@whitequark M203 vs M320 sights are accurate, the M320 is cooler in every way. I qualified on both, 203 is a lot nicer to carry but the 320 is way better when shooting!
the game models ricochet off enemy armor and hard surfaces
seriously, don't shoot at the concrete floor
if a sentry (which fire tracers) fires at the concrete floor at a shallow angle bc there's enemies in that direction, all of the rounds go up in the sky and light it up this is so pretty holy shit
you can zero your sights on rifles (but not e.g. the revolver) for 25m, 75m, and 150m. you can also switch full/semi/auto of course
the grenades from your automatic grenade launcher will ricochet off hard surfaces as well! but only if you shoot at them at a shallow angle
if you hit an enemy in front of you, it hits the grenade's fuze, and it explodes (it doesn't have short range safety i guess. which is kind of weird actually!)
if you hit a hard surface in front of you at a shallow angle it'll bounce away and hit something in a completely unrelated place
you have four stances (moving / standing / crouching / prone) and your accuracy, especially with high recoil guns like machine guns, is affected by it. don't run and shoot! you won't hit anything. well, you might hit an enemy's armor and the ricochet might hit your teammate
there are many places with fog, and there is night. sources of light scatter off fog and cause glare at night. in some places, this makes it almost impossible to do the task without turning the lights off first
i have never seen a game which so expertly takes the affordances and limitations that a keyboard and a screen provides, and uses the fact that your attention is limited under stress to create challenges
a lot of games try. this one succeeds in making it look and feel natural and seamless. i fucking love suffering in it
another game that comes to mind here is receiver 2, which is also about gunplay, and which also simulates an environment where everything hates you and wants you to die (i.e. something relaxing), but it's a completely different genre and type of game. plus it's less focused on teamwork and splitting your attention under stress and more on perfection for the sake of it
with rifles, if you reload, you discard your old magazine. nobody has time to repack rounds when you only have 40 minutes to finish it all
but with a shoulder fired autocannon, you load it with clips! so what happens is: if you fired every round, you load two clips into it and then charge. if you fired over five, you load one. if you fired less, you can't reload it
every single reload animation is comprised of multiple steps (remove old mag, insert new, charge if necessary) and you can interrupt it at any point to e.g. switch to your secondary. the game remembers the state of your weapon; e.g. if the only thing remaining was to charge it, your character will just do that
to call in support, you use a beacon that you configure by pressing UDLR. if your teammate does this, you can see their character using their finger to type it in
the beacon is a proper physics object. it bounces, rolls, and drops. think about where you're throwing it!
the physics, needless to say, hates you
both your character and every one of your enemies are modelled down to the level of individual limbs, with movement actuated by moving said limbs. no limb = less movement
the game features a decent amount of terminals. you configure most of them with a touchscreen. if someone shoots you in the middle of using a terminal, the current state of a terminal, including an unfinished command, remains there and your teammate can finish your input
have i mentioned that everything in the game is trying to kill you? it's so good. i use it to relax before sleep. gives me way fewer nightmares
@whitequark alright, this entire thread but especially that last part might have sold me on it. I usually can’t stand multiplayer games anymore but fewer nightmares would be great.
@aud you can solo it too if you REALLY hate yourself. i generally only play with friends because a bunch of people get Weird about all the satirical patriotism they don't realize is satirical
@whitequark ahhhhh good to know. I probably hate myself enough to try it solo because I literally can’t commit to any schedule to even bother trying to find a group to play with, but it does sound like a lot of the fun is in emergent moments of multiplayer
it has the roguelike difficulty curve. the difficulty levels are 1 to 9. i can reliably solo 2/9. i can reliably do 3/9 with one teammate. i can sometimes do 4/9 with one teammate.
the game hates me every single step of the way i love it so much T____T
the jump in difficulty from 1 to 2 is staggering. so is from 2 to 3. so is from 3 to 4. i've never even tried difficulty 5 because after playing a single round at difficulty 4 i'm covered in so much sweat i need to shower
@whitequark wildest thing is that all these things that would drive normal people up the wall in something like arma here are played up for laughs and you just respawn like a minute later
Bonus: The punishment for "deserting" and leaving the map is done by the same imprecise artillery fire as your call ins, so if you are lucky you can survive it and maybe even kill some bugs with it
@whitequark I think this part at least is common to model, even though the other things aren’t. Apex has this (with the same 3 steps you mentioned here, I believe) and that’s really not about crunchy weapons.
@porglezomp I think it got more common recently, yeah. I don't actually play a lot of games with firearms so I don't have broad exposure. it's just that I know the older ones don't
@whitequark BF4 does some minimal version of this - I think it tracks one step in the middle (e.g. is the mag in but not loaded yet) for some weapons, but that is legitimately impressive
@whitequark The Long Dark has a well modeled rifle in this regard. It's an old Lee-Enfield that takes two five-round stripper clips in a ten round mag.
On the rare occasions you find enough ammo to reload five or ten rounds at a time you'll use 1-2 clips. For anything else, you're pushing in single rounds one at a time.
But we're talking post-apocalyptic survival here, not FPS, so ammo is scarce and combat is best avoided. The bow and arrow is much more renewable (not infinitely as maple saplings for the bow and birch for the arrow shafts spawn in finite quantity in the game world, but they're far less scarce than ammo and materials for crafting more).
@whitequark (TLD seems like your kind of game... In survival mode everything is trying to kill you, including the weather. Except some of the animals you can eat)
@whitequark Speaking of weather it's quite realistically modeled since it's one of your main threats (hypothermia will kill you faster than pretty much anything but a bear or wolf attack).
There's an ambient temperature plus wind chill and precipitation. Every piece of clothing has a certain level of insulation and windproofness, as well as waterproofness. Wet clothing is far less warm and also can soak through to layers underneath.
Skin left exposed to freezing weather, or touching wet clothing that's left outside long enough to freeze, can develop frostbite which gives you a permanent health reduction.
Carrying a heat source warms you slightly, but road flares are non renewable and extremely scarce, oil for your lamp has to be looted or rendered from cooked fish, and torches can be blown out by the wind.
Oh, and clothing wears over time and can be damaged by animal attacks, snagging on things during a fall, etc. And can be repaired with a sewing kit or (more slowly) with crafted materials. And worn clothing has less insulation etc.
@whitequark Closest I've seen to that so far is america's army 2.x (never played the newer versions much/at all so can't comment):
When reloading a magazine-fed weapon with one in the chamber, you get an extra round (e.g. 30+1 for an M16)
The bolt-action M24 sniper rifle models individual-round reloading correctly
Removed mags are kept and counted, so you might reload after an intense firefight and have only a bunch of half-full mags
Grenades from the M203 have a short range safety and won't go off if they hit something too close
The RPG-7 and AT-4 correctly model projectile self-destruct, if you fire off into open space far enough away the round blows up mid flight at some set distance. They also model drop and have adjustable-range sights, as does IIRC the M320 in AA3 (but not the M203 in AA2).
The M9 pistol slide locks back on an empty mag and your character does a "slingshot" slide release. Can't remember if they modeled this for the M4/16 or not.
Breathing is modeled reasonably well.
But there's some bugs too: IIRC if the pistol jams on the last round in the mag, the slide will drop rather than locking back after you eject the dud cartridge. And I think the reload animation for the (belt fed) M249 doesn't show a partial-length belt if you have only a handful of rounds left, although I think they do have two animations for reloading from "mostly full" and "empty".
@whitequark They also model three stances (standing/crouching/prone) plus movement with accuracy affected by each, as well as a bipod you can deploy when prone to get maximum accuracy.
Accuracy is also impacted by health status and heart rate, so for example if you sprint somewhere then dive into prone, or have a whole bunch of enemy fire narrowly miss you, your accuracy will be garbage for a bit.
@whitequark The damage model for all of the AA games was pretty good as well, you'd take some initial damage on a hit then a lot more over time from bleeding (the percentage of each would depend on the type of injury and where you got hit).
You have a field dressing you can apply to slow (but not completely stop) bleeding but a medic-trained teammate has to treat you to fully stop it.
Rounds will go through players or many objects in the game world although they lose energy and IIRC might deflect slightly.
@whitequark IIRC AA3 also improved the damage model to account for limb vs torso hits having different effects on your performance (e.g. a leg injury, even if treated, reduces your movement speed while an arm injury impacts your accuracy more). But I could be wrong, I never played 3 much.
2.x had a single global HP value, the only time the damage model accounted for location was when calculating damage caused by a hit.
Oh, and grenades actually did (range limited) hitscan modeling for individual fragments to calculate damage, including reduction of damage by cover slowing down/blocking them.
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