mind durability mechanics, so long as things don't break too quickly, and they can be repaired in the field with tools, like in TES4 Oblivion and Witcher 3.
The Outer Worlds handled this well, in my opinion. Your weapon and gear lasted a long time and ijt was fairly easy to repair them in the field when you felt that you needed to do so. It also didn't cost any or much in game money, just resources which pretty easy to come by.
speaking of RDR2, it's funny they have the Volcanic pistol, which didn't even last a year in the 1850s, but they don't have any Remington 1875s, cartridge converted Colt 1860s or pocket derringers
Back in my day... When Grand Terismo came out on the PS I was so excited to play it b/c like you said I am not going to be a professional racer. Turns out you had to do all this work to get your license in order to earn some money to buy the crappiest car 😂. Isn't that the life I was escaping?
About the Lion King remake, quick tangent, I think it failed because it didn't commit *enough*. If they really wanted to commit to that choice, they should have done it fully like a documentary without characters speaking or chanting etc and have a narrator tell the story at times. Can keep the unrealistic character interractions to have an interresting story yeah but just commit to your choice. Might not have been good, but it would have been consistent and wouldn't have had to be compared to the original constantly
I loved red dead 2 and the pacing of it. Normally in games i fast travel around or drive at 300mph which is fine, but RDR2 was the first game in a long time that i just immersed myself in the world and took things slow, i'd just walk through the towns, have a bath, get my guns cleaned at the store, sell all the pelts i got whilst hunting etc. i see a lot of complaints about it being too slow but i think it was perfect. I think if you want to enjoy red dead, don't have urgency or expect to rush through it like all the typical games these days, just enjoy it and pretend you're in the world. I also turned off the music so i could hear animals whilst hunting. But also when i play fallout i play in survival mode and i use survival settings mod and i reduce how often i have to drink/eat cos its not fun doing that all the time and i turn fast travel on and autosaves every 5 mins (cos lets be honest, bethesda games are too buggy to have to only save when you sleep) so i don't want that from all my games but it was nice for RDR2 to change up the pace and slow you down and make you appreciate the amazing world they created. But yes i agree that realism can be taken too far. I play games to escape reality :P or i'd just do it in real life.
Like the weapon maintenance system in red dead where it's more of a cleanliness system. a well maintained weapon will take a VERY VERY long time to "wear out" when used properly
Not a simulator regarding bodily functions but a simulator regarding survival crafting for instance. So really not small stuff put there to pretend it's something complex but really complex systems in place, where the world is the game, the main character and the player is the one single odd duck able to play with it, so it needs to react to the player's actions in whatever meaning the player intends to change it. If i'm going in the forest to hunt, maybe io want to set traps not just shoot with a rifle you buy, maybe i want or need to craft a bow and arrows, maybe i want to just cut trees and build something or sell the wood. There are many games RDR being one of the finest that have big adn beautiful world but are all barren, finish the scripted things and it's boring. Why build these fine world if you can;t do stuff in them? Like the single player story line should really be more as an intro, a tutorial even. After that you can play how you want. Be a farmer, a trader, a hunter, trapper, a politician, bandit, sheriff and whatnot. Live in that world. An RPG doesn't need points and skills to unlock or farm, an RPG is a game where you can take any role in that world when you want, you have the systems available so you can influence the matters of that world.
I think adding all aspects to a function in a game that intends to make it more realistic is a great idea, as long as the process is sped up. Lets say your making a boat, well you tell a squire to gather your men, a background timer starts with, lets say 3 days on it, you can either press a button to wait or go do something else, like cook your dinner for the night, you would go to the kitchen press a button to cook it and a sped up 2 hour timer starts, and in 5 seconds you got dinner and 2 hours have passed on the timer. Or alternatively you could have pressed the wait button, and all your basic needs would be done automatically as you wait the 3 days for your men to arrive, and any events that happen could stop the waiting process to let you do the event, or you could stop it manually. Basically a game where you do all the important stuff but CAN do the boring stuff if you wish, but you also have the option to let it be done automatically for you while you wait for things to happen. That way your game is ultra realistic, while keeping it fast paced and you dont have to worry about all the nonsense like having to go to the bathroom etc. but it would still be a function of the game where it COULD have an impact on your actions but likely wont if you dont want it to.
This isn't such a hard question, people nowadays kinda forgot what games are supposed to be, and they mistake them for simulators. To be fair the market isn't putting in any effort to separate the various software available and lumps games and simulators together.
When you mentioned eating to heal it reminded me, in Breath of the Wild you can make food that heals you completely but you can also make a potion with the same effect so I find myself going to this one place where there are lizards with the full restore effect because I don't want Link to be swallowing whole cakes in the middle of a fight, I'll make the foods with other effects and eat em outside of combat because it's just fun to see Link happy though.
Thats why Witcher 3 is the perfect game. big map, small enough to be properly filled with fast travel, blade degradation no too invasive AND FIXABLE ON THE GO , potions that recover with easy to find ingredients, but you have to properly manage...
I like this "stream highlights" type of video. And I guess it saves you time so you don't have to film 2 videos per week, and it keeps the mighty algorithm satisfied =)
Got in a discussion with another Red Dead player once who hated on every game that wasn't realistic. He left the discussion when I calculated how much weight in ammunition his character carries with him. Out of pure lazyness I just calculated with the weight of .22 but in the end the character still has over 20kg (44lbs) of ammunition in its pokets and then we haven't talked about the other stuff (the lamp, knives, throwing axes, loot like watches, rings, etc. small animal carcases, food and booze). Hell, if you gained enough treasure maps or letters even the paperweight would become noticeable, but somehow then the realism became unconvenient 😁
Game should always have strong internal consistency with their other mechanics, and their lore/setting. This is the realism I care about. If the lore says X behaves like Y, it should behave like that in game too (within gameplay limitations). If lore says X always leads to Y, then X should not arbitrarily fail to reproduce Y. i.e.: Multiple casts of Lesser Restoration will perfectly heal you even if your strength was reduced to 0 from 18 (even if they lost 18 strength due to a master duelist critting their arms/legs into noodles, cutting off all tendons/ligaments, severing muscle fibers)- so, from natural causes a character should NOT suffer unhealable muscle tears, tendons just because "story says so." You want to inflict unhealable muscle damage? Justify it - a magical curse, fragments (from arrow head, stone, wood) got in the way and need to be surgically removed before healing can occur. But don't do bullshit like my former DM who gave the party archer a permanent, unhealable muscle tear that not even Miracle could fix... because she rolled natural 20 to hold onto the railing during a large wave aboard our ship.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a nice mechanic for equipment condition: of course things take damage and lose value (also less effective which is the generic thing), but if you are muddied/bloodied, it affects your charisma and how people respond to you. Unfortunately, the only way to clean a bloody weapon is to repair/sharpen it, which is pretty funny considering how realistic that game tries to be.
Yeah, superhero physics are too stretchy for 'realism'. When I'm running a superhero tabletop rpg consistency in decisions and plausibility matters more since players still need to know what to expect.
My threshold is actually pretty low. I MUCH prefer the realism of Gothic/Morrowind which is basically SUPER low cause I know how much more heart and effort will go into the feel of the game 💪🙏
Morrowind is more realistic than most open world games in some important ways, like not having GPS quest markers and actually having to follow directions and signs. Gothic has some of the most appreciated realism for me in its writing - its complex, brutal world and grey morality. Like Skallagrim said, realism isn't just grindey or otherwise tedious mechanics.
@@boredgunner it's actually more challenging & fun, but it's not really a bad thing if they're less realistic if more fun..but wdym by open world games? You mean open world SURVIVAL games? It depends..realism can be immersive, but can also be tedious & boring as hell
@@caesar7786 Open world story driven games is what I meant. Morrowind is one of relatively few that doesn't have GPS quest markers, you have to actually navigate. Amusingly though, at least one character gives you wrong directions but hey, it happens. Unintended realism!
@@boredgunner i think that's one of the very few types of realism i would like, but in many times, it could be annoying though, so i prefer an open world game that has GPS quest marker..i mean, it's supposed to be fun & enjoyable, not realistic but annoying. So it's not rlly a bad thing at all if open world story games outside it are less realistic if it's more fun & enjoyable, those are the most important things in games, not extra realism Wdym by "it happens" tho?
i also really like when the realism is added as a challenge mode or toggeable setting like fallouts survival mode where you need to add water food and sleep and ammo has weight so you have to plan your quests and loadouts accordingly
Weapon durability is something I can agree to reee on, whenever I play Fallout 3/NV I just use the console commands to get around it. I find it rather silly when I have to carry like, 10 of the same gun to keep it working after it breaks in 150 rounds. On the other hand I don't mind RDR2's system of cleaning the guns, because that's actually sensible compared to apparently needing to completely rebuild the thing after every use.
Personally I found rdr2's system a bit annoying just because of how they were selling the whole game as if travelling around the world was going to be more engaging etc, and then talk about weapon condition, but in reality how you travelled had almost negligible impact on the condition of your weapon and it was mainly time. Alongside that, the condition of the weapons would barely ever impact the actual performance, often not hitting any damage breakpoints, or having bad enough accuracy to cause issues. Looked weird to walk around cleanly and guns just get mud on them, yet roll around in the mud with a clean gun and barely anything has happened etc. With rdr2 being pretty big with roleplay, and having so many weapons on you, I wish they actually went way more hardcore with it, but having less of it be affected solely by time. I wish the durability was implemented in a way to make people travel more smartly, avoiding just diving into rivers willy nilly etc. Even if fixing the condition of the weapon was basically free, it would feel a lot more realistic if guns actually got dirty based on what you were doing, rather than just time, which is a big issue with 'durability' in many games. Usually its just a really long timer, that isn't impacted much by how you play (or atleast, players don't have any agency in making it reduce less or more based on how they play).
I do want more realism in games, in the sense that you can really roleplay. So what there is a huge area that's empty? I mean, what's empty is a matter of debate. If the systems of the game are complex enough any "empty " area can be played with, like in real life. I think it's a cool idea to play in a medieval setting or preistoric and whatnot, some time in the past. Where they societies in the game are at that historical level and the systems of the game let you do pretty much anything so you with current ideas and knowledge can create "magic". In a realistic setting it's up to you to find out how can you mine and craft modern stuff starting from nothing, in a preistoric setting. That's pretty much playing with an empty space. But then again, how about other aspects such as laws and social rules? Sure the way crime and punishment is portrait in RDR2 is better than other games but i wouldn't call it realistic. You know, getting wanted level in the middle of nowhere and no witnesses at all, or at least none alive. I think it could be fun to have a type of simulation in that aspect too. More difficult to get away in in a modern setting but something probably more fun to play with in a less advanced setting where DNA stuff or fingerprints is not yet a thing. But in that setting it would be still cool i think, a type of avoiding the law simulation, stuff like Dexter and whatnot. A modern manhunt game should be just that i think, serial killer simulator but within a realistic society with very competent systems for people and police, evidences, trials and whatnot.
If you don't mind it looking like someone ported ultima III to a modern system with quick "upgraded" graphics, Unreal World might interest you from what you put down. It's about teenagers, freezing to death in the woods until it's not.
I disagree with Red Dead having too much realism. I actually enjoy how realistic it is because it reminds me of my experiences in the outdoors and with guns and stuff.
The thing about realism in ark that you hinted at (pooping, constant thirst and hunger, overencumbrance,...) is: That's actually a valuable game mechanic! It makes you think, learn, find ways to solve the problem, requires you to be prepared. And sure in the early game it's a pain in the ass to constantly need water and berry's to stay alive. But late game you FEEL, really feel, the progress once you learned to prepare, got 1 or 2 canteens full of water, some handcrafted food that keeps you replenished for long or even gives you great buffs... When you suddenly can go out and about and tackle every environment with ease. That progression is only possible because of the problems earlier. And thus, realism in games that offer that kind of progression is valuable I think. Because you can learn to deal with it. And that learning curve makes it interesting and fun.
I personally enjoyed the level of realism in RDR2. I actually liked the realism of having to loot every item individually and also the way skinning and loading your horse. It just felt substantial and it was not overdone in my opinion.
Haven't watched both videos yet but the fact Skall posts something about too much realism in video games, a mere couple hours after Shad posts about having realism in games... It's so comedic
I hated redemption 2, found everything slow and the story is over rated in my opinion. but I'm not completely hating "realism" since I recently played trough kingdom come deliverance and liked it. the story isn't original there either but at least I found the gameplay fun
I'm just mad that RDR2 online had so much untapped potential. Like Where is the horse taming and selling. I expected a GTA set in the old west. Instead, we got, well something that resembles but without all the content.🤷
Context!! As an example red dead turns it up Alot but I think it fits for red dead, but I'm glad they didn't go for that same level for ghost of Tsushima
"Sitting there for minutes looking at the character doing one task." You just described 90% of what it is like to play Runescape lol yet for some reason I absolutely love it. I've legit spent hours sitting at my computer watching my character doing one task and I often wonder why is this so enjoyable to me lol
The realism of Red Dead Redemption sadly had little connection to it's gameplay. It had plenty of survival and crafting mechanics, temperature management, hunting, detailed looting ect. But the impact of all these mechanics were too shallow to even matter. Items didn't impact the gameplay enough to matter a lot, death had close to no consequence, the gameplayloop was centered around the action and the adventure not the struggle to survive. So all the bloated realism and mechanics just got in the way of the core gameplay experience instead of adding to it in a significant way. I always though it could have been an interesting experience in it's own right to live in that world with a real weight on the survival mechanics.
yeah that's like the biggest problem with rdr2's overfocusing on minor details because in the end, literally none of it matters food and drink are just glorified powerups that you have to navigate rockstar's legendarily bad UI for, at any moment outside of a mission you can hop into a grocery store and spend an insignificant fraction of the absurd amount of money you have to stuff your inventory with canned food making hunting and foraging completely useless, there is realistically no purpose to the temperature system because you will rarely ever do anything in the mountains making dressing lightly objectively better and all the core gameplay is just an arcadey cover shooter anyway with call of juarez-esque speedreloads that completely takes you out of the illusion that this is supposed to be a realistic world
That's interesting; I thought this was gonna be a discussion video on the matter, not a compilation of moments from that old livestream. But hey, it's pretty cool that you included my comment on certain "unrealistic" just being realistic things that're executed wrong. Anyways, I've always seen realism not as *one* ingredient you put an amount of in a fictional work, but rather as a *collection* of ingredients you pick and choose which ones you put in your overall dish; there's a reason we have the term "selective realism" after all.
Na I disagree RDR2 was awesome the realism is partly what made it so good. Plus some tasks weren't that tedious I don't think. Kingdom Come Deliverance in my opinion is what too much but again some people enjoy the video game for that reason.
Sheriffs showing up out of nowhere while I was deep in the wilderness bothered me more than most of the "realism". As well as how I had to keep going into the menu because my guy would put weapons away, so they weren't ready when I needed them.
Hydroneer has some realism, but also keeps it fun and engaging. Starting with the most basic items to gather ore to sell, all the way up to having a full-on mining operation. Machines require maintenance too, like water filters breaking so you need to have repair kits at the ready.
@@EcchiRevenge No. When you say certain things, there is an opposite implication that you may not realize you are making. I'm addressing that opposing implication. If there is never enough realism, then games that aren't realistic are inherently lazy and talentless. I don't see how anyone could ever say DMC or Bayonetta are too realistic...
I like cataclysm:dda. This uncertainity when im low on resources but really need an armor, only to find out im going to forge the helmet alone for over 3 days, but zombie dinos wont fight themself... Only regular dinos ... And then they turn into zombies... But doing biodiesel of their fat is fun... Its fuuun...
In the witcher 1 you get a wierd eye floater camera effect when your toxicity reaches 50% percent. That made potions almost unsuable for me because it gave me terrible simulation sickness. It's a nice idea to give you a warning when your character is about to die, but it's not helpful when it actually causes your character to die.
The sharpening in Monster Hunter adds a new element of tension and resourse management to the gameplay. Do i want to run away right now and sharpen? Or do i just soldier on with reduced damage until the monster retreats? Alternatively, do i just return to monkee and sharpen mid fight? Plus if the fight happens in an "arena" like Fatalis' fight, where there is nowhere to run to...
Re: Thumbnail Years ago, my friend and I used to play Assassin's Creed 1. When you ride on a horse, the camera was set at a really bad angle because I could easily imagine the horse blasting farts at the camera each time it gallops and lift both hind legs. It's that horrifying.
Speaking of time compression. I liked in the Stronghold games how everything was constructed crazy fast in typical RTS style gameplay, but the moment an enemy soldier entered a certain radius of any of your units or structures, the passing of time slowed down to a pretty realistic scale, even though said units weren't moving any slower or faster, they simply paused the abstraction of building castle walls, constructing supplies, armor, and weapons, and training new units.
The most important question to ask when considering realism is "What does it add to the experience?" If the answer is "nothing" or "minor inconvenience/annoyance" then I would say it's best not to include that. For me, realism is most important in terms of world building, having things behave in natural ways and look as they would in real life. Immersion is everything, and the more realistic the things before you appear, the less likely you are to be taken out of the experience.
Yes, I definitely agree with that.
Yea but for me world building and what things look still depend on the genre..maybe graphics or something like that, then probably yes, while still having a fun & enjoyable gameplay
tl;dr Even outside of gameplay functions realism could be a hinderance narratively.
I personally feel like there’s a good separation point between realism and believability. With current trends in gaming things have strived so much for realism that it’s gradually constricted just how much the medium can really express itself.
Disco Elysium is a game that takes liberties with the artstyle but is able to convey much more to the player through its world building because of it. Early on there’s a statue you see suspended in large chunks by simple rebar poles. Obviously from looking at it the thing should topple over at any second but the game goes into detail about how the statue ended up being destroyed due to social conflicts only for some pretentious artsy types to rebuild it in a way that looks like it’s exploding off into different directions.
I feel more immersed in the world with the knowledge rather than if it were just having a poorly repaired realistic statue with some subdued additions.
Spot on!
But... How am I gonna live without my horse's balls shrinking in reaction to the temperature of the games environment???
"Too much realism" is when it starts to detract from the experience.
Games are meant to be fun. So mechanics should be fun, or at least engaging/fulfilling. They should not be there simply to be there or at worst, to be annoying.
Realism can go far in certain genres like RPG's.
For example, in Fallout 4's "Survival" difficulty, you have to eat, drink and sleep regularly or suffer stat penalties/death. This adds to the experience because it makes all the food, drink and beds you encounter in the game not 100% pointless (Since outside of these you can just heal with the millions of Stimpacks you can accrue and you can pass time by literally just standing around with the Wait function...)
Meanwhile, things like limited inventory space in things like ARPG's, is just annoying. All it adds to the game is annoyance where you have to go back to town repeatedly to sell your junk (And/or get loot filter mods to let you ignore all the junk)
So yeah, realism can add depth to a game and can make certain mechanics more engaging and should be used to make more cohesive and interesting games. But games developers need to always keep in mind "What does this add to the game?" which, to be honest, is also a good thing to keep in mind when looking at any part of game design. Far too often there are mechanics in games that simply don't add anything to the experience and are simply something annoying that players have to deal with.
TLDR: if it makes the game less fun, it doesn't need to be there.
There's a point where "realism" can actually highlight that what you're doing isn't real.
If you had 100% virtual reality, it might be fine to have to put up with that ... but when you still have a screen and controller, it doesn't really help
Yeah..i really hate those people who critic the mechanics that were made to be enjoyable just because they aren't real
Imagine if Activision decided to make a game set in The Civil War, but they actually went full on realism. 🤣 Shoot reload for 2 minutes shoot again, exciting Gameplay right there
The food/sleep aspect is missing in a lot of games imo. The elder scrolls fe have a ton of houses, hotels, inns, tents and a bunch of different drinks and food....and it's all basically unnecessary. You can win the games without eating or sleeping once. Just have your character require sleep and food after some time and reduce first stamina and later health if the need isn't fulfilled. It would raise the stakes, make tze game feel more real and it would use the whole infrastructure that's there already
I think the reason we so often like realism in games is because it is a convenient way to add logical consistency and depth to a game.
That's funny since the realistic aspects of videogames are mostly shallow and inconsistent. For example a fps using actual projectiles instead of hitscan only determines whether or not you have to lead a target at range, depending on how clean the hit detection is. So basically the more complicated programming makes no difference 95% of the time, and 5% of the time you just aim an inch ahead of the guy.
@@dandre3K It's a little more complicated than that, for me, more realistic shooters have additional things like making you feel more weighty or having heavier feeling animations. It's never really as simple as aiming the gun slightly in front of the enemy, there's usually more recoil and stuff, or even gun jams like Tarkov. Having small stuff like this can add to the immersion in a way and some people like to play more realistic games. They're slower and methodical. I mean why do people play games like Truck Simulator. There's a market for games like this.
@@dandre3K that's only true if you are basically in melee 95% of the time and only a few dozens of meters off for the remaining 5%, which is quite frankly not the norm. Games that have normal maps where you can actually shoot things at range will actually reward people for minding distance drop and also leading isn't just "one inch" but can vary on the enemy speed.
Yup. It's always nice when logic is present in place of "video game logic". This was one of the things that made me transition from console games to PC games, and it's not the realism most people here are thinking. I couldn't stand having invisible walls everywhere preventing you from getting off the beaten path to any degree, 95% of doors not working, not being able to shoot through normal glass, or Resident Evil's "puzzles" that revolve around not being able to make like a 3 foot jump in the library. PC games with actual physics and designed around the principle of being able to go where you should be able to go won me over and I never looked back.
@@boredgunner that's really not a pc Vs console thing, just video games being able to do more as over time with more computing power.
So many games run on both these days
I think Kingdom Come Deliverance nailed the perfect amount of realism. You gotta eat and sleep once in a while or you lose energy and your combat/stamina takes a hit. Your weapon requires occasional repair/sharpening after combat and you actually see the edge damage on the blades, which you can repair for free on grinding stones. Stuff that can be easily managed with some planning ahead of time, while giving you the freedom to roam around without resupply for weeks in game if you pack your saddlebags appropriately. The enemies even carry necessary supplies that are themed on their culture/profession. A poor bandit will have lots of cheap booze and some bread or uncooked vegetables, while the Cumans will have dried meats and fruits for travel, as they've marched for weeks or months to get where they are. Rich or high class bandits such as the Robber Barons will have fresh meats, fine wines and even the occasional bowl of soup/stew on him. The Cumans and higher status bandits will also usually have repair kits for their armor or weapons that you can loot.
I love KCD
I was going to bring up KCD as well, with one exception. I found it to be too tedious to make potions and after the first playthrough I just bought them.
Maybe if you had to make, say, 5 or 10 of each potion and after that could make them automatically it would suit my level of patience better.
Well, it was meant to be a more realistic game..many other games are in different genres so that amount of realism aren't needed at all..in fact, it would make the game dull & boring, and put you completely out of the experience
Kingdom Come Deliverance was tedious with some of the silly realism they focused on instead of improving key game mechanics or writing a story. The "being dirty", "sleep" and "hunger" mechanics were nothing more than nagging at you and really offered nothing to the game. I modded them out after the first hour of game play. I just wish instead of working on those mechanics, they'd made combat into something more than a quick time event or had put a little more thought into the horseback riding.
I mostly agree, though I think KCD needs more realistic horse gameplay - a real horse AI and bonding, more NPCs on horses, horse thieves and horses running away if not tied down. RDR 2 is better in this regard.
I'm just glad that Oxygen Not Included is mentioned. Watching piss flow through a recently constructed plumbing system is so satisfying.
Then the panic sets in when you realize it was a poorly build plumbing system.
@@adambielen8996
Spaghetti plumbing is the only way to go.
Realism and story should reinforce the gameplay.
Something interesting that Gears of War did is that it makes reloading weapons fun, because sitting in cover while waiting for the reload animation to end would be boring, so they decided to add reload cancelling which gave a damage increase.
Game Maker’s Toolkit also talked about how dialogue options have the problems of very little involvement or thought placed into it.
I agree to realism and story should enforce gameplay but then you said reload is tedious. Reload is a core mechanic. You are the most invulnerable during reload animation so that you have to mind your positioning.
I guess if you want super high octane gunblazing action, even the act of reloading might feel tedious to you. But for most cases, they are already the integral part of any shooter mechanic. Unless you are talking about a game that has ridiculously long reloading animation, which thankfully i haven't encountered any.
@@snowmanleblanc6053 You’re actually VERY vulnerable while reloading, because you have to move your eyes to the top right of the screen to time the reload correctly. If you screw up the timing, your weapon becomes jammed increasing the reload time.
@@Nevirate that might be a good mechanic i take back my words
@@snowmanleblanc6053 The intention was the make reloading an engaging part of the gameplay, and not thoughtless, so it became another layer of danger.
A great example of the same idea is in VR shooters. Many of them require you to manually eject your magazine, grab a new one, put it into the gun and cock the slide. If its a bolt action gun you'll also need to cock each new shot in as well.
In games like Hotdogs Horshoes and Handgrenades, the interaction leniency for all these things is not very large, so you are forced to pay attention to the gun itself. This is why a lot of people like VR shooters, because it gives a lot of engaging gameplay based around your motion controls.
A non-VR version of this is the game Reciever and its sequel. Both are extremely engaging games and I highly reccomend them.
I feel like it depends on what you are trying to do and what your audience is. Like, do you want to create super detailed simulation or do you want to use your game as a means to convey your setting and story?
At what point does attention to detail become obsession?
As far as storytelling goes, I think realism is good for as long as it adds to your enjoyment of the game and affects your choices rather than just being a bunch of chores to keep track of.
A personal favourite of mine in that regard is Kenshi, a post-apocalyptic fantasy survival RPG that basically plays like the stoner offspring of Mount&Blade and the first Fallout games.
Kenshi combat isn't neccessarily super realistic in every regard, but it pays attention to detail. Say, if your armour is an assymetric piece of garbage that only covers one leg, then the other leg is unprotected. Unprotected legs don't take kindly to abuse. If it gets abused too much, it will fall off. If you lose a leg, walking becomes a tad difficult, so you need prosthetics. Proper prosthetics that allow your to walk properly are expensive and rare.
If one of the major factions catches you wearing a robot leg, they will assume that you are one of the mechanical minions of the evil daemoness that opposes their god and thus they will attack you on sight.
In other words: Because the game pays attention to detail, making poor choices about your equipment can have major narrative consequences, all the way towards an all-out war with a major faction.
That's an interesting degree of realism, where most games will simply pretend like losing a limb is something that doesn't happen to player characters and also just slap a static defense value onto your character.
At the same time, the kind of realism where your player character will get constipated if they don't eat a balanced diet would probably go overboard.
I think there are other games that have that too (losing limbs)
But it''s not a bad thing though if losing a limb is something that doesn't happen to the player's character in the game..just the game's mechanics to make it simpler & less hard. I would prefer it..in many cases, losing limbs feature would just simply make it more frustating & less fun
It also works if it uses realism to reinforce a theme or idea, like games that are anti-war are often hurt by having the combat be too fun and making it more realistic is the easiest way to make it less fun, it all depends on what the game wants to achieve
@@jonnysac77 actually, games are made for people to have fun..so idk with "too fun", that's actually an advantage. Making it more realistic & less fun would make the game more boring.
@@caesar7786 if being boring and miserable is the point, than it should be boring and making it fun would actually make it worse at acheiving it's point, most games are made to be fun so I agree that most of the time realism hurts the experience but there is room for art that doesn't try to be fun
Hey Kenshi, I love that game and how it handles the mechanics really adds ti the atmosphere if being like any weak mook in its world.
Regarding weapon durability: I think Mount & Blade did this just fine, where the weapons are indestructible, but the shields have a limited durability during the battles (they get an instant repair after every fight). That way you get the fun of smashing shields with your giant two handed axe or, if the odds are working against you, you suddenly have to defend yourself with your one handed sidearm if your shield gets hacked into pieces by the enemy.
I personally would add a weapon break mechanic as well.
It can nerf the mounted lances in a quite realistic way.
Though this durability of the weapon could be bind to characters skill with the weapon, so as your character grow more skillful, he learns how to save his weapon's edge)))
@@dilen754 I'm pretty sure I've seen breakable lances. I'm just not sure if it was a mod or was it in native
Btw your shield can get weaker or break if it gets destroyed often also your horse can get lame and if you ride the lame horse and your horse dies it actually dies and removed from your inventory.
@@Yorick257 it is a mod
@@yunusemrecekic8933 Totally true!
Realism, just like suspension of disbelief is not a single entity. You can have realism in one aspect (like how weapons handle) and no realism at all in another aspect (like how quickly you heal from wounds). The same way you may be able to suspend your disbelief when it comes to magic, but not when it comes to physics. And this also differs from person to person. So wanting more or less realism by itself doesn't mean much without specifying what kind of realism and why.
Well, DOOM says fuck it and allows you to shoot without the need of reloading.
Reloading isn't fun, blowing shit up is.
Videogames are supposed to be fun, when realism gets in the way of it then realism be damned.
@@andregon4366 Not going to disagree that video games should be fun. What people find fun however is subjective. Some people enjoy a bit more realism and immersion in their games. There's a huge market for a ton of different types of games. Just play what you enjoy.
there's a reason why no game isn't 100% realistic anyways they know it would be boring and unnecessary.
There's at least two types of realism: realism on what is depicted (think graphics, animation, your character appearing wet when you enter water, that kind of attention to detail) which can be nice to have, and realism on the game mechanics. The more realistic the mechanics are, the more you go into simulator territory, which can be fun in its own right but it's a different experience.
Regarding eating/healing, I think that out of all games, Minecraft handles that pretty well. It's not that food=HP, but rather it's your organism needs nutrients to get energy to heal itself naturally. Which interestingly enough, in a way, is the most realistic "healing by food" system out there.
Agreed. That's a major reason I still enjoy the game after over a decade.
Stalker : Anomaly did that too. Food was responsible for the internal hp regen (which was miniscule), drink was responsible for stamina regen.
Yes, that's not uncommon as a healing mechanic, which makes sense in survival games.
I think Way of the Samurai 4 operated in a similar fashion. Food replenishes Stamina, which is itself used to regenerate lost HP.
try scum then, the game even has some what real nutrient requirement
It was great to see Cara again; that snark complements Skall’s style so well
Their name's Devan now. :)
@@Neiot It's both.
@@Skallagrim Aahh, sorry. :
I would really honestly like to see him do a video series where she's his co-host. I imagine that this is same reason they got married: they're just perfect compliments to each other.
I made up an adage that describes my feelings: "Never sacrifice 'fun' on the altar of 'realism'."
I think it depends entirely on the purpose of your game or fiction. Sometimes making things much more realistic, even brutally so, can be used effectively to get a player or reader to have a more genuine emotional reaction. I would point to the Bloody Baron quest in the Witcher 3 as a prime example. It hits so much harder because of how realistic the scenario is, even with fantasy woven in. It would not work as well otherwise. Now, as far as minor details are concerned, I also think this entirely relates to what your goal as the video game designer/developer or author is. Take the horse balls in RDR2. If your goal is to just make a fun western game with good gameplay, that kind of detail is unimportant. If you're trying to make a game where the goal is to make the player feel like they're in the old west, that kind of detail suddenly becomes important. It's something that you would see and expect to see if you were really there. It's not something that should ever be highlighted, but it's a part of the reality of the situation. RDR2 does it's best to build player investment by making the world feel as close to real and alive as possible. Every detail is in service to that purpose. Now, if say, Borderlands started to bring that stuff in for any reason other than the sake of satire, I would think it was weird because Borderlands isn't intended to be some kind of hyper realistic game series - it's comedic, satirical. But, if they wanted to include super realistic details to make fun of something like RDR2 it would serve the purpose of the game to do so.
The overall point is this - every detail and the level of realism should be dictated by the purpose of your game or story. If being hyper realistic benefits your game or story, then no detail is too far. If it doesn't, then the same writing/design rule of old applies - do not dedicate any time to something that does not matter.
after playing hitman i came up with the "good enough" theory for realism. in the game the characters pats himself down while the dishuise teleports onto him. it convets the idea without taking too long and being intrusive to gameplay.
as for sharpening, dark souls 3 has a weapon who's skill is to sharpen the blade for the next few attacks. i think it's done well there.
The AI in hitman is also very stupid, therefore easy to manipulate. I choose to see it as an extension of 47's view of the world and his job. He's a professional killer willing to do what needs done, and tends to know how and when to do it. Being that he's so far removed from the average person, he likely sees normal functioning people as, well, stupid and easy to manipulate. Who cares if it's an awkward social interaction? It keeps their eyes off of the dude I just killed!
Although, it's a bit stupid when you literally just bump into your target's bodyguard for 10 minutes and the target just... walks off without them.
@@DopaminedotSeek3rcolonthree Or when billionaire stops his routine to pickup a single coin. But the bumping into someone was one of few things that seemed way to cheesy, I expected that after 2-3 tries armed npc goes hostile or civilian runs away. I was very surprised when in one mission the bodyguard calls my bullshit and does a background check on my disguise - one of many jokes from the devs.
just as general statement: It completely depends. Sometimes I wish some stuff was more realistic (for example, using RDRII since it was mentioned, the guns there: The stats are rather arbitrarily for game balancing... I'd prefer it if the Cattleman, a CSAA with .45 long colt was slow and powerful... rather than a weak, fast gun, when the fucking Volcanic pistol pea shooter is one of hte most powerful pistols in the game!)
It's always the question of: What does the game want to be. Does the realism add atmosphere or a nice addition or does it just get int he way? Is it hte only thing "realistic" for the game, or is there other stuff?
What personally semi-annoys me is, when the try hards enter such talk and it goes: "X should be changed and made more realistic to be harder! However food should still only fill you up for 5 minutes and it should spoil in 10 minutes, so that the game isn't that easy!"
Imho that "10 hits and your blade is trash" durability nonsense is basically in the same "Look how hardcore we are!!!" difficulty realism game balancing bullshit i just mentioned. It's in those games to add 1) "difficulty" and 2) Force the player to swap weapons or constantly repair them, potentially costing the player money and/or items.
"There are still areas that are completely empty! Who wants that?"
Me... to an extent. Going with the RDR Example: It's still meant to be a frontier area for the most part... but the amount of people you run into in 5 minutes (/Hold ups etc.) at times makes it feel far more eastern than it should be^^
As much as i loath both games, World of Tanks and (old) War Thunder (before the cold war craze) showed a nice contrast of "pure Arcade" VS "Attempts at realism".
Or games like Rising Storm/Red Orchestra and Squads and that like VS CoD and Battlefield
RDR2's map isn't meant to be the frontier, that's why Dutch wanted to get the hell out lol
@@chumuheha 1) New Austin is on the map and that was, as per John in RDRI, an area the gang actually wanted to get to because it was still quite lawless. 2) The Heartlands (and even the Grizzlies) ARE frontier, however civilization is creeping in.
There is also the dispute if Dutch ever truly wanted to "get out", because he rejoiced too mich in the outlaw life.
@@undertakernumberone1
Regarding Dutch's desire to leave, I think its both.
You have the part of of Dutch that genuinely cares for those under his wing, and wants to act like a leader and father to them, fighting against his other desire for personal glory, and rebellious heroism against the "change" that civilization is pushing into his world.
And personally, i don't feel as if the realism in the red dead series is misplaced or hurts the games at all, from having to manually cock weapons after each shot to the "empty areas" I only ever felt like those aspects made the experience more immersive (though i do admit i wish they had added a few options for the crafting, specifically when crafting split point ammo, i wouldn't have minded the ability to make it in batches of say, 10 or so).
I like the meta idea of integrating gameplay mechanics with the story & lore, like how Dead Space integrated its health bar into the armor as an-universe way of characters being able to gauge each other’s medical status. Or the way Metro 2033 replaces the objective screen with an in-game journal that Artyom updates in marker ink. Basically, the video game concepts we take for granted as “just being game items that NPCs don’t know the existence of and never talk about” end up being actual parts of the world. It makes the world feel more real and immersive IMO.
I think there's a relevant distinction to be made between realism in details (attempting to simulate as many specific aspects of the experience as possible. Hunger meters, extensive walking distances, etc.) and realism in outcome. You can have a very mechanically simplistic system, like many table-top RPGs, that don't attempt to mechanically simulate the minutia of the experience represented but nevertheless balance options and concerns that encourage realistic outcomes. You might not have a hunger meter, but have a simple procedure of deducting a ration every adventuring day, achieves the same basic desired outcome.
Accuracy to "real world" is nowhere near as important as believability within the setting, and consistency with theme, style etc. Real-world based simulationism is rarely the way to go, especially for TTRPGs. A degree of abstration is not only useful, it's necessary, and style is an important part of any fiction. Walking down a corridor in a building would be a very different sequence in a Hitman game, a John Wick movie, and a military thriller, and it's all down to style, realism isn't really essential here.
People who fly the "unrealistic=bad" are frustrating, because it often feels like they are deliberately missing many points just to rant about realism. I appreciate that you always use even the silly and unrealistic stuff as a good starting point for some good-natured education.
Realism doesn’t matter at all, immersion matters a ton. If I’m a magic medieval knight fighting dragons, I won’t question the physics of my spells, but my immersion will be shattered if I whip out an AK. We play video games so that we can get a power fantasy without any of the tradeoffs of real life, and it feels like games frequently forget this. It made red dead 2 feel tedious to me, and makes cod worse since they added mechanics like bullet drop, slow handling weapons, and a shit ton of visual clutter that increase realism while making gunplay suck.
I WILL question the physics of my spells - if they go against established rules. If the setting says magic of X calibre can only do Y, then it should not be violated. Like, using D&D, a 3rd circle transmutation should not give equivalent results to an Epic Spell.
Likewise, if magical armour requires X to beat, you shouldn't break that. Like, DR/+4 should require a +4 EB weapon to pierce, otherwise it soaks damage and whatnot.
@@runakovacs4759 never been a fan of DnD or ultra-hardcore realism in fantasy...
If i can throw fire of my hands , don't tell me what can and can't be done . Period
@@Dan_Kanerva That takes me out of the setting. It should be internally consistent, where the rules are never broken - at worst, expanded upon.
There can exist rules that SEEM to be broken, but only as long as those rules are just misunderstandings by the character and actually make sense in the greater scheme of things.
Like - Mercury's orbit breaks the rules of physics (according to Newtonian Physics), but if you actually expand your definitions in an internally self-consistent manner, it doesn't break physics actually (Einsteinian physics).
@@runakovacs4759 it doesnt seem to break any physics... the sun makes planets go wee wee around it and Mercury does just that.
But i agree with you on not breaking stablished rules... i would be upset if Superman was invulnerable to Kriptonite
@@Dan_Kanerva I've had a DM before that absurdly broke estabilished rules.
There's a spell that can heal a master swordsman snipping your tendons/ligaments, tearing your muscle fibers with critical hits. It takes multiple casts, maybe multiple days of treatment. But, it will restore you 100% with zero loss of functionality, zero lingering pain, anything.
DM came along, asked the party's archer to make a strength check to hold onto the ship's railings during a storm. She passed it with critical success. DM? Ruled that by holding on, she tore her muscles off her bone. The spell from earlier? did 0 help. The spell's super powered variant that heals even internal organ damage, fixes injuries sustained by the very soul, and practically restores you to your best state physically (minus regrowing missing limbs)? Did nothing. The spell that regrows missing limbs? Did nothing.
DM just wanted to ruin us because we would have won the encounter without losses.
Realistic COD game:
Stand sentry for 14 hours. Walk 20 miles, get a radio call, turn around and walk back. Drive in a convoy for 8 hours, get blown up by an IED you never saw. You have no legs now, and can buy the new DLC: Fighting the VA where you fill out paperwork over and over until you rage quit.
If it gets in the way of gameplay is when it gets annoying and feels like it shouldn’t be there in RDR2 you have to repeatedly go through animations in order to do basic stuff like buying things and crafting I found that I never used special ammo just because of me having to go through the tedious animation multiple times just to get the max amount
I do get that but I'm kinda weird and liked that stuff 😅
@@aaronsmith4940 I do too and a way to fix that would be to just allow items to be made in bulk instead of just individually and to lessen the time of the animations or even just skip them outright
Probably wouldn't be tedious if the animation is tied to gameplay. Like, what if you have to do a certain minigame to do those activities correctly? Rockstar did this well with Bully where every class you take is basically a bunch of minigames.
ruclips.net/video/4IaiYaIjBSw/видео.html
@@aaronsmith4940 You're not weird, you just have patience and an attention span longer than 6 seconds. People are pathetic and need instant stupid dopamine, the TikTok generation. If you complain about RDR2 it's not for you. Stop trying to change something that was never meant for you.
I always felt like Battlefield 3 and 4 found a really good balance between realism and arcade-y-ness.
If you haven't already, play Insurgency Sandstorm, great mix of arcade and realism.
@@mattwillerton6775 I have. Good games.
I disagree. BF3 logic: AEK for example has pinpoint accuray (UMP aswell), while the AUG kicks like a mf
One of the stripes of the rainbow jalapeño on She-Skall's sweatshirt is picked up on the green screen.
I generally hate durability too, but enjoyed in in Breath of the Wild. Once you embrace it you can actually make it work for you unlike other games where it is purely detrimental.
This was a good topic to get into.
Since too much realism kills the escapism that is entertainment.
If you want actual realism in your games, taxes on every purchase would make you feel pain.
THIS IS BRILLIANT
@@EpsilonNought Devs already have focus groups that look into this.
We already have a game about checking immigrant documents, so a game about taxes isn't too far off...
Less escapism there is the more I like and respect any piece of entertainment.
@@ArifRWinandar we already had one….
By LJN
I can understand the desire for realism on something that's supposed to provide an authentic experience to something in real-life. Like people wanting realistic bullet drop in games, or a fighter jet simulation that isn't simplified and instead tries to mirror the real experience of flying a jet. I don't get the people that just want tedium in their games, like no fast travel over a vast world. Unless it's a survival game that's deliberately trying to simulate navigating in the woods with map and compass, then I just see the reason for just wasting people's time.
Ya, like people who complain about fast Travel in Skyrim. Why the Fuck, would you want to run from 1 side of the map to the other? WTF !?
There's a simple reason why you wouldn't wanna fast travel in Skyrim
Immersion!! Fast travel breaks immersion and takes away the need to plan ahead for your journey. It also means you wont run into the 100s of map markers which is part of Skyrim's fun
It also for me makes quests feel like a chore where i simply do the "go here get this complete" thing. Like what's the point of a fantasy adventure if I'm not adventuring lol
On top of this the games before oblivion where kind of simulators
@@chrisnorris3641 Because travelling is fun in Skyrim. If travelling isn't fun in a game, then travelling shouldn't be part of that game at all. Instead you can have the player select a fun part to play without pretending that the world exists outside of the game areas, or just railroad them.
It strongly depends on the game whether travelling is a waste of time. If travel isn't fun, it should either not exist or be skipable. Personally I am annoyed by two too common things in games: Boring travel (i.e. anything with a "go there" part to a quest) and boring looting. I don't want to open 100 urns for a 0.1% chance at a set item, I want looting to be interesting in itself. TES:Online did it quite well for an MMO where you only find very specific items in certain types of containers, so there's no need to open urns unless you need those specific items.
@@bramvanduijn8086 I usually do travel from 1 town to the next since you have to anyway, but to return to places Ive already been I'll just fast travel. Why not?
this is a great topic actually & a great bday vid :D thanks for the upload!
You made a number of good points I agree with. I don't care for a lot of realism in games. Games are meant to be fun and an escape from reality, adding too much realism ruins that immersion.
I like Skyrim's systems and don't want the bowel movement thing though is an entertaining idea.
Verisimilitude is a very important term in this area, the perception of realism is often more important to the experience then actual realism.
The only game I can point out that nailed realism is KCD, like it's the only game I can think of where taking care of myself and my clothes actually affects gameplay, riding on a horse is more than faster transportation, like it prevents you from actively running through mud and feces, hunger makes sense and isn't too in the way, crafting, brewing and sharpening takes actual skill and time, I find that immensely immersive.
I agree. They made it immersive while at the same time avoiding to make it boring.
I agree, durability mechanics aswel as "needs" suck because they don't really make sense how they are implimented like, having to eat every five seconds because arbitrary time speedup bull. Great vid, back scabbards are cool and have a great day.
Still, it really depends on game.
Open world adventure game? Keep it out.
Though something like Mount and blade, where you have "separate" battle locations and your weapons would wear during fights but automaticly restored between them, it is is completely sound game mechanic.
Then you can have some overly realistic, say, mercenary simulator strategy, where managing resources to repair arms and armor, feeding and paying your company is a core mechanic.
Lastly, we have famous Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim. It is beyond boring to level the Smithing skill in Skyrim, but it is as well a MASSIVE way to improve your character. If they didn't take away the equipment-breaking mechanics from previous games - it would be a way to constantly advance in this skill instead of making thousands of daggers and hundreds of dwemer bows.
And on the previous game, Oblivion, as you can't make your own items or improve those you have, the repair mechanic is boring and tedious.
@@dilen754 I think smithing could be done better in general without a repair function or at the least have the repair function be different than just outright breaking, maybe having blades get blunt and doing less damage but still be usable. Smikthing could be more involved and be more like say fallout 4 where you do specific things like adding langets to polearms or adding a nagel. Things that dont outright make weapons op. Like shad said in his vid, damage in games is already not realistic so in a better damage system smithing could be more like designing a weapon and forging the metal to have better edge retention.
@@devanpretorius451 I personally think the same way, it was just an example of how you can make the smithing skill less boring in that particular game with minimum efforts.
Personally I love the "modular" version more as well.
@@dilen754 But take the smiting in mount and blade, you have choices about what kind of weapon you want to smith, your decideing its stats.
Hmph!
I bet you don't even sharpen your hammers in real life.
The uncanny valley is kinesthetic as well as visual. The closer a game edges towards realism, the more unconsciously inclined a person is to use real world logic instead of game logic. When the game inevitably responds negatively to this, the player's connection to the experience is permanently damaged. It's even worse when the game covers subject matter you're familiar with.
Survival games are frequent offenders;
"Look Bill, this abandoned shed we cleared of zombies and looted three days ago is full of gardening tools again! What luck for zombie survivalists like ourselves! We can put these hoes, rakes, watering cans, and whatnot in our Loot Scrapping Machine, recast the assorted metal bits into high-grade alloy ingots in our solar powered crucible, and fashion high-tech automatic defense turrets to protect our hideout from other survivalists! Then we can loot their corpses for food! Here, Bill, put this pitchfork in your wooden backpack while I spend six minutes individually reloading each of my obsessively-detailed-and-textured Thomson SMG drum magazines one bullet at a time.
"You know, I feel like my vitamin B6 and leucine levels might have dropped a bit in the fifteen minutes since I last ate. I should probably eat that bacon and eggs I made and stuck in my pocket yesterday using ingredients I found in our rodent traps and pigeon nests. It was just about to go rotten anyway."
Tragically, Bill and his friend were killed the next day by a zombified Hooters waitress when momentarily distracted by a Colt 1851 Navy revolver w/ ACOG sight they had found in a cake shop.
This was one of the issues I had with Kingdom Come Deliverance. It was so realistic to a point that I did not find it enjoyable
Kingdom Come Deliverance did weapon maintenance well in my view. If your sword was damaged, you didn't bash it with a hammer. You took it to a grinding wheel, and there was even a mini game involved where you would grind the sword at a perfect angle to get the right amount of sparks instead of smoke to repair the edge.
It made you feel invested in the maintenance in a good way.
There is a balance that is needed but I think having optional survival modes like in skyrim anniversary or fallout games works well turn it on if you want it, and off if it gets annoying. Options are king in RDR2 they should have had a skip animations you have seen before option.
Added note many of the players skin with there horse on the animal to skip animations, after you have seen the realism for the thousanth time some people don't have all day to watch animations over and over and over as they only have a couple hours to play. More options is always better I didn't mind the animations in RDR2 but it can get tedious for many.
Yeah, if so many games have a difficulty slider, why can't we have a realism slider too?
no.
@@simonrockstream care to explain why players shouldn't have control over the level of realism in a game?
I should clarify that I didn't literally mean a slider
@@metalman6698 I just don't remember any realism being annoying in red dead. What do you want to skip? The skinning animations?
That just seems like a lot of work to make an animation light option to please a few people.
@@jamesfitzgerald1684 tbh I wasn't referring to RDR2. I was really referring more to survival games, or like in some Bethesda games where you can add in survival elements if you want them.
i felt the thirsty/hungry thing. But theres a really good and realistic game called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead and your hunger meter is really just your stomach capacity meter so it goes down quickly but you can actually survive for really long times without eating or drinking, only suffering some stat drawbacks if it goes on too long, what it does have a problem with though is your armour overheating you
what about Minecraft ?
I find epic how humans in Minecraft can regenerate if they don't feel hungry...
No magic needed , just a biological miracle . I get stabbed and i am about to die ? then eat , you wont be instantly healed like Skyrim . But you will start to regen like Wolverine
@@Dan_Kanerva "I'm bleeding out." *Eats a carrot, "Ah, that's better, my wounds are healing."
C:DDA really picks and chooses its realism. On one hand you have the survival mechanics, vehicle physics, individual pockets and carry capacity, and other stuff, while on the other you have zombies, cyborgs, superpower mutations, and mushrooms, and that's not even including the optional mods that come with the game.
@@AnotherDuck having zombies in a zombie game is kinda necessary
@@pinkliongaming8769 That depends on your definition. For the zombie survival game genre, you don't need zombies. Just some zombie-like analogue. It's beside the point, though.
5:36 That's just the first shrine. It was difficult to find materials on the great plateau. I never ran out of weapons after that though because there are so many lying around.
I don’t think there’s a right or wrong answer to this question. It’s subjective from the viewpoint of the person. Me, I love sims. Being a real world horseman and rancher, and loving everything to do with the old west, I absolutely loved RDR2 because it was an immersive experience. But again, that’s my opinion and preference. Not everyone shares it.
Another example, and a hardcore flight simmer. There’s a huge community who love to get in a plane and fly and blow stuff up without having much thought or realism involved. That’s why you have games like war thunder or ace combat. Then there’s people like me who want it to be as realistic as possible without being in the actual aircraft. For us; we have games like DCS and Xplane.
End of the day, there’s no right or wrong answer for how much realism is too much or not enough, there’s just the answer that’s right for you.
Imo red dead 2 wasn't made for people who play fast. It's kinda like playing an elderscrolls game but only doing the main quest and then complaining that the game is too short.
Rdr2 wants you to interact with the world and male your own discoveries. It encourages you to take your time and look at little details by making the game so slow. One of the biggest pieces of evidence for this idea is the fact that playing fast makes the game bug the fuck out lmao. The gunplay is satisfying and cool but ultimately wasn't really the focus of the game! Looking around and solving little mysteries while being utterly immersed is what the game is about. You can have a perfectly fine amount of fun playing through rdr2 fast but I think that robs you of the game's beauty and artistic value..
Another good example of games encouraging you to play slowly is arma3. Game is janky as hell and hard to control because it wants you to think tactically as if you where a soldier and shit.. idfk i never played it get off my back lmao
I liked this "stream highlights" format. Would like to see it more
5:48
It's like a super meter or a transformation meter in games, I legit beat both Darksiders 1 and 2 without using the transformation, because I thought "but what if i need it for a potential second phase, or a follow up boss right after this one"
The most annoying thing with weapon degradation is when it's dialed up way to high IMHO. Most games with gun degradation are completely overdoing it: a pistol/rifle doesn't go bad after a few hundred shots fired and there sure is no need to replace any parts in that timeframe. It wouldn't be so bad if you didn't have to go back to some mechanic or search for parts after this short time. A cleaning mechanic would be much better in terms of realism and frustration IMHO. Just keep your gun clean and it'll degrade very slowly, don't clean it and it'll degrade a bit faster and get progressively more unreliable. Game designers really like to abuse this mechanic as a cheap way to drain player resources and i hate it.
A survival game called "The Long Dark" kinda has this. There is no "Repair kit", just a gun cleaning kit, and as you use it more and more (both weapon and kit) you repair more and lose less durability. Also, since it's a winter wilderness survival game, the level of degredation that your weapons suffer is...not realistic, but at least explainable. (Poor user skill, handmade ammunition, extreme cold, etc.)
Edit for grammar/spelling
Wdym by overdoing the gun degradation? Less realism or what?
But i think there are games that don't dial it too high
@@caesar7786 Yeah kind of. It's less realistic, but the main point is that it's annoying as hell. There are some games that do it right, but there are many more that abuse gun degradation (and similar degradation mechanics) as a cheap way to keep the player busy. I liked the way some S.T.A.L.K.E.R. mods (not the vanilla/base game) have implemented these cleaning/degradation systems where it gives you multiple options for keeping your stuff in good shape (consumables/mechanic/spare parts/etc).
@@vatterger but isn't this video talking about how much realism is too much? If it's less realistic but more fun, then it's an advantage..but does this have anything to do with being less realistic & more fun or not? Or it's actually hard & annoying?
@@vatterger well, don't play games that overdo the gun degradation, then, lol..play other games
I absolutely loved alchemy with mortar and pestle and sharpening swords in Kingdom Come Deliverance
my favorite type of your videos, always watch such things to the end
A lot of times, even if "fast travel" is available, I still like walking around and exploring the world, I got myself in a lot of trouble in Fallout and Elder Scrolls.
Me too! I was always getting bounced by trolls and spriggans as I strolled around Cyrodiil picking alchemy ingredients.😋
@@andrewshaughnessy5828 yeah, I discovered a Death Claw nest in the rock quarry just ten minutes after starting New Vegas.
That blacksmith scene was chef’s kiss! “Gotta make the magics stick!”
I think the Problem with realism is often that it is just tacked on instead of integrated into the gameplay itself. And as Games tend to follow a different logic this creates all sort of weird ludo-narrative disconnects. I always find that what is the most weird in these games is how they handle time in game, especially within Fantasy. I hate open world games where time just does not matter. Like Someone tells about this big world-ending threat that is coming and you are just "Cool story- imma go in the other direction and collect 500 rat pelts and the day before the attack I will just churn out 200 greatswords in one sitting". Why not attach realistic time frames to stuff (while still being one-click instant build) and have that aspect of it be a mechanic in itself. Who cares if I have to sit for a week to recover from an injury when I can use that time to do stuff I would do anyways? Want to craft an absurd amount of cod-pieces? Sure go ahead I just hope nothing bad happens in the 3 Months it takes you to do this...
That is one thing that annoys me in some games. A Bad Thing is going to happen, we have to hurry! Wait, some people in the other direction need help milking their goats, I'll do that for a while.
If a game is going to make it sound like you have limited time to take of a problem, then make time matter! Have a village burned down because you took to long. Then another if you don't pick up the pace. People start turning against you because you're not helping. Have *consequences.*
Fable 3 was really bad example of this, the threat was comeing and you needed cash to fight it off only time only moved when wen you said to.
So you save the world by getting a job or becoming a land lord.
I was in a D&D game once, where the DM would ask us to roleplay out finding a place to relieve ourselves every time we stopped to camp for the night. That was a little too personal and took some of the fun out of the game. Conversely, in a Werewolf game I was going to roleplay a minor ritual on behalf of another character and another player yelled at me, “Shut up! You have it, you do it, LET’S GO!!”
I don't mind durability mechanics, so long as things don't break too quickly, and they can be repaired in the field with tools, like in TES4 Oblivion and Witcher 3.
The Outer Worlds handled this well, in my opinion. Your weapon and gear lasted a long time and ijt was fairly easy to repair them in the field when you felt that you needed to do so. It also didn't cost any or much in game money, just resources which pretty easy to come by.
Breath of the wild was kind of ruined for me cause all the cool weapons broke so quickly.
@@crimsoncherry3525 Same... It was a struggle for me to even finish, was just unfun. Never touched it again afterwards.
What about Fire Emblem?
But I can't sharpen my hammer in Witcher or Oblivion!
speaking of RDR2, it's funny they have the Volcanic pistol, which didn't even last a year in the 1850s, but they don't have any Remington 1875s, cartridge converted Colt 1860s or pocket derringers
Death stranding is a perfect example of too much realism.
This was a very interesting discussion to be a part of on the livestream. Everybody in the chat had cool opinions and insights.
Back in my day...
When Grand Terismo came out on the PS I was so excited to play it b/c like you said I am not going to be a professional racer. Turns out you had to do all this work to get your license in order to earn some money to buy the crappiest car 😂. Isn't that the life I was escaping?
I liked that part of the game.
That surprise Cara cuddle attack was really well timed. Much realism!
About the Lion King remake, quick tangent, I think it failed because it didn't commit *enough*.
If they really wanted to commit to that choice, they should have done it fully like a documentary without characters speaking or chanting etc and have a narrator tell the story at times. Can keep the unrealistic character interractions to have an interresting story yeah but just commit to your choice.
Might not have been good, but it would have been consistent and wouldn't have had to be compared to the original constantly
Hired David Attenborough. "HERE we see the lions... The young cub runs ACROSSSSS the savanna..."
I loved red dead 2 and the pacing of it.
Normally in games i fast travel around or drive at 300mph which is fine, but RDR2 was the first game in a long time that i just immersed myself in the world and took things slow, i'd just walk through the towns, have a bath, get my guns cleaned at the store, sell all the pelts i got whilst hunting etc. i see a lot of complaints about it being too slow but i think it was perfect.
I think if you want to enjoy red dead, don't have urgency or expect to rush through it like all the typical games these days, just enjoy it and pretend you're in the world.
I also turned off the music so i could hear animals whilst hunting.
But also when i play fallout i play in survival mode and i use survival settings mod and i reduce how often i have to drink/eat cos its not fun doing that all the time and i turn fast travel on and autosaves every 5 mins (cos lets be honest, bethesda games are too buggy to have to only save when you sleep) so i don't want that from all my games but it was nice for RDR2 to change up the pace and slow you down and make you appreciate the amazing world they created.
But yes i agree that realism can be taken too far.
I play games to escape reality :P or i'd just do it in real life.
Like the weapon maintenance system in red dead where it's more of a cleanliness system. a well maintained weapon will take a VERY VERY long time to "wear out" when used properly
I LOVE the random hug from Cara, just so cute and spontaneous, we don't see her enough in your video's anymore
Hard to say. Do you really want to see a bladder break bar? In general, I enjoy the survival open world games with wide open spaces to explore.
only if theres something to explore?
Not a simulator regarding bodily functions but a simulator regarding survival crafting for instance. So really not small stuff put there to pretend it's something complex but really complex systems in place, where the world is the game, the main character and the player is the one single odd duck able to play with it, so it needs to react to the player's actions in whatever meaning the player intends to change it. If i'm going in the forest to hunt, maybe io want to set traps not just shoot with a rifle you buy, maybe i want or need to craft a bow and arrows, maybe i want to just cut trees and build something or sell the wood.
There are many games RDR being one of the finest that have big adn beautiful world but are all barren, finish the scripted things and it's boring. Why build these fine world if you can;t do stuff in them? Like the single player story line should really be more as an intro, a tutorial even. After that you can play how you want. Be a farmer, a trader, a hunter, trapper, a politician, bandit, sheriff and whatnot. Live in that world. An RPG doesn't need points and skills to unlock or farm, an RPG is a game where you can take any role in that world when you want, you have the systems available so you can influence the matters of that world.
No, but I would like the option to sharpen my bladder.
I think adding all aspects to a function in a game that intends to make it more realistic is a great idea, as long as the process is sped up. Lets say your making a boat, well you tell a squire to gather your men, a background timer starts with, lets say 3 days on it, you can either press a button to wait or go do something else, like cook your dinner for the night, you would go to the kitchen press a button to cook it and a sped up 2 hour timer starts, and in 5 seconds you got dinner and 2 hours have passed on the timer. Or alternatively you could have pressed the wait button, and all your basic needs would be done automatically as you wait the 3 days for your men to arrive, and any events that happen could stop the waiting process to let you do the event, or you could stop it manually. Basically a game where you do all the important stuff but CAN do the boring stuff if you wish, but you also have the option to let it be done automatically for you while you wait for things to happen. That way your game is ultra realistic, while keeping it fast paced and you dont have to worry about all the nonsense like having to go to the bathroom etc. but it would still be a function of the game where it COULD have an impact on your actions but likely wont if you dont want it to.
This isn't such a hard question, people nowadays kinda forgot what games are supposed to be, and they mistake them for simulators. To be fair the market isn't putting in any effort to separate the various software available and lumps games and simulators together.
When you mentioned eating to heal it reminded me, in Breath of the Wild you can make food that heals you completely but you can also make a potion with the same effect so I find myself going to this one place where there are lizards with the full restore effect because I don't want Link to be swallowing whole cakes in the middle of a fight, I'll make the foods with other effects and eat em outside of combat because it's just fun to see Link happy though.
Thats why Witcher 3 is the perfect game.
big map, small enough to be properly filled with fast travel, blade degradation no too invasive AND FIXABLE ON THE GO , potions that recover with easy to find ingredients, but you have to properly manage...
I like this "stream highlights" type of video.
And I guess it saves you time so you don't have to film 2 videos per week, and it keeps the mighty algorithm satisfied =)
Got in a discussion with another Red Dead player once who hated on every game that wasn't realistic. He left the discussion when I calculated how much weight in ammunition his character carries with him. Out of pure lazyness I just calculated with the weight of .22 but in the end the character still has over 20kg (44lbs) of ammunition in its pokets and then we haven't talked about the other stuff (the lamp, knives, throwing axes, loot like watches, rings, etc. small animal carcases, food and booze). Hell, if you gained enough treasure maps or letters even the paperweight would become noticeable, but somehow then the realism became unconvenient 😁
this is why i like games where pocket dimension magic exists in its lore.
Carrying near infinite things in your inventory makes sense then
That DOES explain why he can only swim 50 feet before drowning. 😁
Alchemy in kindom come deliverance springs to mind, this is deffo my kind of content thanks for the work you put in dude.
Game should always have strong internal consistency with their other mechanics, and their lore/setting. This is the realism I care about. If the lore says X behaves like Y, it should behave like that in game too (within gameplay limitations). If lore says X always leads to Y, then X should not arbitrarily fail to reproduce Y. i.e.: Multiple casts of Lesser Restoration will perfectly heal you even if your strength was reduced to 0 from 18 (even if they lost 18 strength due to a master duelist critting their arms/legs into noodles, cutting off all tendons/ligaments, severing muscle fibers)- so, from natural causes a character should NOT suffer unhealable muscle tears, tendons just because "story says so." You want to inflict unhealable muscle damage? Justify it - a magical curse, fragments (from arrow head, stone, wood) got in the way and need to be surgically removed before healing can occur.
But don't do bullshit like my former DM who gave the party archer a permanent, unhealable muscle tear that not even Miracle could fix... because she rolled natural 20 to hold onto the railing during a large wave aboard our ship.
Wait... she got punished for rolling well? Wtf...
@@adambielen8996 Sounds like an old school "players vs DM" type of DM who uses rule zero to win against the players.
@@AnotherDuck Sounds like the type of DM I'd just walk out on.
@@adambielen8996 Yep.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance has a nice mechanic for equipment condition: of course things take damage and lose value (also less effective which is the generic thing), but if you are muddied/bloodied, it affects your charisma and how people respond to you. Unfortunately, the only way to clean a bloody weapon is to repair/sharpen it, which is pretty funny considering how realistic that game tries to be.
As a superhero fan I have reached the point where "realism" makes me wake up at night in a cold sweat.
Yeah, superhero physics are too stretchy for 'realism'. When I'm running a superhero tabletop rpg consistency in decisions and plausibility matters more since players still need to know what to expect.
@@Bhoddisatva I've just had it up to here with grim and gritty "realistic" superheroes stories.
I like the recipe analogy. How much and what makes a difference.
I like it when Mrs. Grim show up. She doesn't do it too often and it's very sweet.
That thumbnail 🤣🤣🤣
I think that kingdom come:deliverance has the perfect level of realism.
My threshold is actually pretty low. I MUCH prefer the realism of Gothic/Morrowind which is basically SUPER low cause I know how much more heart and effort will go into the feel of the game 💪🙏
Morrowind is more realistic than most open world games in some important ways, like not having GPS quest markers and actually having to follow directions and signs. Gothic has some of the most appreciated realism for me in its writing - its complex, brutal world and grey morality. Like Skallagrim said, realism isn't just grindey or otherwise tedious mechanics.
@@boredgunner it's actually more challenging & fun, but it's not really a bad thing if they're less realistic if more fun..but wdym by open world games? You mean open world SURVIVAL games?
It depends..realism can be immersive, but can also be tedious & boring as hell
@@caesar7786 Open world story driven games is what I meant. Morrowind is one of relatively few that doesn't have GPS quest markers, you have to actually navigate. Amusingly though, at least one character gives you wrong directions but hey, it happens. Unintended realism!
@@boredgunner i think that's one of the very few types of realism i would like, but in many times, it could be annoying though, so i prefer an open world game that has GPS quest marker..i mean, it's supposed to be fun & enjoyable, not realistic but annoying. So it's not rlly a bad thing at all if open world story games outside it are less realistic if it's more fun & enjoyable, those are the most important things in games, not extra realism
Wdym by "it happens" tho?
@@caesar7786 GPS quest markers turn the fun of travelling and path finding into a "hold forward to win" minigame, which is a lot less fun.
I love the way that the chromakeyed backdrop makes part of your partners' chest see-through :D
It's a nice meta-commentary on realism *nods*
I can tell you easily: When you start describing the bowel movements of characters, you've gone too far. Looking at you, George RR Martin.
i also really like when the realism is added as a challenge mode or toggeable setting like fallouts survival mode where you need to add water food and sleep and ammo has weight so you have to plan your quests and loadouts accordingly
Weapon durability is something I can agree to reee on, whenever I play Fallout 3/NV I just use the console commands to get around it. I find it rather silly when I have to carry like, 10 of the same gun to keep it working after it breaks in 150 rounds.
On the other hand I don't mind RDR2's system of cleaning the guns, because that's actually sensible compared to apparently needing to completely rebuild the thing after every use.
Personally I found rdr2's system a bit annoying just because of how they were selling the whole game as if travelling around the world was going to be more engaging etc, and then talk about weapon condition, but in reality how you travelled had almost negligible impact on the condition of your weapon and it was mainly time. Alongside that, the condition of the weapons would barely ever impact the actual performance, often not hitting any damage breakpoints, or having bad enough accuracy to cause issues. Looked weird to walk around cleanly and guns just get mud on them, yet roll around in the mud with a clean gun and barely anything has happened etc.
With rdr2 being pretty big with roleplay, and having so many weapons on you, I wish they actually went way more hardcore with it, but having less of it be affected solely by time. I wish the durability was implemented in a way to make people travel more smartly, avoiding just diving into rivers willy nilly etc. Even if fixing the condition of the weapon was basically free, it would feel a lot more realistic if guns actually got dirty based on what you were doing, rather than just time, which is a big issue with 'durability' in many games. Usually its just a really long timer, that isn't impacted much by how you play (or atleast, players don't have any agency in making it reduce less or more based on how they play).
@@johntravoltage959 Yeah, that would be a better way of handling how condition is effected.
Weapon durability is always way OTT in games anyhow. Like you ain't gonna loose a sword after 5 swings. Maybe after 5 years
That hug was the cutest ❤️
Love this for you
I do want more realism in games, in the sense that you can really roleplay. So what there is a huge area that's empty? I mean, what's empty is a matter of debate. If the systems of the game are complex enough any "empty " area can be played with, like in real life.
I think it's a cool idea to play in a medieval setting or preistoric and whatnot, some time in the past. Where they societies in the game are at that historical level and the systems of the game let you do pretty much anything so you with current ideas and knowledge can create "magic". In a realistic setting it's up to you to find out how can you mine and craft modern stuff starting from nothing, in a preistoric setting. That's pretty much playing with an empty space.
But then again, how about other aspects such as laws and social rules? Sure the way crime and punishment is portrait in RDR2 is better than other games but i wouldn't call it realistic. You know, getting wanted level in the middle of nowhere and no witnesses at all, or at least none alive. I think it could be fun to have a type of simulation in that aspect too. More difficult to get away in in a modern setting but something probably more fun to play with in a less advanced setting where DNA stuff or fingerprints is not yet a thing. But in that setting it would be still cool i think, a type of avoiding the law simulation, stuff like Dexter and whatnot. A modern manhunt game should be just that i think, serial killer simulator but within a realistic society with very competent systems for people and police, evidences, trials and whatnot.
If you don't mind it looking like someone ported ultima III to a modern system with quick "upgraded" graphics, Unreal World might interest you from what you put down. It's about teenagers, freezing to death in the woods until it's not.
I disagree with Red Dead having too much realism. I actually enjoy how realistic it is because it reminds me of my experiences in the outdoors and with guns and stuff.
I played Skyrim as if it's a walking simulator. 😂😂😂
Same, i really loved walking from Solitude to Whiterun while killing everything along the way.
The thing about realism in ark that you hinted at (pooping, constant thirst and hunger, overencumbrance,...) is:
That's actually a valuable game mechanic! It makes you think, learn, find ways to solve the problem, requires you to be prepared.
And sure in the early game it's a pain in the ass to constantly need water and berry's to stay alive. But late game you FEEL, really feel, the progress once you learned to prepare, got 1 or 2 canteens full of water, some handcrafted food that keeps you replenished for long or even gives you great buffs... When you suddenly can go out and about and tackle every environment with ease.
That progression is only possible because of the problems earlier. And thus, realism in games that offer that kind of progression is valuable I think. Because you can learn to deal with it. And that learning curve makes it interesting and fun.
I personally enjoyed the level of realism in RDR2. I actually liked the realism of having to loot every item individually and also the way skinning and loading your horse. It just felt substantial and it was not overdone in my opinion.
Haven't watched both videos yet but the fact Skall posts something about too much realism in video games, a mere couple hours after Shad posts about having realism in games... It's so comedic
I hated redemption 2, found everything slow and the story is over rated in my opinion. but I'm not completely hating "realism" since I recently played trough kingdom come deliverance and liked it. the story isn't original there either but at least I found the gameplay fun
I'm just mad that RDR2 online had so much untapped potential. Like Where is the horse taming and selling. I expected a GTA set in the old west. Instead, we got, well something that resembles but without all the content.🤷
And you can't even sharpen your guns!
Before I even watch far in, ngl, clicked for the ARK poop I saw in the thumbnail/mouseover preview. Thousands of hours, that part never gets old lol.
Context!! As an example red dead turns it up Alot but I think it fits for red dead, but I'm glad they didn't go for that same level for ghost of Tsushima
"Sitting there for minutes looking at the character doing one task." You just described 90% of what it is like to play Runescape lol yet for some reason I absolutely love it. I've legit spent hours sitting at my computer watching my character doing one task and I often wonder why is this so enjoyable to me lol
The realism of Red Dead Redemption sadly had little connection to it's gameplay. It had plenty of survival and crafting mechanics, temperature management, hunting, detailed looting ect. But the impact of all these mechanics were too shallow to even matter. Items didn't impact the gameplay enough to matter a lot, death had close to no consequence, the gameplayloop was centered around the action and the adventure not the struggle to survive. So all the bloated realism and mechanics just got in the way of the core gameplay experience instead of adding to it in a significant way. I always though it could have been an interesting experience in it's own right to live in that world with a real weight on the survival mechanics.
yeah that's like the biggest problem with rdr2's overfocusing on minor details because in the end, literally none of it matters
food and drink are just glorified powerups that you have to navigate rockstar's legendarily bad UI for, at any moment outside of a mission you can hop into a grocery store and spend an insignificant fraction of the absurd amount of money you have to stuff your inventory with canned food making hunting and foraging completely useless, there is realistically no purpose to the temperature system because you will rarely ever do anything in the mountains making dressing lightly objectively better and all the core gameplay is just an arcadey cover shooter anyway with call of juarez-esque speedreloads that completely takes you out of the illusion that this is supposed to be a realistic world
That's interesting; I thought this was gonna be a discussion video on the matter, not a compilation of moments from that old livestream. But hey, it's pretty cool that you included my comment on certain "unrealistic" just being realistic things that're executed wrong.
Anyways, I've always seen realism not as *one* ingredient you put an amount of in a fictional work, but rather as a *collection* of ingredients you pick and choose which ones you put in your overall dish; there's a reason we have the term "selective realism" after all.
Na I disagree RDR2 was awesome the realism is partly what made it so good. Plus some tasks weren't that tedious I don't think. Kingdom Come Deliverance in my opinion is what too much but again some people enjoy the video game for that reason.
Sheriffs showing up out of nowhere while I was deep in the wilderness bothered me more than most of the "realism". As well as how I had to keep going into the menu because my guy would put weapons away, so they weren't ready when I needed them.
Hydroneer has some realism, but also keeps it fun and engaging. Starting with the most basic items to gather ore to sell, all the way up to having a full-on mining operation. Machines require maintenance too, like water filters breaking so you need to have repair kits at the ready.
Never enough; people just use "too much realism" as excuses for lack of effort/talent/money.
I guess the people who make DMC and Bayonetta are the ultimate effortless/talentless/moneyless game developers.
Or people want to have fun instead of seeing some arbitrary thing that’s value wears off once you’ve seen it a million times
@@BaldorfBreakdowns So you admit they used "too much realism" excuse?
Or people can skip animations...etc.
@@EcchiRevenge No. When you say certain things, there is an opposite implication that you may not realize you are making.
I'm addressing that opposing implication.
If there is never enough realism, then games that aren't realistic are inherently lazy and talentless.
I don't see how anyone could ever say DMC or Bayonetta are too realistic...
I like cataclysm:dda. This uncertainity when im low on resources but really need an armor, only to find out im going to forge the helmet alone for over 3 days, but zombie dinos wont fight themself... Only regular dinos ... And then they turn into zombies... But doing biodiesel of their fat is fun... Its fuuun...
In the witcher 1 you get a wierd eye floater camera effect when your toxicity reaches 50% percent. That made potions almost unsuable for me because it gave me terrible simulation sickness. It's a nice idea to give you a warning when your character is about to die, but it's not helpful when it actually causes your character to die.
1:55 You described perfectly when you start a new game in 7 Days and don't have the Iron Gut skill to allow food and water to fill you up longer.
"The magics will drip out when you need it!" That was pure gold!
The sharpening in Monster Hunter adds a new element of tension and resourse management to the gameplay.
Do i want to run away right now and sharpen? Or do i just soldier on with reduced damage until the monster retreats? Alternatively, do i just return to monkee and sharpen mid fight?
Plus if the fight happens in an "arena" like Fatalis' fight, where there is nowhere to run to...
It's actually more challenging & really fun..idk how to describe it though
Re: Thumbnail
Years ago, my friend and I used to play Assassin's Creed 1. When you ride on a horse, the camera was set at a really bad angle because I could easily imagine the horse blasting farts at the camera each time it gallops and lift both hind legs. It's that horrifying.
Speaking of time compression. I liked in the Stronghold games how everything was constructed crazy fast in typical RTS style gameplay, but the moment an enemy soldier entered a certain radius of any of your units or structures, the passing of time slowed down to a pretty realistic scale, even though said units weren't moving any slower or faster, they simply paused the abstraction of building castle walls, constructing supplies, armor, and weapons, and training new units.
That's a great way to do it, for sure.