Contrary to real life warfare, games are pretty straightforward.

On the battlefield you can feel the smell of rotting flesh, clouds of smoke and dust blur your vision, your body is tired from carrying ammo and supplies, you can hear the moans of the wounded and mortar fire around you. Your body reacts after training and you are scared shitless that you will leave your pregnant wife all alone.

While playing a game you are sitting on a comfortable chair with a fizzy pop and left over pizza in the vicinity, you probably shut the blinds so the sun doesn't reflect on the screen. The dog looks at you in hopes that you will finally walk it. You are inside your loving home.

How do you expect these two situations to match the immersion? Designers are constantly challenged to suck you into the battlefield, make you feel like that poor bastard sent to war -- you are to shit your pants when faced with a 30 metre cyber demon, not calmly punch it dead with your fists. Things like blurring, pounding etc. confuse you as a player, trigger a red light in your head -- something is not right, I have to run to safety, hide, regenerate, think. Once you learn your lesson a few times, you start paying attention, using cover, flanking etc -- you start acting like the designers think a soldier should. They do it so we can safelly experience something that otherwise is not even remotelly fun.

It doesn't work like that.

If you are getting shot you likely don't know where it's coming from... or its just unavoidable. at that point if you try to run you can't see where your going or try to spot the shooter and if you try to stay and shoot like you have to a number of times it just makes a hard situation harder. So what you are saying is the point fails. Flash red, keep damage marker on the side of screen the shot came from and you have what you should have for what you are saying they are trying to accomplish.

A typicall player does not have military experience whatsoever. He will not distinguish from where a shot could come from based on terrain most of the time. And in real life when you get shot, you usually die or are at least shocked enough to fall to the ground. As gamers we have it easy with HP bars and markers from where do the shots come from -- it has all been playtested and they did it because otherwise it would be too challenging/frustrating. Games are meant to be fun and entertaining, if many modern games have that one feature, it can't be that the mayority doesn't like it. Most people, including me, don't even notice it at all, except when it happens more than a few times in a given timeframe.

I'm quite sure warfare games wouldn't get far without the helpers you mentioned as unrealistic. The players would just die too much. Mastering the game just to play it is not an option either. Remember playground war games as a child? What was the most quarreled point in most of them? Whether you were shot or not, if you are dead or not and that someone cheated by shooting through a wall. Designers erased those problems by clearly stating when someone shot (damage, sound and visual feed) and from where (againsound and visual feed).

A typicall player does not have military experience whatsoever. He will not distinguish from where a shot could come from based on terrain most of the time. And in real life when you get shot, you usually die or are at least shocked enough to fall to the ground. As gamers we have it easy with HP bars and markers from where do the shots come from -- it has all been playtested and they did it because otherwise it would be too challenging/frustrating. Games are meant to be fun and entertaining, if many modern games have that one feature, it can't be that the mayority doesn't like it. Most people, including me, don't even notice it at all, except when it happens more than a few times in a given timeframe.

I'm quite sure warfare games wouldn't get far without the helpers you mentioned as unrealistic. The players would just die too much. Mastering the game just to play it is not an option either. Remember playground war games as a child? What was the most quarreled point in most of them? Whether you were shot or not, if you are dead or not and that someone cheated by shooting through a wall. Designers erased those problems by clearly stating when someone shot (damage, sound and visual feed) and from where (againsound and visual feed).

you didn't reply to what i said.

i said drop the blur, desaturation, and the blood overlay
add a marker of "where" you go hit that is like the blood overlay and a have a brief flash along the side.

you then have all you need for what you said the designers are designing towards without the annoyance... resulting in a more fun experience.

Ah, sorry, I didn't quite understand what you wrote

What you described happens in nearly any modern game now. Maybe there really should be an option to turn the annoyances off then? I'm not sure players would actually bother to alter it anyway -- at least I wouldn't. Then I guess there is no harm in allowing a greater degree of customization of the individual experience -- some might, for example, revoke the flash as a spoiler and want to rely only on their ears.

I conclude you are right, games tend to become more and more packed with features. It is their choice that we cannot turn them off -- the question is, to they think it is irrelevant and players will just suck it up and play or is there a more complex reason behind this?

Ah, sorry, I didn't quite understand what you wrote

What you described happens in nearly any modern game now. Maybe there really should be an option to turn the annoyances off then? I'm not sure players would actually bother to alter it anyway -- at least I wouldn't. Then I guess there is no harm in allowing a greater degree of customization of the individual experience -- some might, for example, revoke the flash as a spoiler and want to rely only on their ears.

I conclude you are right, games tend to become more and more packed with features. It is their choice that we cannot turn them off -- the question is, to they think it is irrelevant and players will just suck it up and play or is there a more complex reason behind this?

Well I mean take inFAMOUS

I get shot... I look at my Radar... Enemies fon't always appear on there, while I'm looking i get shot again
I remember i have a thing that makes enemies light up red when i use it as long as i'm healthy enough...i use it and look around, find the enemy...get shot again
Desaturation has set in and I go to target through the red haze, desaturation, and blur (oh and on top of that i have pretty crappy eyes) I get a shot in... the mob moves...
I seek cover..while i am i get shot again...there goes my sound and i'm fully desaturated now... and where did the mob go? I can't find him cuz he's behind cover, every thing is monochrome, and the character's clothing is already poorly designed as BLACK and BROWN in a world of already brown, greys, and blacks...

Oh and just for fun civilians that where the same color clothing run into the line of fire instead of away from the lightning throwing guy and the 3 psychos wielding Automatic rifles...

Was the desaturation and blood really needed? No. it's just another frustrating element on top of other frustrating elements.


And then there are areas where you have to stand in one spot and take on waves of enemies using automatics firing at you with no cover to get to...again. This is already a hard situation. How does making it harder by making it hard for me to see/hear things better? especially when to heal I have to hit the enemies


I have no problem with mechanics that are used to prod the player to not be stupid, but when the player is already trying to act the way you are telling them to and it's already hard, why make it harder by taking away their connection to the world they are trying to interact with... and if they are going to do that... yeah i think they should have a way to turn it on and off...

An overall poor design might further the annoyance, I do agree with that. I haven't played inFAMOUS at all so I can't judge -- but other games I've played do not make it that hard. On the other hand, there are just a few titles I have recently played (Duke Nukem Forever, Bulletstorm, Crysis 2) and I keep my distance from the warfare games out there like Black Ops.

and it's just frustrating. and in my opinion bad design... Why make something harder when it is shown that the current difficulty is already too hard... It's like going "Digging a 10 foot cubed hole is hard to do with a shovel...so I think now that I've dug one foot I'm going to use a spoon the rest of the way"

http://apps.metacritic.com/games/platforms/ps3/demonssouls

Call of Duty uses it, and admittedly it does have a tendency to make it a little too hard to see, but it's nevertheless effective. Moreso than in Halo, where I knew I had my shield mostly up still and 5 health bars. I could see exactly I was going to do, and therefore my only goal was to go Rambo and not really care. The current system enforces the gameplay mechanics of cover and strategy instead of run and gun. When you get hit you have to hide, it's that simple, and encourages you to know what the environment around you is like. Where there is a rock, where you can hide, and where the fire is coming from. If it's coming from your left, you want cover on the left side, not your right. Yes, the AI tends to not be very cool (as someone mentioned, they tend to have perfect aim while shooting from the hip, or running away through fog firing behind their back). However that's of little consequence to whether or not the obfuscated screen is a good design decision or not; all that does is show that they need to work on making the enemy AI better.

And if you want a realistic game, how about one where you walk away from base to piss and get shot in the back and die, or are driving down the road and hit an IED and don't have a leg anymore and get discharged?

I like it, I think it's perfectly fine.

I also really like health bars and I think that the stigma about them is a mental blockage, but bluring and also does indeed worsen your performance and that itself maps to how, when injured, your performance is impaired.

In other words, it makes injury more of a problem than "you're about to die" and changes the gameplay in a fundamental way.

It changes how you deal with a poor state and situation.

In Turok, if I had 3/100 health, and I was very careful, I could get halfway through the level and find some health widgets. It'd be a tough slog and have some backtracking or exploration and I would have to plan ahead and be very careful.

When I'd find health, it'd be triumphant.

In the blur method, you go quickly to a safe point, recover momentarily and get back into it.

It's excellent if you want to guide the player forward 100% of the time and your tracks are very linear like in Half Life.

It's just different.

On a side note, with respect to your "newsflash", the real newsflash (to you) is that effective and successful games give you limits and challenges and stressors, because if you're not having to handle the altered situation, you're not engaged.

It can be frustrating if over done, sure, but I tend to take it as less HUD-replacement and more of a punishment -- I've done something stupid, I get hit, and now I face actual consequences *as the player*, rather than as my in-game puppet. I don't know, maybe we should make unhealthy players limpy like in L4D or many Survival-Horror games -- but Its rather hard to say one design or the other is "broken" -- it simply is what it is. Deal with it. Other games punish you similarly in other ways -- for example, Halo knocks you out of scope-zoom when you get hit.

When I hear people complain of such punishments, what I really hear is "I want to run-and-gun from one end of the map to the other and win just as long as I can sneak through with 3% health." In some games that's fine -- Doom, Quake, many others, but its not the right mood for every game. Punishments like this add tension to the game, take them away and you have a distinctly more "arcadey" feel.

The designers set out with a goal in mind, and chose a set of gameplay elements which they thought best approximated their vision. It can be neither entirely right, nor entirely wrong as long as the whole of the experience is cohesive.