> I can't think of a single shooter where reloading is anything different from just physically doing a reload action like you would with a real gun.
I'm fairly confident that more people have experience reloading video game guns (just press Square) vs. the motions required to reload a real gun.
I know that when I'm playing Pavlov, every time I spawn with a new gun, I have to relearn how to reload it (and then die surrounded by all the clips I've dropped).
> physically doing a reload action like you would with a real gun
More like physically doing a reload action while wearing a thick pair of well-buttered gloves.
Each game does have small differences in the reloading process, be it pressing a specific button to release the slide or (strangely) pulling the charging handle every reload. Even firearms enthusiasts would have to learn these details.
Beyond that, VR controls are still limited. You have little to no tactile feedback, so you don't intuitively know when you failed to grab the magazine off of your belt or failed to grip the bolt. You have to learn the exact positions and tolerances to avoid slipping up and botching an entire reload in the heat of the moment. I find this to be completely unsatisfying in comparison to mastering a real life manual task.
I also often find myself banging my controllers together, especially when handling pistols.
I think most people find this kind of thing frustrating and immersion breaking, which pretty much defeats the draw of VR gaming.
My favorite VR game is Resident Evil 4 partly because it seems that they focused on reducing the friction of weapon handling. Most processes are fairly simplified and the tolerances are generous, but you still get that heightened level of intractability in VR vs a simple button press.
> only to forget how to reload your damn gun after a couple of weeks/months of not playing.
I played that Jedi game on PS5 the other day and found it really intuitive how they implemented the reloading. There you have to pull back this little virtual lever with your non-gun hand. I liked that much better than remembering some button even if it's not 100% realistic.
> Gun fighting doesn't "feel" real-time like it should. Shooting a goon 12 times with my revolver (6 shot) at point blank range isn't my idea of immersion.
Totally agree.
Going from a dialogue to a shooting scene is like going from a Rembrandt painting to Team Fortress.
> Realism is moving at human speed, experiencing fatigue, reloading and hiding behind cover, and guns that recoil when you fire them. Well, pseudo-realism anyway – you really don’t want the “real” in gaming.
Sounds a bit biased. My favorite FPS (pubg) has all of that, and it is what makes the game enjoyable. There is even bullet velocity and drop, so you need to account for moving targets and parabolic paths.
> Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?
I think it's more engaging/immersive not because it's more realistic, but rather because it adds nuance to the action and makes it more of a skill to be learned. The lows of the "oh shit" moment of flubbing a reload in the middle of a firefight and the highs of pulling off a perfectly timed John Wick-esque reload in the middle of a firefight are much more intense than just tapping a button.
It's a more embodied version of the "reload bar" mechanic in some games where you can just hit the reload button for a normal reload or hit it twice with good timing to get a better/faster reload, but if you miss the sweet spot you get a worse/slower reload.
> in that game you were also limited to a single bullet on the screen at a time.
I think this mechanic works fine if the bullet moves faster to speed up the pace of the game. I'm also passing along some feedback when I made my own vertical scrolling shooter around a year ago. Most early players told me to crank up the pace. After doing so they were absolutely right. I was so hung up on seeing the various mechanics I was working on in action that I didn't really notice that the pace of the game was too slow to not be boring.
> It’s just that not having ADS into iron sights or vaulting in 2023 game feels archaic.
And thank god. Nobody was asking for thi.s
> The movement is incredibly clunky
Clunky to some is incredibly layered to others. Simple, yet oh so difficult to master, but crisp to input (well... there's some nonsense with the subtick system currently making it less crisp than players want, but that can be overcome). CS has multiple movement based subcommunities for a reason.
(from your original comment)
> Just move on.
Because you enjoy the mechanics of other competitive shooter titles, doesn't mean that everyone does. You seem to think that if everyone played Apex, Warzone or Tarkov they'd suddenly enjoy it, and presumably their PC or some other factor limits them. Newsflash: plenty have played the others and come back to CS.
It's akin to telling a rugby player: hey, why are you still playing rugby? American Football is so much better. Rugby is an archaic game from the 1900s.
> 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.)
> but im sure many people would have a preference for it.
hardly, for shooters it will become very frustrating very fast, because a lot of the time you're going to get outrandomed rather then outskilled.
I mean I don't get why everyone is focusing on shooter style games, this would be really great instead for assassination games or hide&seek games, including path findings, runners, treasure hunt etc.
>If the physical forces are too lifelike, it can ruin the fun factor. For example, imagine what it would be like to play Grand Theft Auto V with unforgiving physics — there's a mod for that by the way.
There’s an entire game for that, GTA IV. Not sure if “fun” is a right term for its plot, but that ruined nothing imo.
Apart from gta, I think physics and realism advancements look funny before the fact that in most 3d games you still get stuck in floor irregularities while running and die trying to get around that invisible wall. Or that you can wipe an armored squad with a plasma weapon, but has to find a key to a wooden door. Or that your superexoskeleton cannot do pull ups. Or that you shoot one of guards and after a couple of minutes their buddies calm down and lose their interest in the event. Like, you know, our guards die twice a day, not a big deal.
I wish realism fixed that instead of waving tents and accurate explosions.
> I wish game engines would put some effort into making games FEEL real more than just LOOK real.
“More realism” doesn’t equal “more fun to play”. Games engines are capable of realistic physics (look at the simulator and racing genres, for example), but that’s not what people want out of a game like Halo Infinite.
> But I think the real problem is this Rambo model of games. In reality, a single assailant against a large number of armed defenders should never be able to attack their way into a base.
On that note, I wish more shooters weren't just Rambo. Some of my favourite battles were ones where it felt like I was part of a larger offensive (I think Call of Duty 1 and 2 did this a lot). Unfortunately, the gaming industry completely ignored that design and went on to make one-man army games instead because of the power fantasy, which I find boring. I want to be part of an army. I want to be part of a war. I want to see dropships fly overhead. Artillery smashing the other side of the ridge. Fellow soldiers being gunned down as we push on an entrenched position.
This seems exactly what the OP is complaining about. Why would you want that, rather than just hitting 'r' or whatever?
(I literally have no idea how to reload a gun, FWIW. Having it be "realistic" doesn't actually make it easy or discoverable.)
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