Fake realism in games

[Vympel]

Playing through Fallout 3 again since I lost all my progress when my HD died and I want to play Broken Steel (as well as The Pitt and Point Lookout), and really, the more I played the more I remembered from before how much I loathed the Carry Weight.

What's the point of this shit, really? It's a pain in the ass - every new location you go to you have to spend an inordinate amount of time managing your inventory to make sure you can pick up something you want from the location by dumping some items, repairing others (Fallout 3's item repair system is a whole other story, but I don't mind it so much) and all that bollocks.

Which is ridiculous anyway because there's no way a single man can carry all the shit you can legitimately carry anyway, so why the hell bother with carry weight at all? Mass Effect went one route - do away with the concept all together (except for a 150 item limit that is relatively unobtrusive, its problem is that its inventory system sucks, but anyway) - whilst the Witcher went with another (i.e. limited and fairly realistic inventory space).

So I finally bit the bullet and just upped my carry weight in the console to 2,000. Fuck it. I don't have time to dick around with the inventory. Sure, I still OCD collect one of all the different weapons and armor and put them in my Megaton house (it's just something I do, ok?) but it's so much more convenient not having to fuck around in the (awful) inventory screen more than once every several hours.

Of course, this may make the Strength stat less useful, but who cares, it already affects Big Guns, Melee and Unarmed, if you wanted to replace Strength's affect on carry weight with something else, make it a minimum requirement for certain types of Big Guns.

[Stark]

I really see 'weight' systems as actually 'loot limiting systems' to prevent cashflow. Think of it - crap stuff is light (or the stuff that has more requirements or makes the game hard or whatever) so you can carry more loot - and the better equipped you get (and thus the easier the game) the lower your profit-carrying ability is. Many of these games have other methods to suck money out of the player too, because the game devs are too fucking stupid to make a proper economy (F3 paid repairs for instance).

F3 even has absurd zero-weight ammo, so selling the 120,000 5mm you'll never use = infinite money anyway.

[Vympel]

I really see 'weight' systems as actually 'loot limiting systems' to prevent cashflow. Think of it - crap stuff is light (or the stuff that has more requirements or makes the game hard or whatever) so you can carry more loot - and the better equipped you get (and thus the easier the game) the lower your profit-carrying ability is. Many of these games have other methods to suck money out of the player too, because the game devs are too fucking stupid to make a proper economy (F3 paid repairs for instance).

F3 even has absurd zero-weight ammo, so selling the 120,000 5mm you'll never use = infinite money anyway.

Exactly. Even Fallout 1 and 2 had ammunition which actually weighed something. It's interesting, actually, that fucking around with your inventory never seemed to happen in those games ...

After buying all the extra (and largely useless) stuff for your house, there's nothing to really spend large sums of money on in F3 anyway. Rare ammunition (.44, for Lincoln's Repeater and the Magnum) seemed to be it - and spare stuff in shitty condition to repair your armor, which are all cheap as dirt.

[Stark]

Good point - ammo always cost the same and in shops there was never fuck-all of the decent stuff anyway. I don't know if I every bought anything (except weapon parts because I'm lazy).

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Well, since you're on PC, you have the wonderful opportunity to rectify (or have others do so for you) Bethesda's mistakes and crapouts.


For weight: Mighty Mouse alt.4 works very well.

[Stark]

Not really relevant to the presence of these kind of 'stupid realism' limits though, is it?

Vympel, what do you think about DOUBLE weight systems, like stalker? You have the space grid (whcih allows you to carry ludicrous equipment ) which is FURTHER limited by weight numbers (which are never actual weight, ps AK74 = 8pounds lol)?

A hyrbid system is Sacred2 on 360; it's based on the grid-system, but is presented in a list, with the 'weight' simply being the number of grid-squares it takes up (ie sword 3, shield 4, armour 6 etc). Grids are too hard for console gamers.

[Vympel]

Not really relevant to the presence of these kind of 'stupid realism' limits though, is it?

Vympel, what do you think about DOUBLE weight systems, like stalker? You have the space grid (whcih allows you to carry ludicrous equipment ) which is FURTHER limited by weight numbers (which are never actual weight, ps AK74 = 8pounds lol)?

I've got a copy of Stalker ($10 from EB's half-yearly sale, bought it when I was hanging with Stofsk in Melbourne) but have yet to play it. I'm not sure how I'd like it, it depends on how I feel about the guns and shit in the game (i.e. whether to carry a variety for different jobs and be a pack-mule or not) - an 8lb AK-74 isn't that bad - the real gun has an empty weight of 3.07kg (6.8lb) - so if you include a loaded magazine its well within the ballpark.

EDIT: actually 8lb is an underestimate, a loaded AK-74 is about 8.6lb. But yeah, margin of error, its pretty decent.

A hyrbid system is Sacred2 on 360; it's based on the grid-system, but is presented in a list, with the 'weight' simply being the number of grid-squares it takes up (ie sword 3, shield 4, armour 6 etc). Grids are too hard for console gamers.

That is freaking weird.

System Shock 2 had a grid system, IIRC - I don't recall having too much inventory annoyances with that.

[JointStrikeFighter]

Stupid realism; firing the gun affecting the guns balance with no on screen indicator.

That is all.

OH OH! I forget "check 3-9 line" button in ARMA

[Starglider]

I usually think of unrealistic inventory capacity as an abstraction for what you'd accomplish in real life by more tedious methods. For example, if you've cleared a building of enemies you'd make multiple trips for the loot, or for carrying loads of weapons you'd keep them in a vehicle or on a cart or similar and park that somewhere concealed before starting a fight. That would just be tedious and detrimental to gameplay, so it's an acceptable break from reality to skip it, just like it's acceptable to have you recover all health overnight instead of taking weeks or months. I guess it's personal preference though (except when it's used as puzzle element); I find token inventory restrictions an improvement in suspension of disbelief over none at all, while for some people it's probably the reverse.

As for Fallout3, I ended up spending most of my spare cash on mini-nukes for the MIRV and cells for the plasma rifle. Not that using the MIRV was in any way necessary, but it was fun.

[Stark]

Except you can really easily get around that in not-stupid ways, and it doesn't address that Vympels point is if you're going to break realism for game convenience, why insert 'fake' realism? Why not have auto-loots, remote-loot, absurd inventory, or less spawning? Current inventory systems are pretty much all broken, and they're accepted because they're the same as 10 years ago. Grid systems are comlpete shit, but people love them anyway; there are way better ways to go about that sort of thing.

Frankly, designing a game where you play solo, need 3-4 different weapon types AND carry whole suits of armour is unrealistic. What's gained by 'fake' realism? Inflated weight limits as F3 are just as limiting anyway (since you waste so much weight on redundancy) so... what's the point?

[Covenant]

I never spent any noticable amount of my money whatsoever, after I began to have enough that it was worth having any money at all. All I bought were ammo for my energy weapons, but I was never really fighting for cash.

Honestly, I say that abstract inventory systems are a waste of time. If your game benefits somewhat from having a realistic limit on carry weight (simulation games and games striving for realism) or from limiting the character's inventory capacity (survival horror games that want you to struggle between weapon, health and ammo item space) then you have a reason to impliment a carry weight. Other than that it's entirely irrelevent and should be discarded as an unnecessary, player unfriendly relic of the D&D era in which food and water supplies were actually important.

Inventory systems are just as bad. Don't give me a limit on the amount of items I can carry whatsoever unless you've got a reason to limit my inventory to something small. Limiting it to "just not huge" is stupid and petulent game design resulting from people thinking they should have a limit somewhere, but not knowing what it would be. If you can't think of a good reason to restrict something, don't at all.

And if a cry of "But then you'll be carrying 1000 rifles around back to shop!" issues from the lips of game designers in a panic, they should ask, why does the player need to sell 1000 rifles? If inventory is simply used to slow your progress in money ranks then you have built an unwieldly, unfriendly system just to make another unwieldy system work--the false scarcity of games that reward me for picking up stuff but punish me for picking up TOO MUCH stuff.

They should just stop making it worthwhile, or even possible, to just pour loot down the throat of a merchant. Limiting their gold is not an option, since then I will just max out their supply with the shit I carry. If they went to a "you get your major cash from the storyline missions, and merchants don't buy shit--only sell it" design scheme then you'd remove the threat of grinding and the need for an inventory system. Bam, done. This also means you can stop putting gold in the inventory of dogs, and stop making worthless gold-sinks throughout the game.

[Stark]

If you were being consrvative, replacing 'run forever / oh noes overloaded u slow' with 'run speed related to total weight and strength somehow' would have a soft limit and no 'magic number'. It'd still be dumb but it's a simple and positive change from the current.

F3 preventing fast travel with high weight was lame. Decrease speed - oh wait, time is irelevant. Increase danger - oh wait, no encounters. Turns out it's another e ample of a broken systm to hide something broken.

[Vympel]

You guys paid for energy weapon ammunition? I was never, ever in danger of running out. Heck, most of the enemies you encounter in the game can be dealt with quite efficiently with Ol' Painless, or even an ordinary hunting rifle. You only really need the more exotic energy weapons (and small guns, like Lincoln's Repeater or the Xuanlong Assault Rifle) when you're fighting tougher enemies, like the Enclave, or Deathclaws.

However, I've just recently encountered my first Feral Ghoul Reavers, and those things are fucking insane hard. I didn't have sufficient energy weapons skill to use the A3-21 Plasma Rifle, so I had to rely on Lincoln's Repeater and Bottlecap Mines to put them down.

[Pablo Sanchez]

Frankly, designing a game where you play solo, need 3-4 different weapon types AND carry whole suits of armour is unrealistic. What's gained by 'fake' realism? Inflated weight limits as F3 are just as limiting anyway (since you waste so much weight on redundancy) so... what's the point?

I think one good thing about STALKER was the fact that any number of guns were capable of performing every likely combat need reasonably well, so that you really only needed to carry one good assault rifle to get by. At end-game in STALKER I was usually carrying like one G36 and maybe a sniper rifle for very long range work; in F3 I would be carrying a sniper rifle, Lincoln's Repeater and/or Blackhawk, maybe a combat shotgun (to avoid stressing my supply of .44 Magnum), a Dart Gun, a passel of grenades and mines, and a Fat Man. That's kind of silly. There's also the issue of Fallout's traditional gun-fight based economic cycle:
1) get in gun fight,
2) loot the corpses of your enemies,
3) trade the take to a merchant for money and items to help with the next gunfight,
4) go to 1

This has been part of the series since the first game, but the greater depth of the F3 engine could have allowed it to break the mold by including more interesting trader trash and shifting it away from a gun-fight based economy with a more interesting scavenging element. Like what if medical supplies, prewar junk like machinery parts, computer components, liquor, and the like were more valuable to traders than a stack of shitty Chinese Pistols? There's kind of the germ of this idea in the handful of NPCs who will buy specific clutter from you at much more than their market price (guys in Megaton and Underworld who buy scrap metal, the BoS scribe in Arlington who buys pre-war books, & the people who buy historical artifacts) but it could have been applied more generally. In almost all cases the merchants price items by their utility to the player, which makes some sense since it's a player-centered universe, but by that logic they might as well go the Mass Effect route and remove trader trash altogether, making clutter purely environmental ambiance.

However, I've just recently encountered my first Feral Ghoul Reavers, and those things are fucking insane hard. I didn't have sufficient energy weapons skill to use the A3-21 Plasma Rifle, so I had to rely on Lincoln's Repeater and Bottlecap Mines to put them down.

If you encountered them in the Presidential Subway they're also hugely glitched out, in that when you shoot them they bug out and shake wildly for a couple seconds, during which time they're invulnerable to damage, which is genius, and makes a probably difficult fight into a Benny-Hill chase scene of running backwards and shooting intermittently while dropping occasional mines and grenades.

[Stark]

In F3, since you're the single most powerful person in the universe (as is common in nerd games), you'd think you'd just get on the radio and phone up your gang to do the looting instead of carrying three vacuum cleaners around. If they took a step outside the 'very pretty Ultima 4' attitude they had and actually let the player have an affect on the game, you could be building up a serious stash in some abandoned vault/reasonable building and doing something more interesting than 'fedex quest #472.

The fight-sell model would be a bit more interesting if it was fight, drop beacon, clear area, respond to distress call, have massive supply of gear in base from which you do actual things, etc. Turns out they need a single person with fuck all stuff or their stupid story doesn't work, so they break everything else to make up for it.

It doesn't even work; in F3 the coke machine out the front of the supermarket is the highest density loot point in the universe. Good thing nobody ever steals anything from you, really.

[Darmalus]

Just a passing thought before I go to sleep, but I remember in the game "The Bard" (or something similar, I never owned, I did watch, I liked the humor) but all the junk that the main character didn't use just flashed across the body when looted and appeared as money in the characters inventory. I rather liked that idea. Limit me to a few weapon/armor/ammo slots and have all the loot just vanish when I grab it and appear as money in my wallet, and just don't let me take anything that really is worthless.

[Vendetta]

System Shock 2 had a grid system, IIRC - I don't recall having too much inventory annoyances with that.

However, almost everything in SS2 was 1x1, 1x2, or 1x3 squares, so there wasn't much inventory tetris to get everything to fit, and since only three of the guns were any good you never bothered hauling shit like energy weapons around, because all of the most dangerous enemies basically treated being shot with them as a minor inconvenience.

[Oskuro]

I guess a weight-limit system (as any other inventory system) is more relevant in games where you have to prioritize loot because you can't just spend 20 minutes walking to the store and back (thus preventing the player from slowing down the game due to greed), but limited inventory just for the sake of it sucks big time, just like any other purposeless limitation.

I for example like the inventory from Tron 2.0, but it's a bit silly that you can just pause the game and switch your items around, thus making the limited equippable slots entirely pointless (with the possible exception of when they become infected, though).

[Covenant]

You guys paid for energy weapon ammunition?

I didn't want to bother picking things up, so I did buy ammo. I mean, why not? I have so much money and there's nothing to buy.

I still think it's time we stop treated loot as a money source, because it's just a stupid abstraction. Money is money, and if loot is money too, then making it take an extra step between loot and selling is a bit obnoxious. And if your system automatically turns loot INTO money, I just find that unnecessary, since if they wanted to reward you with cash, they could just put cash on the bodies.

Weight systems work the same way. All these faux-reality systems are okay if a simulation is the goal--if you want a realistic shooter with heavys hit slowing you down, your guy getting tired after a run, aiming getting jaggy and not being able to carry a ton of shit... okay. These games don't do it though. And unless they want to make that step, and reward me accordingly for the upjump in difficulty, they should stop penalizing me for playing the game the way they set it down and fix the broken mechanics at the source.

[loomer]

Abomination: the Nemesis Project had an interesting take on it. It was a team based strategy game, where you took 4 soldiers into a battle with their own loadouts.

Now, where it gets relevant is that each of them had a fairly reasonable weight limit (without armour or anything fancy, you could carry about 600 rounds of 5.56 and an M4 carbine. Add in some armour, you drop to like 510 rounds, a grenade is equivalent to a mag, and so forth.) considering that you'd nearly always face down five to ten times your own numbers in human cultists or supernatural beasts.

You got new equipment by looting the battlefield (cultists would drop their gear and the environment - boxes, dumpsters, dead soldier terrain bits - were searchable and could give completely new stuff) and by procuring it. But when it came down to bringing stuff back from a mission, you didn't need to decide who picked up what and manage it that way. Instead, there's an assumption that a follow up team sweeps through and loots anything you found and didn't carry out on your active team.

Then you had the overall mechanic where you could call in new equipment from headquarters (or just more ammunition. Specialty weapons, like the Barret M82 or advanced armour, really relied on this.) or send what you looted back, which was important as you could only keep 2500 units of stuff (a mag is a unit, and something like an M60 is 8. It was still generous, you just had to dump a bunch of AKs every once in a while.)

It was, for a flawed game (from 1999), a surprisingly flexible system that didn't bog things down basically at all.

[Agent Sorchus]

Just a passing thought before I go to sleep, but I remember in the game "The Bard" (or something similar, I never owned, I did watch, I liked the humor) but all the junk that the main character didn't use just flashed across the body when looted and appeared as money in the characters inventory. I rather liked that idea. Limit me to a few weapon/armor/ammo slots and have all the loot just vanish when I grab it and appear as money in my wallet, and just don't let me take anything that really is worthless.

That would be The Bard's Tale and that was a nice feature. There was no inventory at all, when ever you picked up an item that was not as good as the equipment you were using its value would go directly into your gold supply. If you picked up better gear than your old and less useful item would add its value to the gold supply. You never had to deal with selling crap at all. The main reason I do not think that the feature will ever be picked up by another game is how the Bard's tale repeatedly broke the fourth wall for the sake of humor, This sistem would not work so well in a game of total immersion.

[Starglider]

You guys paid for energy weapon ammunition?

Not for the laser pistol (Protectron's Gaze = win), but yes for the plasma rifle, because ammo for that is rare in the original storyline until near the end.

I didn't have sufficient energy weapons skill to use the A3-21 Plasma Rifle, so I had to rely on Lincoln's Repeater and Bottlecap Mines to put them down.

The plasma rifle is very, very good if you have energy weapons skill 70+ and some perks that increase action points (it is almost brokenly good if you get Grim Reaper's Sprint and the +25 AP hockey mask - better than either of the custom gatling lasers). It kills just about anything in one, maybe two headshots, it's fast firing, accurate and has a very low degredation rate.

That said if you think Fallout 3 is too hard and have the Mothership Zeta expansion you could just do that first. After you complete it get a full set of energy weapons (pistol, rifle, RPG equivalent) more powerful than anything else in the game, and about 2000 shots worth of ammo left over. I left it until last because I heard in advance that it trashed game balance.

Stark's ideas are ok in principle. Right now though, they would be a nightmare to implement though. Fallout 3 was already fairly ambitious in terms of followers, NPCs, scripting and having events in the world progress whether you're there or not; ambitious enough to make the result horribly buggy and late. Maybe once we've got really solid engines (i.e. not Gamebryo) that can do that seamlessly and content creation tools that make setting up a FO3/GTA4 scale world cheap and easy, there will be spare resource to make a large scale support team that doesn't suck and a genuinely customisable and useful stronghold/base system. There are efforts to do something similar as FO3 mods, but from what I can tell they are glitchy piles of spaghetti scripting, bumping against engine limitations.

[Ghost Rider]

Playing through Fallout 3 again since I lost all my progress when my HD died and I want to play Broken Steel (as well as The Pitt and Point Lookout), and really, the more I played the more I remembered from before how much I loathed the Carry Weight.

What's the point of this shit, really? It's a pain in the ass - every new location you go to you have to spend an inordinate amount of time managing your inventory to make sure you can pick up something you want from the location by dumping some items, repairing others (Fallout 3's item repair system is a whole other story, but I don't mind it so much) and all that bollocks.

You really have to ask that question?

It's to provide some fake simulation of challenge. Same reason every game that is something beyond a platformer forces some thing upon you. I mean fuck this is akin to asking why do shopkeepers want you to pay a quarter of a billion of gold to buy their weapon so you can save the world and thusly their lazy ass. Not to mention how do haul that shit and why aren't you buying entire continents with you hundreds of trillions of whatever currency. Because somewhere they realize someone with a brain cell is going to figure out their combat system, break it in a way they never concieveably thought, and all that there is left is the mini puzzles they disguise.

[General Zod]

That said if you think Fallout 3 is too hard and have the Mothership Zeta expansion you could just do that first. After you complete it get a full set of energy weapons (pistol, rifle, RPG equivalent) more powerful than anything else in the game, and about 2000 shots worth of ammo left over. I left it until last because I heard in advance that it trashed game balance.

It's true. If you get the disintegrator rifle, Grim Reaper's Sprint and some of the sniper perks, you're pretty much guaranteed a 1-shot kill for 95% of all the enemies in the game. Deathclaws might take two or three shots. Although even before that the Plasma weapons were pretty well broken, the alien weapons are just the cherry that throws combat balance to the wind.

[Ghost Rider]

That said if you think Fallout 3 is too hard and have the Mothership Zeta expansion you could just do that first. After you complete it get a full set of energy weapons (pistol, rifle, RPG equivalent) more powerful than anything else in the game, and about 2000 shots worth of ammo left over. I left it until last because I heard in advance that it trashed game balance.

It's true. If you get the disintegrator rifle, Grim Reaper's Sprint and some of the sniper perks, you're pretty much guaranteed a 1-shot kill for 95% of all the enemies in the game. Deathclaws might take two or three shots. Although even before that the Plasma weapons were pretty well broken, the alien weapons are just the cherry that throws combat balance to the wind.

Pfft, the hidden named weaponry did that long before you had that in the original, the very first add on broke the game further with the Chinese Stealth suit and so on.

Really, say Zeta breaks the game is looking at a shattered vase and smashing the shards to make sure it's more broken.