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Comment by projektfu | Hacker News Reader

I started the article hoping it would be about making death and life-threatening situations more severe in games, both to make them a little more realistic as well as making them more difficult and requiring more strategy. I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you. Probably there is, but I don't play a lot of games anymore.

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> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.

first of all, there are plenty of games where the top tier of weapons can kill you instantaneously with a single headshot or even bodyshot.

the thing is, this concept is not particularly realistic. in real life, it is pretty rare for people to die instantaneously from a single shot. while there are a couple key points on the body where this can happen, usually people are going to bleed out over the course of minutes or hours. while this happens, the injured person can be anywhere between totally incapacitated and running around killing people, not even aware they've been hit. it's hard for me to see how this could be incorporated into a fun set of game mechanics. people like all kinds of different games, but in general I suspect they are looking for something a bit more deterministic than reality.

IIRC the very first Rainbow Six was aiming to achieve this. It felt realistic because you or team members could be wounded and required time to heal across missions, or could die. At some point though an invalidating bullet is statistically equivalent to death gameplay wise. Sadly attempts at simulating wounds were and still are generally implemented in a very simplistic way.

Lots of military shooters will kill you with one or two bullets. I've thought that what would really make a shooter "realistic" would be if players who get shot are maimed (rather than being able to run and jump just as well at 1% health as 100%). But who knows whether that would actually be fun.

Arma 3 does that. If your legs are hurt you still can move and the walking animation is the same, but the speed can be close to zero. if your arms are hurt, you cant shoot straight anymore. They also have a way better (whatever that might mean) visualiation of pain and dying than other shooters.

"Escape from Tarkov" is also praised for "feeling" realistic, but I can't say much on that.

All of that started with a mod for Quake 2 called Action Quake. You could break your legs by falling or bleed out, and had to bandage, that kind of thing. It was the predecessor to Counter Strike, which in turn birthed a lot of modern shooter mechanics.

I used to play Action Quake 2 for years pretty seriously. Looking at the gameplay videos of it now it looks so much like a pre-pre-alpha version of CS:GO still to this day.

Ive wanted a FPS bullet sponge game where one of the random enemies getting killed starts a flashback to everything thats gone wrong in their life to become a private military contractor after their wife said “its time to be realistic”

And then watch the memories fade in real time

that happening to a nonsignficant character

it's not exactly like that, but if you're looking for an FPS that makes you feel weird/bad about what you're doing, you should check out spec ops: the line.

How about this: the first hour of gameplay is fighting the terrorists, the next 100 is learning how to get food from your plate to your mouth again.

A game about physical therapy sounds interesting. Although I'm not sure how to adapt spending dozens of hours on the phone with insurances and billing centers.

I can suggest the recent Wolfenstein games.

There was a game on Steam a while ago that was an FPS with a limited pool of lives for all players to share, and wine the lives ran out, the game was shuttered. I believe the same company is working on a game that gives you one life, and then the game refuses to run again (without cheating I’d guess).

The truth is that sounds a bit stressful to me, and the reality of how online PvP frequently evolves I’d be surprised if it worked out long-term. Part of the joy of games is being able to try again and again and perfect your gameplay. A game that punishes exploration and growth sounds dull, not daring.

Go play you some old school Counter Strike - with a handgun containing 7 bullets, you can frag 7 players. Also, 1 other player with 1 bullet can frag you just as easily(or not, headshots are tricky).

> I've always thought that there should be an FPS where getting shot once is likely to kill you.

Real life simulators tend to be boring / tedious compared to mass market games. "Sniper: Ghost Warrior 3" is probably one of the least generous (as far as health goes) games I've tried to play, and it was tedious and boring. That's not to say one example means the idea is inherently as bad as that one game, but it does limit appeal significantly.

(Often the same FPS game will let you scale the difficulty from easy to something where being shot multiple times probably means death/restart/whatever.)

Ultimately it’s still not realistic because you can just go on playing another game after that.

I think most people spend their lives trying not to think about death in a realistic way.

In "You Only Live Once", a platformer Flash game, if you die, close the tab and return later, you are still dead.

Also "One Chance" on newgrounds. Similar concept.

Arma, Counter-Strike and Insurgency all fit that model and have each been around for 10-20 years with continual updates. Rainbiw Six used to fill that niche as well.

Did they remove those mechanics in Rainbow Six: Siege?

Siege is tuned towards esports. The TTK is still relatively low and it's very much a tactical game but it's not as brutal as the one-shot kills in RS3.

Perhaps more profound are games like Combat Mission or Graviteam Tactics, which try to simulate battalion and smaller level engagements. Even with save scumming, it's not uncommon for over 30% or even over 50% of your forces die or get seriously injured. It puts the realities of symmetrical warfare in context.

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