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[Tsuchigumo550]

For the discussion about making killing in an FPS unsatisfying: Dwarf Fortress's combat in Adventure mode would actually be pretty horrific to somebody who wasn't used to it. Fighting against human(oid) enemies isn't really unsatisfying, it's just that it's never as simple as stabbing them until they fall over and die cleanly. It's really a combination of the realistic combat and intense difficulty. Once you disable an opponent, you'd better move on to disabling the next one or you'll find yourself surrounded. Eventually, when all the bandits/kobolds/whatever are bleeding out and unable to fight back, it's a matter of going around and cutting their throats so that you can loot them and leave as quickly as possible. It's still fun in a certain sense of the word, but it's definitely grim.

It'd be harder to implement in an FPS, though. Maybe have it so that enemies aren't guaranteed to be die just because they fell down? They're out of the fight but still alive, moaning and clutching where you shot them. Since they're on the ground, you're less likely to notice them until after the fight's over, giving more time to notice that they're just lying in pain on the ground.

This wouldn't be a half bad system for games...

Health dosen't recover, take enough damage and you start taking damage over time (yes, taking damage damages you), and once you can't keep going you drop to the ground.

the enemy might have a chance to mercy-kill you. They will. But if they don't actually take the chance, there's a small window in which you can act before finally dying. Meaning, as you're bleeding out, you take a moment to gather your strength and thoughts, have about 15 seconds to very inaccurately and likely fail at shooting something with a pistol, and then die. Teammates will be able to pick you up from this stance but not instantly, you will have to be stabilized which will take time, then either evacuated (respawn somewhat faster) or retreated to a medbay area (where less time than either respawning or evac-respawn is done, note that a regular respawn is about 2 minutes and is time for strategizing, class-changing, editing, the like, whereas Medbay takes a minute or so on it's own).

This, in a common, hash-and-rehash "next gen" FPS. We've proven we can make the same damn thing every time on a shooter and the market is stagnating. Make something new, market is as CoD kiddies being completely fucking unable to handle anything new and directly insult the market to get any of us with brain cells left thinking.

The CoD kids have the same buying strategies as most casual gamers.

I can hear the high-pitched screams of prepubescent butthurt already.

[Krevsin]

Are we lumping CoD kids in with casual players now?

Yes they are part of the same market.

by this logic, buying anything puts you in the same market.

I know some casual gamers. nice people, like games, but simply do not have the time to invest themselves in anyting complex.

CoD players I know are, on the other hand, obnoxious people who will spend hours and hours playing CoD, developing skills that many would call hardcore.

so no, besides the whole "easy to grasp" thing, there really is not much common ground between CoDfans and Casuals.

[Neonivek]

CoD players I know are, on the other hand, obnoxious people who will spend hours and hours playing CoD, developing skills that many would call hardcore

Look... It doesn't matter how terrible they are. If devils walked the earth and ate babies but had the same buying tendencies as this living saint of holy and goodness, they are part of the same market.

As well "Casual" doesn't refer to how much you play. A lot of casual gamers put many hours into gaming.

The casual market are usually people with very low awareness of the medium and play games that are popular and preferring to stay away from complicated games or just games that have much of a learning curve (with some exceptions... Dark Souls and Demon Souls managed to appeal to the casual market... somehow)

[Vendayn]

Games that don't let you be fat, skinny or ugly. This goes for both males (that are almost always super buff) and female characters.

And sort of related to games.

How to have a successful game: Have a bunch of near nudity ads all over the place, that don't actually have anything to do with the game

[nenjin]

I was actually thinking about a 3rd person action game where you start as an overweight, awkward nobody, who through extraordinary circumstances is the hero of the story, and slowly changes over time to become something else. We're so used to being handed supermen right out of the box, so can sprint like the wind, leap like Neo and automatically know how to fight like a bad ass. I think it would kind of novel to start the game as someone weak, who is afraid and who you're afraid for.

For a certain segment of gamer, anyways. Some would undoubtedly reject "weakness" as any sort of appreciable gameplay mechanic.

[Neonivek]

I don't know Nenjin I've seen that taken too far.

Tomb Raider: Dark Angel

Or whatever it was called you start as an out of shape Lara Croft... and dear goodness do you start as pathetic.

[Delta Foxtrot]

@nenjin:

While it's "only" a 7-day roguelike, A Quest Too Far is a neat inversion of what you're wanting. As the game progresses, your once strong adventurer grows older and weaker. It's nice to see something that plays with idea of a powerful player character.

Your average AAA power fantasy FPS isn't going to function well with a disadvantaged PC, but how about horror games? They are not quite up my alley, but I would assume that they have weaker PCs to amplify the horror aspects. How do games like Silent Hill and the like function in this regard?

I just realized what a terrible game Rainbow Six 3 is in terms of portraying America in a good light.

"A paramilitary squad of one sheet-white American (but he has a Mexican name! Diversity!) and his elite team of European stereotypes go around the world with impunity, killing South American citizens on South American territory with only implied authority to do so. Some will surrender, and you totally can arrest them, but there's no penalty for blowing their brains out. Eventually, Rainbow succeeds in assassinating a Venezuelan non-combatant based purely on their own assessment of the threat he poses, based on their own investigation with no outside supervision."

That sounds like one of the (later) console ports? That said all R6s have had somewhat US/British heavy representation in their rosters. Sure they had a few Russians, a Korean, some middle-easterners and south-americans in Rogue Spear, but vast majority were still white-ish americans and europeans.

I do believe that the fluff explains it as Rainbow being mainly an extension of NATO, but I still would have liked to see more colour, on flags and in people's faces.

[nenjin]

Your average AAA power fantasy FPS isn't going to function well with a disadvantaged PC, but how about horror games? They are not quite up my alley, but I would assume that they have weaker PCs to amplify the horror aspects. How do games like Silent Hill and the like function in this regard?

Generally I feel like horror games avoid progression because it's gamey and that detracts from the horror factor. (The more abstract things that are distracting you from how scary the game is, the less scary it is. Mechanics in a horror game are in a way an expression of power that is in direct contrast to how dangerous the world is. You instantly feel safer in a horror game when you get a gun, for example, or when you get abilities that let you circumvent threats in the horror narrative.)

So yeah. Silent Hill, you don't get more powerful. Amnesia, you don't get more powerful.

My thinking is that convincingly giving the player someone weak, who seems human and fallible, right down to the animations and sound effects, makes the journey of becoming powerful that much more meaningful. I think it'd work in a FPS, given the right approach to balance.

I mean imagine you're basically playing a fat nerd, who sprints and you can hear him wheezing, saying stuff like "God I'm so out of shape." Fast forward an hour into play, he's not wheezing anymore. He's lost some weight. He runs faster, for longer. His dialog is filled with a rising confidence in himself. By the end of the game you can stand and look back at where you started and actually feel the progression on more levels than just the intellectual/mathematical.

That'd be my hope anyways. It's ultimately more of an immersion thing than anything else, something grounded in a story that mimics what's going on mechanically.

I'd point to GTA:San Andreas as something that played with this concept. While it wasn't balanced for long-term play, I did enjoy watching my character change and improve.

[rabidgam3r]

That can be taken way too far, however. Lester the Unlikely for the SNES (Or Sega Genesis, I don't remember.) The controls were deliberately gimped, the character didn't obey you and ran away from slightly large turtles. TURTLES. TURTLES ARE ABOUT AS SCARY AS A BALLOON WITH A SCARY FACE DRAWN ON IT IN HIGHLIGHTER.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

My thinking is that convincingly giving the player someone weak, who seems human and fallible, right down to the animations and sound effects, makes the journey of becoming powerful that much more meaningful. I think it'd work in a FPS, given the right approach to balance.

I think the recent incarnation of Tomb Raider did this fairly well, in my opinion.  When I looked back towards the beginning of the game from somewhere in the middle, I was amazed by how much things had changed.

[Darkmere]

A massive percentage of gamers don't get past midway through a game. Reviewers don't either. If you started out as a fat nerd, everyone would only play the first 10 minutes (tops) and say "holy shit, this fat nerd game sucks", then leave. It's not a viable business strategy, so it won't really be a thing that happens. Just adding some perspective in here.

[Knight of Fools]

My thinking is that convincingly giving the player someone weak, who seems human and fallible, right down to the animations and sound effects, makes the journey of becoming powerful that much more meaningful. I think it'd work in a FPS, given the right approach to balance.

I think the recent incarnation of Tomb Raider did this fairly well, in my opinion.  When I looked back towards the beginning of the game from somewhere in the middle, I was amazed by how much things had changed.

Still, as soon as you get that first kill you go into Miss Hardcore Kill-em-Up mode and don't have any qualms about sneaking up behind dudes and choking them to death with your bow. You also become a crack shot with said bow and any weapon you pick up. Sure, you shout, "Get away from me" in a panicked voice at bad guys... but the effect is somewhat lessened as you're charging into their position filling them with lead with the cold efficiency of a professional soldier.

That said, it's probably the best, most recent example in the industry. Far Cry 3, the only other game I can think of that tried the same thing, just had your character complain about skinning animals for half the game, and he doesn't blink twice at brutally killing hundreds of dudes after stabbing that first guy with a knife.

[Glloyd]

Just realized, most games (Spec ops: the line excluded)  are just "AMERICA SHALL KILL ALL TERRORISTS!   FUCK OTHER COUNTRY'S, WE ARE THE BEST!  SHOOT EVERYTHING!  YEAH!"

That is because they are made for the casual crowd and as such Lowest common denominator all around!

And casuals wonder why people dislike them so much. I don't, but that is because I know better.

Are we lumping CoD kids in with casual players now? Because I really don't think the guy I met who likes to point out all the guns in Modern Warfare that his family owns is representative of casual gamers as a whole.

CoD IS a casual game though. Although I agree that there is a distinction between the gung ho 'MURRICA nuts that CoD panders to and people who play light games on their tablets/phones.

[WealthyRadish]

I think the only real way for an actiony FPS to not have that rift that comes with killing hordes of enemies is for the main character to be either hallucinating or a psychopath. The closest you could get otherwise is to parody action movies, but that's not exactly a serious story. Hotline Miami had a pretty good story, and having a hallucinating psychopath certainly worked well for it there (though that's not an FPS), and that Spec Ops game was kind of a mix of parody and insanity.

I think a kind of survival game playing as a hunted guerrilla or insurgent could stand a chance at having meaningful combat, if only through the limitations of fighting a much more numerous and well equipped enemy. Killing a soldier would be more significant if they're in an armored car and you're just a starving rebel with an AK and some explosives, for example. A game like that would be pretty damn unpalatable for the US and other similar markets, though, since we always play the role of the ones stomping insurgencies (both in our games and in practice). I think the Red Faction games tried this, but failed in practice at actually playing any differently than the CoDy murdergasms.

To keep this from being entirely derail encouragement:

Overplentiful Ammo
Few games seem to actually let the player run out of ammo. There's no point in exploring when the game just chucks thousands of bullets at you everywhere along the main path, and nothing to encourage a diverse use of weapons. To mention Hotline Miami again, I loved how there wasn't any ammo storage or reloading, forcing the player to change weapons on the fly to continue fighting. I don't think an FPS could pull that off, but it'd be nice to just see more conservation required in games.

[Neonivek]

Overplentiful Ammo
Few games seem to actually let the player run out of ammo. There's no point in exploring when the game just chucks thousands of bullets at you everywhere along the main path, and nothing to encourage a diverse use of weapons. To mention Hotline Miami again, I loved how there wasn't any ammo storage or reloading, forcing the player to change weapons on the fly to continue fighting. I don't think an FPS could pull that off, but it'd be nice to just see more conservation required in games

Ohh and how can we forget its cousin

"Rare" Ammo
Best game as this example? Dead Island. What is "Rare" Ammo? Well it is when a game tries to make ammo artificially scarce not by reasonably making it scarce but by making it so your character will absolutely refuse to carry more then the bare minimum of ammunition or find ways to get rid of it. When the army carries 30 rounds of ammo for your main gun and your character refuses to carry more then 5 clips... there is clearly a problem. I don't like feeling like the only reason I don't have ammo is because my character stupidly refuses to carry any on him.