Realistic shit that many people would think is unrealistic if they saw it in games - When real doesn't "look real."

[IamSpechal]

In fps games when a grenade or even mortar fire hits your surrounding area your player doesn’t immediately get knocked down for a couple of seconds and lose all hearing. If this was real people would complain about being hit with a blast being a free kill.

Not to mention you would likely die anyway thanks to the shrapnel.

 

[An Ghost]

The way starships handle in games. In reality, in order for a starship to stop or slow down, it would have to use some kind of mechanism to produce thrust in the opposite direction to which it's currently traveling. I've seen this in almost no games though. In most of them when you let off the thrust, the ship slowly comes to a stop.

If it makes you feel better, imagine even a ship that is standing still is in fact moving very fast because nothing stands still in space. Everything is constantly orbiting something or it would fall directly into a larger body.
Spess games break down into two categories: plane sim (star wars) and boat sim (star trek, gotchic armada, starsector). The problem with plane sim style is in a space dog fight, theres nothing stopping you from spinning around while continuing your current trajectory and blasting anybody who is on your tail. Boat sim style forget theres 3 dimensions to space. An episode of star trek even has the characters evading another ship by "hiding under the surface of space" like theyre a fucking submarine. The shocking truth is if we ever see space combat, it'll be so mindblowingly balls to the wall insane. But probably more realistically we'll just see extensive use of space torpedos with guidance systems.

 

[BScCollateral]

If it makes you feel better, imagine even a ship that is standing still is in fact moving very fast because nothing stands still in space. Everything is constantly orbiting something or it would fall directly into a larger body.

Except a change to the frame of reference would also affect other objects on the screen.

"Space" games are almost universally boat simulators because idiots today think Star Wars is science fiction.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

grapple gun. people think they can be like batman and shoot themselves up to the roof when in reality, the you wight and gravity would rip your shoulders off.

 

[Kurtis Trent]

Sanitary in post-apocalyptic games. Most of the tlou2 cast would probably get infections just by drinking unclean water and having unprotected sex. Speaking of, the way that game portrays pregnancy and childbirth just pisses me off. Even with today's access to good healthcare a high percentage of kids is being born with disabilities due to birth-related traumas. Delivering a baby is a delicate procedure and anything can go wrong. Not to mention, it's very easy to miscarry due to stress. No woman in her late stages of pregnancy should do any heavy work even if she wants to, it's extremely irresponsible.

 

[M3xus]

If it makes you feel better, imagine even a ship that is standing still is in fact moving very fast because nothing stands still in space. Everything is constantly orbiting something or it would fall directly into a larger body.
Spess games break down into two categories: plane sim (star wars) and boat sim (star trek, gotchic armada, starsector). The problem with plane sim style is in a space dog fight, theres nothing stopping you from spinning around while continuing your current trajectory and blasting anybody who is on your tail. Boat sim style forget theres 3 dimensions to space. An episode of star trek even has the characters evading another ship by "hiding under the surface of space" like theyre a fucking submarine. The shocking truth is if we ever see space combat, it'll be so mindblowingly balls to the wall insane. But probably more realistically we'll just see extensive use of space torpedos with guidance systems.

I remember the creator of Gundam freely admitting in an interview that any human involvement in space combat beyond the planning stages would be a waste, and also posited more realistic depictions would feature fights far, far beyond visual range.

Speaking of range, bullets having a max range in space games. I understand it's for balance, but kinetic projectiles shouldn't have a max range because there's no friction. I can understand a laser having a max range, but even then, it would be how far it travels before the emitter stops firing.

For all its flaws, Mass Effect at least got the bullet part right when the Sargent was giving the "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space" speech.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I remember the creator of Gundam freely admitting in an interview that any human involvement in space combat beyond the planning stages would be a waste, and also posited more realistic depictions would feature fights far, far beyond visual range.

The creator of Gundam at least tried really hard to come up with an internally-consistent set of rules for his setting. It's silly, but it does what he wanted the giant robots to do.

Speaking of range, bullets having a max range in space games. I understand it's for balance, but kinetic projectiles shouldn't have a max range because there's no friction. I can understand a laser having a max range, but even then, it would be how far it travels before the emitter stops firing.

For all its flaws, Mass Effect at least got the bullet part right when the Sargent was giving the "Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son of a bitch in space" speech.

On bullets: a lot of the time the maximum ranges on those are an abstraction of the fact that you can only lead a moving/dodging target so much. If a target is a lightsecond away (~185 thousand miles) and your hypervelocity railgun can only send slugs out at a "mere" 4.5k miles per hour, by the time the shells reach the estimated range to the target, the target won't be anywhere near the point of aim. In that case, you might as well not even fire because your shots are so incredibly unlikely to hit as to be a complete waste. Sure, you can still fire and the bullets might hit something, eventually, but they're very unlikely to hit what you actually aimed at.

Of course, in a lot of settings bullets have far shorter ranges than they ought to have. We can already reliably hit things with bullets (or shells, which are essentially big bullets) at multi-kilometer ranges. A machinegun/autocannon in a space sim having a maximum effective range of only 500 meters is fucking ridiculous.

On lasers: the maximum range for lasers isn't how far it travels before the emitter stops firing. It's how far it can travel while retaining collimation (and to a minor degree how much it gets attenuated by the interstellar medium). Read: how well the beam can hold itself together as a beam. Once the photons are fired, they're free to just keep going no matter what happens to their source. Ignoring any relativistic bullshit going on, if I fired an one-second laser burst at a target a light-year away, if my laser somehow managed to remain coherent that distance, the target would feel a laser of exactly one second duration hitting it.

 

[Snekposter]

Not to mention you would likely die anyway thanks to the shrapnel.

Ironically, no. Not with the really heavy stuff that gets worn a lot these days, especially for urban warfare. Modern armor laughs at hand grenades, and a 80mm mortar round that doesn't instantly turn you into chunky salsa would be quite survivable. Which leads me to....

Armor. It helps. A lot, a lot more than most people realize. Most games really devalue or understate its protectiveness (or theatrically overstate it like with CoD/Battlefield and supersuits), or pretend it doesn't exist, but you can actually take multiple 5.56 or 5.45 to the chest with a modern SAPI or ESAPI and with a couple aspirin for the pain and bruising, a minute or so to catch your breath and a fresh plate because half the reason your chest is only bruised is because it shattered to absorb the hits, and you're good to go. CoD Jell-O Vision is pretty accurate in that regard.

 

[Berrakh]

The way gunfire actually sounds? Same for movies so it's an obvious choice.

 

[John Titor]

Sniping is a lot more complicated than "shooting the little man in the scope", you have to factor in things like wind speed, curvature of the Earth and even temperature. I remember long ago there was a Flash game that tried to use wind speed as a mechanic before most other shooter games did.

 

[HeyYou]

Sniping is a lot more complicated than "shooting the little man in the scope", you have to factor in things like wind speed, curvature of the Earth and even temperature. I remember long ago there was a Flash game that tried to use wind speed as a mechanic before most other shooter games did.

That's because most modern shooter games like CoD have maps where you're shooting dudes who are ~100 meters from you. Even the largest Battlefield maps are probably only a few football fields in length and width. Only a few games that I know of allow you to actually shoot at realistic sniping distances.

 

[VIPPER?]

The way gunfire actually sounds? Same for movies so it's an obvious choice.

this tbh, modern guns are really wimpy sounding
but on that note, recoil. modern guns recoil more than you think they would! especially pistols. pistols are fucking uncontrollable. rifles are well built, reliable, actually heavy, and don't kick too hard. pistols are all light as feathers and horribly temperamental. how they came to be the "reliable back-up option" thing in games and movies is beyond me

[words]

Not to shit on you but usually the maximum range thing in those sorts of space games is to incorporate inherent weapon inaccuracy. You can only machine your railguns so well, and your lasers being on big gimbled machines that have the teensiest bits of play or being completely fixed on your spaceship that can only know where it is based on other objects it can only sense not super accurately means the weapon itself isn't pointed completely straight all the time at its target. The maximum range is, I assume, meant to express a maximum range where there's enough stuff having already acted on it and that will act on it that the error exceeds some acceptible threshhold so you give up tracking it, and it disappears from play because even if it does carry on in the universe, any planet will burn it up in atmosphere or it'll be absorbed by anti-asteroid CWIS systems or energy shields or whatever.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Not to shit on you but usually the maximum range thing in those sorts of space games is to incorporate inherent weapon inaccuracy. You can only machine your railguns so well, and your lasers being on big gimbled machines that have the teensiest bits of play or being completely fixed on your spaceship that can only know where it is based on other objects it can only sense not super accurately means the weapon itself isn't pointed completely straight all the time at its target. The maximum range is, I assume, meant to express a maximum range where there's enough stuff having already acted on it and that will act on it that the error exceeds some acceptible threshhold so you give up tracking it, and it disappears from play because even if it does carry on in the universe, any planet will burn it up in atmosphere or it'll be absorbed by anti-asteroid CWIS systems or energy shields or whatever.

I thought that was implied with what I said. Here:

We can already reliably hit things with bullets (or shells, which are essentially big bullets) at multi-kilometer ranges. A machinegun/autocannon in a space sim having a maximum effective range of only 500 meters is fucking ridiculous.

That accounts for not only issues of leading/flight time, but also accuracy. Indeed, the longer the range the more any kind of deviation at the source would throw a shot off. Take a somewhat harder (compared to shit like Star Wars) sci-fi setting like Homeworld, for example: Ion Cannons, spinal-mounted weapons with all the stabilization in the world, have a puny maximum range compared to their power (and they also don't lose power over range as they should). Their kinetic cannons also don't seem to fire past 6km or so either, even against very slow targets. These are ranges we would be able to fire at with near-current technology. Ranges in space games are just incredibly compressed for gameplay purposes. After all, nailing a TIE fighter 100m in front of you and flying through the cloud of debris is a lot more viscerally satisfying to most people than popping that same TIE fighter at 2 miles away using an aiming/lead reticle and just seeing a little puff of fire when it blows up.

(And the least we talk about theoretically guided weapons like missiles and torpedoes, the better.)

Something that always makes me chuckle is how Battlefleet Gothic (the wargame, not the videogame) is one of the few space combat games that gets the ranges right. They're very clear that the ship models are only representations of what would be just specks of dust on the table if the game's real scale was represented. It also helps account for the weapons being relatively accurate: even two ships in base contact are over 1000km away from one another, each salvo is flinging a lot of shit at the wall and hoping something sticks.

 

[VIPPER?]

Sorry man. I never got my grade 10.

E: after reading your post a couple times I maintain that the wonkiness in space warfare games is gamey interpretations of physics

but also lol 6km being long range for anything ever. people have made shots with handheald weapons at nearly 2k. game design demands a certain level of disbelief and fancy though. a pure space warfare game would probably have 100 rounds of diplomacy before the opening strike which would decide the game

 

[Hard Toothbrush]

The way starships handle in games. In reality, in order for a starship to stop or slow down, it would have to use some kind of mechanism to produce thrust in the opposite direction to which it's currently traveling. I've seen this in almost no games though. In most of them when you let off the thrust, the ship slowly comes to a stop.

Early levels in Nexus: Jupiter Incident were excellent in that this was your starting ship. It was the first time that I've seen working thrusters at the front of the ship AND also a spinning section to simulate gravity (though they did stop when they stopped burning the engines). Still a great game even today.

 

[Pocket Dragoon]

Early levels in Nexus: Jupiter Incident were excellent in that this was your starting ship. It was the first time that I've seen working thrusters at the front of the ship AND also a spinning section to simulate gravity (though they did stop when they stopped burning the engines). Still a great game even today.

I was just going to mention that; in addition to there being a fantastic mod editor which allowed for large scale skirmish battles around gravity wells. I wish I still had both.

 

[Snekposter]

Early levels in Nexus: Jupiter Incident were excellent in that this was your starting ship. It was the first time that I've seen working thrusters at the front of the ship AND also a spinning section to simulate gravity (though they did stop when they stopped burning the engines). Still a great game even today.

Man, I need to reinstall that game at some point. Never managed to get past the second-to-last mission and then an HD failure wiped my saves.

EDIT: For something more on topic with the thread.

An elephant, no. A Major General? Yes.

 

[Corn Flakes]

EDIT: For something more on topic with the thread.
View attachment 2160427
An elephant, no. A Major General? Yes.

Sometimes the other guy just rolls a 20.

 

[Mary the Goldsmith]

Rubber bullets being lethal in some cases. Games like Arkham Knight and MGSV treat them as 100% safe non-lethal weapons and some media like Fast & Furious and The X-Files treat them as being almost completely useless, when in real life those things can seriously injure you and even kill you under some cases.
(To be fair Arkham Knight does include a line of dialogue where one criminal mentions the Ruberr bullets hurt like hell)

 

[Gravemind]

Rubber bullets being lethal in some cases. Games like Arkham Knight and MGSV treat them as 100% safe non-lethal weapons and some media like Fast & Furious and The X-Files treat them as being almost completely useless, when in real life those things can seriously injure you and even kill you under some cases.
(To be fair Arkham Knight does include a line of dialogue where one criminal mentions the Ruberr bullets hurt like hell)

I just came out the Yakuza thread to see this and I can't help but think of how one of the biggest key elements in Yakuza 4's plot is the use of rubber bullets. And about how more than one person gets shot in the head at or near point-blank range and survives simply because "lol high tech rubber bullets".