Guns and Gear: Weapons and Tactics in Games

Brant asked me to take a break from my usual gear porn and serious musings on self-defense to share some thoughts on how weapons and tactics are represented in games. After all, this is primarily a gaming-oriented blog :).

Unlike most of my colleagues here at GrogNews, I am, first and foremost, a console gamer, not a PC gamer or a tabletop gamer. The relative merits of electronic vs. tabletop gaming and of the various electronic gaming platforms can be debated for hours (or megabytes, as the case may be), but suffice to say that there are some great strategic and tactical games on consoles. At the strategic level, Sid Meier's Civilization: Revolution comes to mind, while Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series and Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising are among the best tactical games on console platforms. In terms of popularity, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) is at the top of the heap right now, with Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Medal of Honor following in its footsteps with hopes of topping its gameplay and technical accomplishments and at least approaching its commercial success.

In today's posting, I'll touch on some features that I would like to see in a tactical-action game on the PC or next-gen console platforms. Some games do some, but not all of these things, right, while some of the other ideas have not yet (to the best of my knowledge) hit the market.

Distinct Models for Weapons and Ammunition

Terminal effects (e.g., damage inflicted) are fundamentally a property of the cartridge, not the weapon from which it was fired. An M855/SS109 NATO 5.56x45mm, 62-grain penetrator cartridge fired from an M4 is fundamentally the same as one fired from an M16, an ACR, an Tavor TAR-21, an F2000, a FAMAS, or any other weapon chambered for 5.56 NATO. There can be differences in terminal effects based on different muzzle velocities from different barrel lengths, but these effects only come into play at medium ranges (beyond 100 meters).

Yes, MW2, I'm looking at you. Why is someone shot by an M16A4 or a TAR-21 dramatically more wounded than someone shot by an M4?

Magazine Compatibility

While we're on the topic of ammunition, a small improvement that a lot of games (yes, MW2, I'm looking at you again) could make is to recognize compatibility of magazines between various weapons. If my squad-mate is armed with an M16A4 and I'm armed with an M4A1, we can use each other's magazines. In fact, the M4, M16, ACR, TAR-21, F2000, FAMAS, AUG, G36, L85, M249 SAW, L86 LSW, and many other weapons can use the STANAG magazine most commonly associated with the M4/M16/AR-15.

Penetration

This has really improved over the past few years, but some games still don't get it right. The other night, I was playing M.A.G. while my wife worked on her laptop on the sofa next to me. I was playing a sniper role, popping 1-2 enemies at a time and then displacing left or right along a long fence line. I was really racking up the kills when my wife, who is not anywhere near as into weapons and tactics as I am, looks up at the screen, hears the enemy's return fire hitting the fence, and innocently asks, "What's the fence made out of?" "Wood," I responded and then realized what she was pointing out: the game had lulled me into treating a wooden fence as hard cover.

Movement and Positions

For a game to be in any way realistic, it has to model the real biomechanics of a how trained shooter moves, the positions that they take, and the effects of movement and position on accuracy. Ideally, games should also model fatigue and the effect of pulse and respiration rate on the stability of your body as a shooting platform.

I can't tell you how many times I've been killed in on-line games by some 12-year-old bunny-hopping on the approach and circle-strafing for the kill. I've completed some fairly high-speed training (especially for a civilian), but I must have missed the session where they covered bunny-hopping and circle-stafing as individual movement techniques.

Ricochets

Richochets are a real issue with small-arms fire, especially in urban environments that can be used to one's advantage or can present a risk (either from friendly or enemy fire). For example, a skilled machine gunner can "skip" rounds along a wall to hit otherwise protected targets. FM 3-06 discusses this and other factors that designers of realistic tactical action games would be well-advised to study.

Reaction Times

I haven't done any controlled tests on this topic, but it seems that games vary in how they treat reaction times of friendly NPCs and AI opponents. I know that SWAT 3: Close Quarters Battle and SWAT 4, from the now-defunct Sierra Online, did it fairly well, because they actually had a difficulty setting to control the reaction times of AI opponents.

Wikipedia offers a decent overview of the topic and a column in a recent issue of SWAT Magazine also discussed the topic of reaction times with an emphasis on its tactical implications. At a minimum, I think a game should include some delay for the reaction time of the character observing the stimulus, making a decision (do I shoot or not? do I need to re-load? do I need to turn left or right to face a threat? etc.), and then actually executing the action (squeezing the trigger, executing a tactical or speed re-load, turning, moving, etc.).

Go/no-go reactions are also faster than choice reactions. If the AI is already covering a door that it expects the player to come through, it just needs to decide to fire when he sees the player come through the door (like readying an action in D&D). If, on the other hand, the AI is just standing around smoking and joking one moment and in the next moment he's covered in his buddy's blood and brain matter from a suppressed 7.62 round to the head, he has to go through a lot of choices: drop prone? dash for cover? unsling my weapon and return fire (where did the shot come from)? freeze in panic? etc.

There are other areas to consider (like the teamwork between a sniper and an observer that it takes to make a one-shot kill against a fleeting target at 800 yards or a better representation of terminal effects, including the effects of body armor), but perhaps those would push the game too far toward a simulation for realism fanatics like me.

In conclusion, I'd love to hear what you, our readers, think. What makes a good tactical-action game? What games do it really well and, conversely, what are some of the worst representations of combat in games that claim to be realistic?

[Edited to fix a typo.]

By: Guardian