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The lack of carnage in FPS games is disappointing and feels sterile, dated, and pathetic.

RolePlayer

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THERE IS NO GORE
Long ago I played a game called Soldier of Fortune II, a pretty infamous game for its dismemberment physics. The game was extremely gory, and I was convinced that this was the future of FPS games and it would only get more realistic.

Ironically, for how much people even today complain about 'violent video games', it's interesting how thoroughly sanitized FPS games nowadays are.

  • There's almost never blood, at MOST, there's a red puff of particles when you hit the enemy. There's very rarely blood puddles or sprays on surfaces.

  • Games now delete bodies. Even DOOM vaporizes bodies after a few seconds.

  • Rarely are there dismemberment or 'animated' deaths, typically there's just an instant ragdoll and the enemy simply slumps into a heap.

  • There's pretty much absolutely no wounds or damage visible on enemies. You don't hit a guy with buckshot and see ripped and torn flesh, or hit someone with a slug and leave a basketball-sized exit wound.
Games have become severely sanitized... and even games that are 'extreme gore' still feel sanitized. I mentioned DOOM - DOOM 2016 is a very gory game... but the gore is so over the top that it doesn't even really feel gory. Like I said, everything disappears after a few seconds, and the gore - even chainsawing enemies in half - is obviously done to be extreme to the point that it borders on satire. It's the difference between the gore in the first SAW movie versus the gore in the later SAW movies - the first movie was more restrained and realistic and thus more painful to watch, but as the movies went on it got so over the top it became comical (see also: Final Destination).

THERE IS NO FEELING OF DAMAGE
Another game from way in the past that did FPS gaming better was F.E.A.R. The absolute best part of this game was the gunplay, in particular, the massive clouds of smoke and plaster dust that would billow and fill a room as you fought enemies. I can't find any particularly good videos showcasing this but you can see some of it in this video.

Gunfights would leave huge chunks of wall missing, concrete crumbling, and the chaos of battle would create a fog of war. Nowadays, there's almost never any destruction. Environments are completely impervious to any kind of damage. Bulletholes disappear after a minute, dust and smoke dissipates in seconds. There's no feeling of destruction.

At the end of one of (possibly the) greatest shootouts in movie history, the place looks like this. Except if this were a video game made in the year 2019, it would look like this. No damage. No bodies. Nothing.

THERE IS NO 'LITTLE STUFF'
Change a magazine in a game and look at what happens to it - nothing. It doesn't exist. You can see your player eject a magazine and it's gone. Nothing drops to the floor... and in the rare game that actually does show it, it simply falls through the floor or disappears in two seconds.

Unload with a minigun and watch the stream of brass fly out of the gun and look at what happens to it - nothing. It doesn't exist. You can see it fly but it just disappears. In the rare game that actually shows the brass in the game world, it simply falls through the floor or disappears in two seconds.

Shoot a lamp with a rocket launcher, almost no games will ever do anything, not even causing the lights to flicker. The world is completely impervious to any effect whatsoever.

Even the very simply basics that would give a combat environment a "fought-in" feel can't even get this shit right. No brass, no magazines, unrealistic bullet holes, no discarded or used equipment, nothing!

https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming...ack_of_carnage_in_fps_games_is_disappointing/
 

Unkillable Cat

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Like lightbane said, the console market appeals to the lowest common denominator, which means that gory games are bad, mmkay?

Another reason is that dismemberment physics, retaining spent ammo casings and the like is extremely taxing on hardware, which mostly hurts... the consoles.

Lastly adding all these 'little things' is very expensive on development time and costs, which is a big no-no to most publishers, especially the ones on... the consoles.

There are some very good exceptions out there though, such as the Brutal Doom mod.

Permament blood on walls and floor? Check.
Bodies stick around (unless vaporized by heavy arms fire)? Check.
Ammo casings stick around? Check, though there may be some limitiations on this.
Dismemberment of enemies? Circumstantial, but definetly a Check.

Then realize the irony that Brutal Doom influenced the design of 2016 Doom.
 

Wunderbar

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Nah.
Gore, shell casings, spent magazines - that's just neat, but optional fluff. It doesn't magically make game better.
 
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Cassar

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Blame consoles
I'm pretty sure Soldier of Fortunes was on consoles, though. Can't say if it was also gory.
It's always the devs's fault, no one else.


It was made for computers and computers only. The games were then ported to consoles something like 2 years later and i dont even think by the same company, i think SOF 2 was outsourced. And both have shit scores on the console ports. IGN gave SOF 2 88% for the pc original and 58 for the xbox port. They were probably barelly functional ports, if that. You know how they used to make them in the 90's and early 00's. PC had so many excelent tailor made games for both the hardware and the mouse/keyboard combo. Completely ill suited for consoles both becaue the controller cant play them and the hardware was lacking. That didnt stop publishers from putting all sorts of hilarious ports. Kinda like how Wasteland 2 or Pillars of Eternity are now for consoles. You look at them and think why the fuck do they even exist in such a grotesque manner. But they do anyway

 
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RolePlayer

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Everything in the industry has been homogenized to be more family friendly. It's like a movie studio making more PG/PG13 movies for broader appeal. This is yet just another one of many examples of how corporations have crippled the video game industry.
 

Sjukob

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Agree completely, but I think carnage shouldn't be limited to FPS only, all other genres could really use some more violence.

There are some very good exceptions out there though, such as the Brutal Doom mod

Yeah, just like the kitty said. I remember being blown away by brutal doom, because it was the only thing at the time that did violence right. Might want to check it out if you haven't done so.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
I've never played the series myself but probably of the exceptions:





I wonder how PS4 version of this game fares.
 

DalekFlay

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The recent Doom and Wolfenstein games are the first pure FPS games I've enjoyed in a long ass time. Other than that, I mostly agree they lack that certain "oomph" I want a lot of the time.

Not sure I'd blame consoles really. They're to blame for a lot of FPS issues, but that visceral feel and particle effects and such? They could easily do that shit now, and games mentioned like FEAR were ported relatively well from what I have read. I think the issue is much more that better overall graphics cause devs to skimp on the little stuff a lot of the time, and also that a mainstream focus lowers the desire for gore and too much impact.
 

TheHeroOfTime

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Night Goat

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The lack of destructable terrain is the most disappointing thing. Remember when Red Faction let you blow your way through walls and shit 18 fucking years ago? And yet, it never caught on. In modern games there is still no amount of firepower that will have any effect on the environment. Because that would take work. And work doesn't sell games, marketing does.
 

Unkillable Cat

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I never paid attention to whether it deletes the bodies or not, but there's blood splattering, limbs flying, and if you shoot a gnaar with the coach gun from point blank range, you disfigure it.

Oh, it does. It's been a gripe of mine with the series since the start.

Strangely enough SSam 3 doesn't delete the blood spatters, so you can still see where you've been.
 

Bad Sector

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Another game from way in the past that did FPS gaming better was F.E.A.R. [...] Gunfights would leave huge chunks of wall missing, concrete crumbling, and the chaos of battle would create a fog of war.

IIRC FEAR did clean up the carnage after a while though and it was quite fast. There are mods to increase the time and improve the gore though.

Although i agree that most games have this tendency to clean up after a while and i do not see why. Even Duke 3D and Blood had permanent decals back in the day (although i think blood splatter would clean out in Blood).

When i implemented decals in my engine a few years ago i did a small stress test with blood decals to test its performance and i'm pretty sure that once (well, if... considering how much of a vaporware it has been) i finish the game i'll have permanent damage (although yeah, it is much easier when your graphics are simplistic like mine... but then again even in modern games the vast majority of dynamic decals on the environment are just quads plastered on surfaces, so it shouldn't really be that taxing).
 

Syl

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Games now delete bodies. Even DOOM vaporizes bodies after a few seconds.
That's a technical limitation, no ? Can't have too many 3D objects on the screen at one time. But they could surely last more than a few seconds or use low poly models for corpses. So fuck them.
The lack of destructable terrain is the most disappointing thing. Remember when Red Faction let you blow your way through walls and shit 18 fucking years ago? And yet, it never caught on. In modern games there is still no amount of firepower that will have any effect on the environment. Because that would take work. And work doesn't sell games, marketing does.
Also a technical limitation as far as I know. The way 3D environment is stored, it's highly compressed, it can't easily be modified on the fly (or something like that). You're right though, it's definitely possible with more work.

What's depressing is you'd think that voxel technology will solve that. It won't. Environment will also be indestructible by default.
 

Bad Sector

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Coincidentally i was looking into some old articles i wrote for a (paper) magazine back in 2008 and in the column i had at the time (which was theoretically about shooters, but in practice my monthly rant about how much FPS sucks nowadays and why older FPSs are better) and found one that was almost about this topic. Here it is, translated (consider that i wrote it 11 years ago, i almost always wrote these at the last moment and there are a couple of mistakes in there - i put some notes at the end):

Interactivity

Doom 3. You shoot with your shotgun an imp that has spawned in front of you, splattering blood all over the place. A few steps below you notice a zombie in a locked room through a large glass window. You approach, shoot the glass and... not a scratch. You go back to the imp, that has already disappeared and obviously, while you weren't looking, the cleaning lady came and wiped the blood stains.

Half-Life 2. Antlions are headbutting you endlessly and you just ran out of ammo. You take out the gravity gun and... you can't pick up anything. All the rocks around you are glued to the ground. As an antlion at your side headbutts you to death you wonder why, even though you can carry 384.923 weapons, you can't carry a single medkit for later use.

F.E.A.R. Norton Mapes (the fat guy who always carries potato chips) just wont die no matter how much you shoot him (is there anyone who didn't try that, i wonder?).

BioShock. What are the chances that someone who was endlessly shooting you just a moment ago not having a single bullet on him right after you kill him? According to the game, that is very likely. That's just details, you may say. Like metallic surfaces in Rapture not being good electrical current conductors.

All the above are cases where interactivity either suffers or could have been better. Id never cared about it - John Carmack was known for considering breaking glass as a gimmick in Quake 2 - which shows in all of their games. At a first glance, the reason sounds obvious: there is not enough processing power for better interactivity. However this isn't the case, as older shooters had a greater amount of interactivity. First of all, 10 years ago enemies didn't disappear. Watching the trailers and screenshots from the upcoming Wolfenstein that was shown in E3 2008, i noticed disappearing Nazis! OK, in Doom 3 you can excuse that due to the demonic nature of the monsters involved. But now that the game is supposed to take place around 1940, what is the excuse?

But these "shortcomings" do not stop at the enemies. In the original Wolfenstein, beyond the basic keycard-based gameplay, you could take advantage of the environment. As an example, you could eat the dog food to gain health or, if you were in a bad shape, you could even slurp blood from a blood pool. If you killed a Nazi, you could - always - get his bullets. In Ken's Labyrinth you could use slot machines, vending machines, etc. Duke Nukem 3D is the apex of interactivity: if you shoot a glass, it will break, just like several other objects (f.e. glasses, bottles, plants, pots, statues, lights) and lights will go out affecting the area lighting. If you shoot an enemy near a wall, his blood will splatter it and then slowly drip down, whereas if you step on his blood for a while, your boots will leave red boot marks on the ground (or blue, if you step out of water). Decals such as bullet holes and blood splats on the walls after a violent shootfest started with Duke. Unlike other later games, however, Duke (and all the Build engine games) didn't make decals go away after a while. And i ask: how my 200MHz Pentium MMX, the computer i had at the time, had no issue handling Duke's decals, whereas my Athlon64 X2 4200, the computer i had when playing Doom 3, was not? Or it is that it could handle them, but someone just didn't consider interactivity an important element for player immersion?

Almost all modern FPSs have a physics engine running beneath the scenes. Sadly, most of them use the engine for ragdolls or destruction physics that provide only a minimum of "interaction" (you could have the same effect with animations - the new Rage by id Software looks like it goes back to animated death sequences instead of ragdolls). Very few games tried something beyond that, like Half-Life 2. But even though physics puzzles provide an interesting addition to the gameplay, they are just a part of interactivity.

Some notes for the text above:

1. I am not 100% sure about that bit about Carmack. I remember reading it at the time, but i can't find it with a quick google search now.

2. Even though i call it interactivity in there, i'm not sure if that term covers exactly the examples i gave (especially the bits about BioShock). Honestly reading it again (especially now that i tried to translate it) i think i'm shoving a little too much under a single term.

3. With the "original Wolfenstein" i obviously meant Wolfenstein 3D, not the Apple II games, this was a column focused on FPS games. Just mentioning this in case someone feels pedantic. :-P

4. I was wrong about Duke being the first to feature decals on the walls - even ignoring the earlier Blood engine games by Capstone, Doom itself had bullet holes on the walls.

5. It might look weird to use Half-Life 2 as both a bad and good example of interactivity, but this was in different contexts. Also i was limited in how much text i could write (by the time i was near the end of the page i was already into cutting out text :-P) and wanted to reference games that people were likely to have played. And TBH that entire paragraph suffers too much from text cutting because yes, destruction physics is interaction, but what i meant at that point was that the physics engines weren't taken advantage of to provide better interaction that you could only do with a physics engine but instead were (and, FWIW, still are) used to do stuff you could do with other means too.
 

Alienman

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I agree with effects of fire fights, like stuff flying around, bullet holes, destroyed walls, general destruction and debris. But some games still have plenty of gore, and bodies laying around for a good while - even on consoles. Two games I recently played have it in spades.

Last of Us, and Days Gone. Bodies get mutilated depending on weapon, especially in Last of Us, and when dudes are killed they are laying face down in a pool of blood. Looks very "satisfying" after a battle. It goes for Days Gone too, but with one main difference. The bodies stay for an incredible long time in this game, even while it being open world. Like you can kill dudes, go away and come back an hour later and they are still littering the place. Unfortunately the pooling of the blood disappears. One thing both games suffer from is gunshot wounds on the corpses. That is a big one that I miss in modern titles. In Last of Us the enemies do suffer from gruesome wounds like I said earlier, but you have to shoot them in the head with a shotgun or grenade them to get that effect, regular bullet wounds on the body is non-existent.

In both games enemies also react to where they are shot, but it ends after that unfortunately. It looks cool though, shooting someone in the arm and then having them clutching it in pain. Would be sweet if they dropped their weapon and had to crawl around or something but alas.
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Anyway, I guess it depends on the game, or maybe its more accepted in the zombie genre(maybe even expected) -having a ton of blood and with dismemberment effects that other genres just ignores ?
 
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Hobo Elf

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The lack of destructable terrain is the most disappointing thing. Remember when Red Faction let you blow your way through walls and shit 18 fucking years ago? And yet, it never caught on. In modern games there is still no amount of firepower that will have any effect on the environment. Because that would take work. And work doesn't sell games, marketing does.
EA tried it with Battlefield: Bad Company, but it didn't help push sales, as you said. The destructible buildings were a nice addition to that game since you could just bomb the shit out players camping in structures.
 

Wunderbar

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The lack of destructable terrain is the most disappointing thing. Remember when Red Faction let you blow your way through walls and shit 18 fucking years ago?
it was a gimmick, destructible environments were barely used in gameplay.
 

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