Fake realism in games

[General Zod]

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.

Yeah but why go through the trouble of looking for the hidden crap when Zeta throws it in your face?

[Ghost Rider]

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.

Yeah but why go through the trouble of looking for the hidden crap when Zeta throws it in your face?

Because I didn't have to. I got the best shotgun because I killed some dork in a hideout, because he aggroed me in a gunfight. Hell, I complete one mission as a goodie two shoes and I get a plasma rifle before the weapon was demonstrated. Half of it is hard to find through their insane puzzles, but the other half is lying around going "Take me and rape your enemies with a metal enema!". That told me how bad they made the weapon grading well before any expansion.

So far the only way I've seen of challenge is purposefully gimping yourself to insane levels. So making the thought that Zeta somehow breaks it? It's asinine and small thinking given the tools the original had.

[Jade Falcon]

One of the most irritating inventory systems I've found is in the old RPG Arcanum. Severe weight and a horrendous grid system.

[Stark]

The idea that there's any challenge in F3 before you get uber weapons is very, very strange.

Isn't Arcanum the steampunk Fallout-em-up? The Fallout inventory was pretty bad too, so they may have felt a grid was better than a 'show three items at a time and scroll slowly though items' system.

[Jade Falcon]

The idea that there's any challenge in F3 before you get uber weapons is very, very strange.

Isn't Arcanum the steampunk Fallout-em-up? The Fallout inventory was pretty bad too, so they may have felt a grid was better than a 'show three items at a time and scroll slowly though items' system.

Aye, Arcanum was the steampunk one by Troika games. It was a decent, though flawed game, but if you were trying the technologist path the grid inventory was a pig because it didn't take long to get loaded down with assorted stuff you might need.

[Yogi]

Reduced inventory is to prevent you from stripping every single enemy of everything they have and selling them, but still allowing you to use the enemy's weapons, armor, and ammo against them if their's is better. If you want unlimited carrying capacity and the ability to loot anything the enemy is using off the enemy, then the items can't sell well or refine for a lot of resources. Personally, I never had a problem managing inventory, at least not more than managing any other limited resource in a game. Most of its vendor trash anyway, and I think the only game I was running out of room to put actually useful items was Resident Evil 4.

[General Zod]

Reduced inventory is to prevent you from stripping every single enemy of everything they have and selling them, but still allowing you to use the enemy's weapons, armor, and ammo against them if their's is better. If you want unlimited carrying capacity and the ability to loot anything the enemy is using off the enemy, then the items can't sell well or refine for a lot of resources. Personally, I never had a problem managing inventory, at least not more than managing any other limited resource in a game. Most of its vendor trash anyway, and I think the only game I was running out of room to put actually useful items was Resident Evil 4.

Or just not limit the inventory. I don't want to have to deal with extensive resource micromanagement in my games. Arbitrary limits when combined with extensive micro just make me think the devs put them there to gloss over how shallow the game itself really is.

[Yogi]

Reduced inventory is to prevent you from stripping every single enemy of everything they have and selling them, but still allowing you to use the enemy's weapons, armor, and ammo against them if their's is better. If you want unlimited carrying capacity and the ability to loot anything the enemy is using off the enemy, then the items can't sell well or refine for a lot of resources. Personally, I never had a problem managing inventory, at least not more than managing any other limited resource in a game. Most of its vendor trash anyway, and I think the only game I was running out of room to put actually useful items was Resident Evil 4.

Or just not limit the inventory. I don't want to have to deal with extensive resource micromanagement in my games. Arbitrary limits when combined with extensive micro just make me think the devs put them there to gloss over how shallow the game itself really is.

Who were you responding to? You certainly weren't responding to me, since I already mentioned the ramifications necessary for having unlimited inventory. Either you can't loot everything off an enemy, or what you loot from an enemy can't resell for a lot.

[General Zod]

Reduced inventory is to prevent you from stripping every single enemy of everything they have and selling them, but still allowing you to use the enemy's weapons, armor, and ammo against them if their's is better. If you want unlimited carrying capacity and the ability to loot anything the enemy is using off the enemy, then the items can't sell well or refine for a lot of resources. Personally, I never had a problem managing inventory, at least not more than managing any other limited resource in a game. Most of its vendor trash anyway, and I think the only game I was running out of room to put actually useful items was Resident Evil 4.

Or just not limit the inventory. I don't want to have to deal with extensive resource micromanagement in my games. Arbitrary limits when combined with extensive micro just make me think the devs put them there to gloss over how shallow the game itself really is.

Who were you responding to? You certainly weren't responding to me, since I already mentioned the ramifications necessary for having unlimited inventory. Either you can't loot everything off an enemy, or what you loot from an enemy can't resell for a lot.

Then you must have glossed over the rest of my post that was saying extensive inventory micro gives the impression that the devs are just trying to cover up shallow gameplay. the arbitrary limit bit was more of a random idle thought.

[Yogi]

Then you must have glossed over the rest of my post that was saying extensive inventory micro gives the impression that the devs are just trying to cover up shallow gameplay. the arbitrary limit bit was more of a random idle thought.

. . .

I'm not sure if you're actually reading my posts or just taking advantage of an opprotunity to complain. I've specifically mentioned in my post reasons why limited inventory would be beneficial for gameplay, why it is not necessarily an afterthough, and alternate ways this can be done (namely, the console RPG way, where the enemies jut drop gold and perhaps one or two items, but you could carry 99 of everything)

If your post was nothing but "I disagree" then I guess there's nothing we can really discuss then.

[Steel]

Then you must have glossed over the rest of my post that was saying extensive inventory micro gives the impression that the devs are just trying to cover up shallow gameplay.

But eliminating weight limits makes gameplay more shallow.

The fact is that weapons are a valuable commodity, and if you are to fight enemies with weapons that are a credible threat to you then their weapons are going to be of value. If there exists a way of buying and selling weapons and you can use enemies weapons then you must be able to pick up enemies stuff and sell it yourself.

If that is not the case, then is an admission by the devs that they cannot balance the economy and so had to make the gameplay more shallow.

There isnt really a way of getting round the fact that weapons that are a threat to the player will be valuable in the context they are in. The challenge is in balancing the situation so that it isnt 'kill 4 easy guys infinite money', but that often boils down to weapons that were working fine for your enemies being tattered crap once picked up or inexplicably selling for 1% of what the vendor sells them for.

Weight limits are there so that you actually prioritise what you pick up. If you complain "but then I cant carry the 300 coffee mugs worth a total of 0.03p" then you are retarded. Because its hard to put rigid time limits/pressure in games (due to either difficulty concerns or complaints of "Waa! dont want things to progress while I'm not there") the player is able to spend a month picking up useless tat and selling it when the damsel is in distress/world is in peril. The way a weight limit should work in an rpg type game is that you go in, grab the most valuable loot and get out again. By the time you return someone else will probably have scavenged the rest of the stuff you couldnt take.

Better systems for looting involve clearing an area and then (abstracted) taking x time to search, seeing a list of whats there and choosing what to take, as opposed to looking through 900 containers in the area. In fallout tactics references are made to Repo Squad who follow up your team and mop up any areas you clear out, taking any valuable things back to base (although you wont get paid for anything they take so you still have to manually pick everything up and stuff it in the truck). In Jagged Alliance 2 after clearing an area you can just go up to the map and then you can take anything from the sector inventory without having to run all over the area picking up shit.

In Hidden and Dangerous you would have to have your men carry enough ammunition for a campaign with them, which meant a big backpack full of all your stuff. If you had about 30kg on a soldier then they could still run, but sprinting and jumping would tire them massively faster, so fast movement was less of an option. You could dump yor backpack on the floor and pick it up later if you needed to move faster for a while, but then you were of course restricted to only stuff you had in your pouches.

[General Zod]

But eliminating weight limits makes gameplay more shallow.

. . .that was kind of the point. If you need extensive resource management to create a "deeper" experience then the game's already failed in being engaging.

There isnt really a way of getting round the fact that weapons that are a threat to the player will be valuable in the context they are in. The challenge is in balancing the situation so that it isnt 'kill 4 easy guys infinite money', but that often boils down to weapons that were working fine for your enemies being tattered crap once picked up or inexplicably selling for 1% of what the vendor sells them for.

Sure there is. Make damage skill dependent instead of item dependent. Then you don't have to worry about whether or not an enemy is going to drop a really valuable sword/gun/whatever.

Weight limits are there so that you actually prioritise what you pick up. If you complain "but then I cant carry the 300 coffee mugs worth a total of 0.03p" then you are retarded. Because its hard to put rigid time limits/pressure in games (due to either difficulty concerns or complaints of "Waa! dont want things to progress while I'm not there") the player is able to spend a month picking up useless tat and selling it when the damsel is in distress/world is in peril. The way a weight limit should work in an rpg type game is that you go in, grab the most valuable loot and get out again. By the time you return someone else will probably have scavenged the rest of the stuff you couldnt take.

Good thing that's not what I'm complaining about then. Instead of including a lot of useless junk that doesn't serve any purpose except to sell to merchants, the devs should work on making the wealth distribution more balanced.

Better systems for looting involve clearing an area and then (abstracted) taking x time to search, seeing a list of whats there and choosing what to take, as opposed to looking through 900 containers in the area. In fallout tactics references are made to Repo Squad who follow up your team and mop up any areas you clear out, taking any valuable things back to base (although you wont get paid for anything they take so you still have to manually pick everything up and stuff it in the truck). In Jagged Alliance 2 after clearing an area you can just go up to the map and then you can take anything from the sector inventory without having to run all over the area picking up shit.

Or get rid of the concept of loot entirely. It's an archaic relic that doesn't really add anything significant to gameplay. (By loot I mean raiding enemies for "goodies", which honestly tends to get ridiculous in some games.)

[Noble713]

Here's a few of my salient inventory experiences:

Baldur's Gate II is probably the most annoying. Perhaps it's because I'm a packrat. My characters tend to have their inventories chock full of potions, scrolls, and the occasional backup weapon that somehow didn't fit in their normal equipment slots. Scrolls are the worst, as even with a carrying case you just accumulate too many of them. Combining a weight limit with the grid makes it worse. When looting dungeons I'm constantly shifting items between every member of the party to make sure no one is encumbered. This usually means Korgan has a backpack full of greatswords and half plate while everyone else is carrying stacks of arrows or something.

Oblivion's weight system has flaws but there are ways to correct it slightly. Here the problem is that unless you make getting a house your first priority (made easier with house mods) you will inevitably accumulate a bunch of interesting stuff (unique books, etc.) that you don't want to throw away, don't want to sell, but are forced to lug about on your person because you have no other option, impairing your ability to loot dungeons. My preferred solution is the Saddle Bags mod + an easily acquired (i.e. free, not quest-dependent) house mod + companions. With the Saddle Bags, your horse can carry ~500+ pounds, increasing in capacity as you level up. You find yourself going dungeon-diving with the bare essentials on your actual character, maximizing your ability to haul loot and giving you a cleaner inventory screen anyway. Your companions also ramp up your loot capacity in a believable manner (here, you carry these swords). Sell all the junk at the merchant and then dump the neat stuff in your house. Much better than having to scroll past 10 books to get to your repair hammers.....hammers which make sense on your horse, as you probably shouldn't be halting in some cave to fix your busted armor (unless you are in an Oblivion Gate....really need to stockpile for those).



The fundamental problem, though, is that game economies are just horrible imitations of real-life because a fully-accurate real-economy would suck. The difference is that game characters don't have mandatory real-life daily/monthly expenses like food, water, and rent (Fable might have rent). That's what really drives wealth acquisition IRL, but it sucks in games. I played a Morrowind mod that forced you to eat and hated it. You get sick and tired of switching to your inventory to eat some rice every time you get a "You are getting hungry" pop-up message.

Also keep in mind that in most of the games the player has no other income beyond being a scavenger. If your character had a regular paycheck you probably wouldn't be so concerned about recovering every arrow and suit of rusted chainmail from the battlefield.

So no regular salary for your character = forced to loot to get money to buy stuff. No REAL expenses = no drain on your funds, essentially making all income disposable. People with huge amounts of disposable income will spend it in all kinds of broken, ridiculous ways. Just swing by any enlisted military barracks for a real-life example. So it shouldn't surprise developers when gamers spend their loot in ways that breaks the game, and it shouldn't surprise gamers when developers try all manner of cludged-together solutions to "fix" the issue.

[Stark]

I think the last thing these games need is MORE moneysinks.

PS, being unable to carry eight million potions != broken inventory system. It's just that if they let you carry 100, they might as well let you carry unlimited because it's already absurd.

It's sad that plunder has driven economies throughout history (not realistic lol) and people with money don't bother looting shit stuff because it's relatively worthless. Once you have a certain level of wealth you think you'd just have a staff to loot the now empty Caves of Androzani, but apparently not. This is why it's 'fake' realism - kinda-sorta limiting your carriage without allowing any sensible way of dealing with it, then forcing the player to do it manually.

I can only assume fat nerds like to a) collect useless shit and b) hoard. OCD? Nerds? No wai!

[Stark]

Sure there is. Make damage skill dependent instead of item dependent. Then you don't have to worry about whether or not an enemy is going to drop a really valuable sword/gun/whatever.

What's really sad is that games that do this are seen as 'boring'. Itemisation really drives nerds in these games - look at Witcher, or the older Gold Box games. Just 'a sword'? SO BORING! If you can't find Kingdom's Windswept Diamond Matrixblade of the Daemon Antioch's Edge, what's the point of playing?

Genre of games driven by levelling is why F3 has levels. For... no real mechanical reason. Nerds just love DINGING LEVEL 20.

[Vendetta]

But eliminating weight limits makes gameplay more shallow.

Remedial arithmetic does not deep gameplay make. Weight limits are a holdover from the days when pasty virgins played D&D on paper in their parents' basements. They're not there to make gameplay "deep" or to "balance the economy", because there's never been a game where they have done either in any significant way, all you do is hoard the most valuable per unit weight crap, or simply stop and town portal back to sell the crap you're carrying and carry on strip mining the world of vendor trash. The only way to make this any form of restriction is to make areas a sealed unit which the player cannot leave until they finish and cannot return to. That's pretty much the only way inventory management becomes anything more than a trivial distraction.

Weight limits are there so that you actually prioritise what you pick up. If you complain "but then I cant carry the 300 coffee mugs worth a total of 0.03p" then you are retarded. Because its hard to put rigid time limits/pressure in games (due to either difficulty concerns or complaints of "Waa! dont want things to progress while I'm not there") the player is able to spend a month picking up useless tat and selling it when the damsel is in distress/world is in peril. The way a weight limit should work in an rpg type game is that you go in, grab the most valuable loot and get out again. By the time you return someone else will probably have scavenged the rest of the stuff you couldnt take.

Except, of course, games are not dynamic worlds in the absence of the player in anything but the most simple of ways, because that just wastes computing resources on shit most people will never see, so unless you script your areas to autodelete items not looted when the player leaves, this does not happen, and most games do not do this in any kind of reasonable time (Fallout 3 and Oblivion have stuff persist for a week in game time, easily enough to make several trips.

It's possible to make weighted inventories worth a damn, but no-one has done it yet, and I very much doubt they will. Weight limits in games are pretty much only there because A) They've always been there and B) People like you confuse them with depth and think they improve the game.

[Stark]

Looting in Diablo-em-ups is even auto-filtered; people simply begin ignoring 75% of the loot in the game because it's worthless and uncompetitive. Did it add anything to oblivion to accidentally pick up some cups and thus fuck your ability to carry swords, on their horrid list-based inventory? Clearly, not.

'Making weight inventories interesting' is like 'making armour interesting' or 'making weapon balance interesting'. It's not hard - but why bother, when there are established ways of doing it that nerds ABSOLUTELY LOVE and are easy to set up?

[Noble713]

Sure there is. Make damage skill dependent instead of item dependent. Then you don't have to worry about whether or not an enemy is going to drop a really valuable sword/gun/whatever.

What's really sad is that games that do this are seen as 'boring'. Itemisation really drives nerds in these games - look at Witcher, or the older Gold Box games. Just 'a sword'? SO BORING! If you can't find Kingdom's Windswept Diamond Matrixblade of the Daemon Antioch's Edge, what's the point of playing?

Genre of games driven by levelling is why F3 has levels. For... no real mechanical reason. Nerds just love DINGING LEVEL 20.

^THIS. I tried to edit similar comments into my post while proof-reading it but of course that didn't work.

Here's an example of a game where I found the most rewarding experiences came from growing your characters' rather than looting/buying uber-gear: KOTOR2.

Playing as a Sith Lord, the consistently rewarding aspects were achieving Dark Side Mastery for extra Force Points and looking evil (largely gained through dialogue), unlocking Force Storm (admittedly through leveling, but you could make that sort of stuff quest-based like the lightsaber forms) and blasting entire rooms with it, and watching as Atton (becomes a Jedi/Sith through dialogue) and Visas cut down anyone else with their lightsabers. The fact that they had some weird crystals that gave them +4 damage or whatever was pretty much irrelevant. It's a perfect example of a game where the storyline/character interactions/gameplay was rewarding in and of itself, and the mechanics behind it weren't really significant. Note that it also featured an infinite inventory.

[Uraniun235]

I can only assume fat nerds like to a) collect useless shit and b) hoard. OCD? Nerds? No wai!

Isn't this what drives just about every WoW player?

[Stark]

Yeah. The push for better stuff and slightly better stats - the levelling thing - drives all kinds of genres. Indeed, removing it even makes people feel like there's 'no progression', because it's so entrenched.

[Duckie]

As far as other examples of fake realism, the 'if you swap a magazine, you lose all the bullets currently in it' made to prevent magic FPS soldiers doing strange 4-handed reloads where you never have a half-full clip inserted.

But you know what? That system is okay. It's unrealistic, but are you seriously telling me that there's supposed to be no option for me to conserve some sort of rare ammo if I reload with some left in the clip, even if I'm out of combat and willing to take the time to take the bullets out of the magazine.

Some systems make it even worse, by making those half-full clips go back into your inventory to conserve the bullets, but I've never seen a "Realistic FPS" that actually tells you properly how many bullets are in the clips in your inventory if they use that, even though your character should remember this stuff or just be able to tell by how heavy the clips are.

Or what about in games, knee-high walls or invisible walls preventing you from crossing. I count this under fake realism because sometimes the "invisible walls" are actually just 'fall to your doom' areas or the like. This gets especially jarring in, say, Assassin's Creed where you can ride all over the tiny mini-holy land, but you can't enter a certain section of the city due to magic blue fog. If a game developer tells me I can go anywhere in a nonlinear game (which admittedly assassin's creed didn't, but, Prototype did) I want to be able to go faff about in stupid areas instead of being blocked out.

I know it's hard to program such things without making the area an island (either cliffs, rivers, oceans etc. stop your progress or you can walk forever if there's no invisible walls- the Halo series took the first one, amusingly, with inexplicable cliffs around every single area set on the ring that wasn't an island. And if you couldn't fall to your doom, you were in a canyon and so couldn't ascend up to go walk somewhere else.) but why not have someone creative figure out a way to make a non-infinite size game area that still doesn't bug me with invisible fucking walls. Of course, this would make it impossible to have you have to go through bullshit like "I know there's going to be an ambush here, but I can't go around it because there's some uncrossable hedges/rivers/ravines/etc. in the way", but maybe that'd be healthy for game developers to have to work around once in a while.

Also, can we stop disguising equipment leveling as material upgrades?
Wooden Sword > Copper Sword > Bronze Sword > Iron Sword > Steel Sword > Silver Sword > Gold Sword > Super-Magical Material Sword.
It was stupid even back in Dragon Quest, and especially because the fake realism is broken by super-magic speshul materials like gold usually being better than plain old steel. I know '+3 Sword' is boring, but at least it isn't insulting the way "Iron Sword replaces your old Copper Sword" is to my intelligence. I know it's just a damn +3 damage widget.

[Vendetta]

I know it's hard to program such things without making the area an island (either cliffs, rivers, oceans etc. stop your progress or you can walk forever if there's no invisible walls- the Halo series took the first one, amusingly, with inexplicable cliffs around every single area set on the ring that wasn't an island. And if you couldn't fall to your doom, you were in a canyon and so couldn't ascend up to go walk somewhere else.) but why not have someone creative figure out a way to make a non-infinite size game area that still doesn't bug me with invisible fucking walls. Of course, this would make it impossible to have you have to go through bullshit like "I know there's going to be an ambush here, but I can't go around it because there's some uncrossable hedges/rivers/ravines/etc. in the way", but maybe that'd be healthy for game developers to have to work around once in a while.

Game areas are, essentially, always going to be limited. Even in the mythical future where storage space is infinite, programmer and artist time is still a fixed resource, so there will always be a limit to the amount of content which can be created during the development cycle.

So, there will always come a point where you have to say to the player "you cannot go any further".

The advantage of having obvious physical barriers like giant cliffs, walls, rubble, etc is that it's intuitive. Here's a giant fucking cliff. I can't fly, so I can't go any further that way. It avoids the thing in Fallout or Oblivion where you just get a message saying "you can't go that way any more" when you hit a map edge, even though you can see Stuff beyond that point.

So, what do you think developers can do to circumvent the hard physical limit of inexorable time? Procedural generation of mapspace? It could theoretically be infinite, but chances are it wouldn't be interesting, there's a limited set of things which make sense in the context of any game, so you have to restrict the procedural generation to certain combinations of things, which means a player will run through them all pretty quickly.

[Duckie]

I know it's hard to program such things without making the area an island (either cliffs, rivers, oceans etc. stop your progress or you can walk forever if there's no invisible walls- the Halo series took the first one, amusingly, with inexplicable cliffs around every single area set on the ring that wasn't an island. And if you couldn't fall to your doom, you were in a canyon and so couldn't ascend up to go walk somewhere else.) but why not have someone creative figure out a way to make a non-infinite size game area that still doesn't bug me with invisible fucking walls. Of course, this would make it impossible to have you have to go through bullshit like "I know there's going to be an ambush here, but I can't go around it because there's some uncrossable hedges/rivers/ravines/etc. in the way", but maybe that'd be healthy for game developers to have to work around once in a while.

Game areas are, essentially, always going to be limited. Even in the mythical future where storage space is infinite, programmer and artist time is still a fixed resource, so there will always be a limit to the amount of content which can be created during the development cycle.

So, there will always come a point where you have to say to the player "you cannot go any further".

The advantage of having obvious physical barriers like giant cliffs, walls, rubble, etc is that it's intuitive. Here's a giant fucking cliff. I can't fly, so I can't go any further that way. It avoids the thing in Fallout or Oblivion where you just get a message saying "you can't go that way any more" when you hit a map edge, even though you can see Stuff beyond that point.

So, what do you think developers can do to circumvent the hard physical limit of inexorable time? Procedural generation of mapspace? It could theoretically be infinite, but chances are it wouldn't be interesting, there's a limited set of things which make sense in the context of any game, so you have to restrict the procedural generation to certain combinations of things, which means a player will run through them all pretty quickly.

You aren't really talking about what I'm talking about, you seem to be thinking I'm advocating infinitely large games when I'm explicitly now.

I don't care about a canyon that blocks my path and doesn't let me go walk to china if I'm in the levant. I just want to be able to go around a damn 2 inch deep stream if I need to go around it. It's very rare to find a game where the invisible wall or 'you can't go beyond here' thing is unobtrusive and in spots where you'll not want to go. Most of the time I feel like- "You know, I'd love to skip the ambush going through this narrow section with traps everywhere, but apparantly this is the only route to a building in an entire fucking city". You can give someone the illusion of freedom of choice, even if it's to accomplish the same goal, without an infinite sized map and infinite time developing. Just make a game actually nonlinear in its routes.

[White Haven]

Use creativity and variation in your methods of blocking player progress. Rather than having cliffs everywhere, have a cliff on one side, a minefield on another, and a river with a destroyed bridge on the third. Have a soft border, with an active warzone that'll kill you before you run out of mapspace. Don't use hedgerows to block a pyrokinetic. If the player's in a canyon, make it a plot point (Follow this canyon and you'll be able to get close to the OogaBooga base without coming under fire from their main defense guns) rather than just saying 'aaand cliffs.' If the player can fly or superjump, use anti-aircraft guns and fighter cover to kill or crash the player. If you can't think of anything but a glowing shield, write it into the plot (League sorcerors have raised a shield over the Flat Plains. We're sending you in under it to assassinate them and bring it down).

[Zixinus]

Or snipers if you can get away with open plains. In most games, snipers are only a nausence (if they wouldn't be, they would be a player-killing irritation), but against a single target that doesn't have invisibilty, a sniper team easily take out from a much greater distance than a single one (a sniper with a spotter can adjust his shot far more trough his spotter because he can counteract wind/gravity/heat distortion/etc).

If you need to seperate them from the more usual laser-guided snipers, tell the player that the snipers on the outskrits are either a, outside parties told to secure the perimetre and don't bother asking questions or b, mercenaries that the big baddy hired to shoot occasional deserters so he won't have to use his own.