Likewise, I'm not convinced that it's going to prove as easy to achieve heart-shots as you're evaluating it to be, for most players, at least, and if it does prove that easy, then there may well be a disconnect between the level of realism in your damage simulation and the level of realism in your gunplay simulation.

I have to seriously agree with Paragon123 here. With the level of realism you are attributing to hitting an enemy AT ALL, you can't expect it to be "difficult" to kill a person on the battlefield (because modern guns are quite simply highly effective killing tools). One limitation you can put on players spamming shots to the abdomen (which is the origin of your balancing issue) is to drastically limit the ammo available to them in comparison to the quantity of enemy troops. If they run out of ammo, they would have to acquire new ammo from a corpse, possibly even an enemy corpse, which means approaching the enemy directly without ammo / an effective defense. This is a risk that players will want to avoid, therefore they will be careful with their aiming in order to conserve ammo.

CoD Tried to make aiming more realistic... and in theory I think the idea is sound... but in their implementation i don't think it really works. When not looking down the scope they have a small circle, and this represents how "off center" your shot ends up.... when you look down the scope the circle gets smaller until it's a pin point. Shooting or moving widens the circle again. The ability to 'no-scope' sniper head shots is pretty decent proof that they must have gotten it very, very wrong (or the players must be cheating).

It requires knowing how the circle actually relates to the shot though to determine how well this actually models realistic aiming. In any case, the way i would do it is something like..

Instead of a circle, it would be more of a cone... of course the cone can be represented by a circle (who knows, perhaps this is what they are doing).

Choose a distance the circle will represent. When a player fires their weapon, choose a random point on the circle, favoring the out side of the circle the smaller the distance. the vector the round will follow will originate from the end of the weapons barrel and pass through this point. So the random point chosen represents the angle offset of the rounds vector rather than the end point offset of the rounds impact. (I.E if the aiming circle represents a 25' cone and you are firing at something 40' away you likely won't even hit anything within the circle). If they player is not in a stable position (Prone for rifles, firmly planted in place for handguns) the circle will move erratically (even in a stable position the circle will move in predictable patterns due to breathing, muscle control, etc). If the trigger isn't pulled directly back, the circle will move upward slightly before the round can even exit the barrel (this could be represented by a characters familiarity with the weapon... you will only be able to pull the trigger directly back if you know the weapon well enough to know how much pressure it takes to release the hammer) Then, when the hammer hits it will push the circle back down (unless you are familiar enough with the weapon to compensate). Being unfamiliar with the weapon and over compensating either action will cause the circle to move in the opposite direction slightly. Also, right handed shooters tend to pull the barrel to the right and left-handed to the left.

In addition, the round will start dropping noticeably even within a weapons "maximum effective range" and you don't need to be firing at a target half a mile away with a sniper rifle for a cross wind to be the difference between a hit and a miss... even an shooter firing an assault rifle at a target 200 meters out may find they need to adjust for wind. For example, if you are trying to pass your marksmen test with an m4 with a wind blowing left to right you want to aim near the left shoulder to make sure you hit somewhere in the torso area.

If you watch a marksmen competition they will take their own good time to aim... at 15-30 seconds min... and after ever trigger pull you have to start over... if you are just pulling the trigger as fast as you can you might as well be firing from the hip. Plus, the "circle" doesn't gradually decrease in circumfrence... you start aiming, it all snaps together and you pull the trigger... if you miss that window things tend to go blurry and you have to start over, its tough to keep your eye that focused and your muscles that still for much longer than an instant.

All that being said, I've never been a particularly good shot myself... I just know everything people kept telling me every time I missed

Oh, and I know i can't stop talking... but generally the larger the caliber of round, the less important the accuracy of the sights... rifles being the weapon where the sights are most likely to be accurate, as generally each person zeroes their own sights... and the quality of the weapon/sights determines how much wear a weapon can take before the sights start getting out of whack and need to be zeroed at a range again... and here familiarity with the weapon helps a shooter maintain accuracy as the sights start needing adjusting.

Oh.. and also, in line with what facehead1992 said, a hand gun doesn't have "30 rounds" it has two magazines of 15 rounds each.. meaning, shooting three times then reloading leaves you with 15 rounds, not 27. Stealing ammo only works if they are using a weapon with a compatible magazine.

This is realistic

That's your core problem :) You know, you don't have to implement it if you don't want to (I know, I keep forgeting it myself too). Simply don't simulate heart maybe?

I would echo what people have said about expecting realistic results (frequent death) if you do a realistic simulation. Having said that, better body armour would reduce the chances of instant death. Or have the effects of a shot be a bit variable, e.g. the bullet ricocheted off a rib. Or limit the amount of ammo that has that direct punching power, favour ammo that fragments and doesn't penetrate deeply.

Okay, this is try FOUR to respond. This stupid fucking site keeps kicking me back to the previous page and erasing ALL OF MY FUCKING DATA because nobody was smart enough to install an auto-save feature into this fucking thing. I am NOT taking the time to respond to ANYTHING in here at-length, because this PIECE OF SHIT is guaranteed to delete EVERYTHING if I take even half an hour to type this, so I am going to be very, very terse. Especially since Sturgeon's law is proving quite true here with how many times in this people put words in my mouth, or ignore my statements so they can make assumptions I have already refuted.

You can't make your weapons that realistically damaging and expect to have the same exciting, run-and-gun fights you see in a lot of FPS games.

I never said this. This is the exact opposite of my goals for this game, quit putting words into my mouth.

Most gun fights are either extremely one sided (and over in a matter of seconds),

No, Christopher Nolan, they're not. Guns don't make people fall over like ragdolls dead on the spot, they just punch agood old-fashioned hole in them. Gunshot wounds are just regular wounds, they're NOT indowed with the magical killing power people keep injecting them with.

or extremely long and drawn out, with both sides behind cover waiting for the other guys to run out of ammo, or for the artillery to come down, or for reinforcements to flank them... etc.

On a battlefield, sure. In a real civilian gunfight, both parties open fire while taking cover, then have a prolonged standoff periodically exchanging fire between trying to do damage control on their wounds, trying not to get any more, and trying to kill the other guy. All largely incompatible goals, so some are always botched to succeed on the others if any are succeeded on at all. They are equally likely to end either with one party dead and the other wounded, both parties dead or both parties wounded. The only factor that changes that is body armour.

Or at least it did, with how much the police force has been militarized now in my home country, I doubt it'll stay that way.

I'd say that if you want to keep that level of detail in how weapons work, you need to re-evalutate the pace of the game and the quantity of the enemies to a point where getting shot (pretty much at all) is expected to end the game.

Bullshit, no I don't. The game is slow-paced already, because it's a SURVIVAL GAME. And you clearly have NO IDEA HOW GUNS WORK if you think getting shot "pretty much at all" is fatal. MOST PEOPLE WHO GET SHOT SURVIVE.

If you are keeping the DOT that makes you bleed out from getting shot in the heart, are you also making it so that getting shot in the leg makes it so hard to concentrate that you pretty much entirely lose all your accuracy? Getting hit in the body armor your wearing stuns you b/c you've had the wind knocked out of you and without someone to drag you off behind cover makes you easy pickings?

1. You bleed from wounds everywhere, in the heart it just bleeds really fast and never stops.
2. Pain is meaningless in a fight. One of the primary roles of adrenalin is to inhibit nociception. This is supposed to be common knowledge. You DO NOT FEEL PAIN in a fight, and it's incredibly likely to fail to notice serious, even fatal, injuries. Franz Ferdinand, for a good historical example, was shot in the carotid artery and only ever noticed his wife Sophie's heart wound, dying minutes later without ever realising he had been shot. His last words were "It's nothing. It's nothing."
3. A bullet that doesn't penetrate body armour doesn't do much damage at all, and it certainly isn't incapacitating. It would be painful, if you could FEEL pain in combat, but you can't so it isn't. Even a rifle doesn't do much if it can't penetrate armour, and it's only really rifles that are even considerable when they are stopped by armour. You clearly do not understand what a firearm is. It's not the magic death-ray blaster you're imagining. It's a launching device meant to activate tiny deflagrant charges and help them get tiny bits of metal moving really fast to put holes in what you point it at.

Also, it seems that accuracy in your game is not realistic enough if it is that easy to hit the heart every time. A good marksmen might be able to reliably hit a target the size of the heart at a reasonable distance (changes depending on type of gun) from a stable position on a stationary target, but that will only be true for say... the first shot against a sleeping target or something.

I NEVER said it was easy. For a new player, a heart wound might be too hard for them. But with practice a player will be able to hit it, say, maybe 1/3 of the time. That's too good.

And in real life, there are people who are very good at shooting other people through the heart to the point where it's part of what they do for a living. We call them "special forces", and there are so many of them in the world it's impossible to call them "flukes", or "isolated incidences". In particular, the main combat philosophy for the Spetsnaz can be summarized as "If you think you've shot their heart too much, you haven't shot it enough."

So, to it seems to me that this is an issue where one mechanic has a level or realism that is out of place with the rest of the mechanics.

Only if you have some serious misgivings about the meaning of the word "realistic".

This pretty much echos my opinion. If you're making heart shots death shots, and if they are easy to hit, then you probably have an accuracy issue. FPS can get away with simplified hitscan weapons that are crazy accurate, I suspect your game would not.

Would be valid, if only I had said it was "easy". All I said was that it was easier than it should be, as in, it should be harder. That in way implies it is actually easy. I also already said the guns don't hold still, aren't perfectly accurate, the bullets take time to travel, slow down and drop.

But then again, this could be all worrying over nothing, I think this may be a case of premature optimization, at least for enemies being hit by heart shots.

Maybe it is.

For the player, you may end up wanting a completely different damage model, as it's hard to say without knowing your game, but I suspect that being sometimes instantly killed by enemies and sometimes not will probably not end up being very much fun.

It is very much not instant. Even shot through the heart the player has the better part of a minute to watch themselves die. A minute, to stumble on in disbelief, then realize where they're hit as they fire a few furious final shots at the enemy, crashing to their knees as they desperately try to stop the bleeding only to end up slipping into shock and realize there's nothing they can do to stop it and then shake it off, sigh and return to the menu to start a new game when their character finally dies.

Which, on inspection, actually really fits the emotional tone of the game REALLY well. I've seen somebody go through all five stages of grief in minutes playing a game before, I did it myself like four times playing Spec-Ops: The Line, it's a beautiful thing both to see and experience, and I'd love to see it here. So... Maybe it's okay if it happens on occasion when the player screws up. There's a lesson in it, something to learn. Call it a very painful learning experience.

You know, I think I'll just make a few AI changes to make this only happen to the PC on rare occasion as a result of player stupidity. Or even rarer on freak accident, say, a stray bullet from a firefight they're running away from, between two sides they aren't involved in and don't care about, manages to go and catch them right in their little civilian heart, because that too fits the main theme of the game.

(The war in this game looms over the horizon like a great, horrible beast, growling and bearing its teeth at the helpless little civilian it'll one day rip apart, no matter how they run, how they hide or how they fight. It's like the monster in a horror game, except there's no way to escape alive because this game doesn't stop until you're dead, and when you die it's over forever and you lose everything. The game's ending screen even tells them nobody will ever remember they existed, and the savages in uniform had forgotten all about killing them by the next day.)

Likewise, I'm not convinced that it's going to prove as easy to achieve heart-shots as you're evaluating it to be, for most players, at least, and if it does prove that easy, then there may well be a disconnect between the level of realism in your damage simulation and the level of realism in your gunplay simulation.

I never once said it was easy. Not ONCE. I said it was easier than it should be for balance, that's it. That in no way implies it is actually easy. Not addressing this again.

I have to seriously agree with Paragon123 here. With the level of realism you are attributing to hitting an enemy AT ALL, you can't expect it to be "difficult" to kill a person on the battlefield (because modern guns are quite simply highly effective killing tools).

1. I HAVE ALREADY SAID MULTIPLE TIMES THAT THIS IS NOT A WAR GAME. I WILL NOT SAY IT AGAIN.

2. There is an ENORMOUS difference between killing somebody and killing them quickly. A single decent-sized gunshot wound to the chest, or even a small one to the head, should be fatal if given time. Neither of those is quick, however. It can take hours to die from a gunshot wound, if the bleeding isn't enough to kill you directly (as it usually isn't, if you die at all because even THAT is less likely than surviving) you can take hours to die from shock, it's possible to spend days in a hospital on life support dying slowly from shock. The thing about the heart is death from a heartwound is always fairly quick, it's extraordinary for it to take even ten minutes, and there's not a damned thing anybody can do about it, and it's big enough to be possible to precise enough to hit.

One limitation you can put on players spamming shots to the abdomen (which is the origin of your balancing issue) is to drastically limit the ammo available to them in comparison to the quantity of enemy troops.

1. THERE ARE NO ENEMY TROOPS.

2. If you get into a firefight in this game, it's probably a totally avoidable fight with a looter trying to scare you away from his claim and thoroughly underestimating the kind of crazy he's dealing with. (Only a PC would look at the pissed-off twenty-something standing in front of a ruined house, firing a shotgun into the air and screaming about how this is "his claim" and how he has "kids to feed" and then decide for themselves "You know, I think I want to pick a fight with that guy. I think he'll be a real push-over.")

3. Where in the Sam hill did you get the idea that spamming shots on the abdomen was the issue, when I have spent the entire time talking about heart shots and the heart is in the CHEST?

If they run out of ammo, they would have to acquire new ammo from a corpse, possibly even an enemy corpse, which means approaching the enemy directly without ammo / an effective defense. This is a risk that players will want to avoid, therefore they will be careful with their aiming in order to conserve ammo.

Does not solve the issue. Especially since this is NOT A WAR GAME.

CoD Tried to make aiming more realistic... and in theory I think the idea is sound... but in their implementation i don't think it really works. When not looking down the scope they have a small circle, and this represents how "off center" your shot ends up.... when you look down the scope the circle gets smaller until it's a pin point. Shooting or moving widens the circle again. The ability to 'no-scope' sniper head shots is pretty decent proof that they must have gotten it very, very wrong (or the players must be cheating).

It requires knowing how the circle actually relates to the shot though to determine how well this actually models realistic aiming. In any case, the way i would do it is something like..

Instead of a circle, it would be more of a cone... of course the cone can be represented by a circle (who knows, perhaps this is what they are doing).
Choose a distance the circle will represent. When a player fires their weapon, choose a random point on the circle, favoring the out side of the circle the smaller the distance. the vector the round will follow will originate from the end of the weapons barrel and pass through this point. So the random point chosen represents the angle offset of the rounds vector rather than the end point offset of the rounds impact. (I.E if the aiming circle represents a 25' cone and you are firing at something 40' away you likely won't even hit anything within the circle). If they player is not in a stable position (Prone for rifles, firmly planted in place for handguns) the circle will move erratically (even in a stable position the circle will move in predictable patterns due to breathing, muscle control, etc). If the trigger isn't pulled directly back, the circle will move upward slightly before the round can even exit the barrel (this could be represented by a characters familiarity with the weapon... you will only be able to pull the trigger directly back if you know the weapon well enough to know how much pressure it takes to release the hammer) Then, when the hammer hits it will push the circle back down (unless you are familiar enough with the weapon to compensate). Being unfamiliar with the weapon and over compensating either action will cause the circle to move in the opposite direction slightly. Also, right handed shooters tend to pull the barrel to the right and left-handed to the left.

In addition, the round will start dropping noticeably even within a weapons "maximum effective range" and you don't need to be firing at a target half a mile away with a sniper rifle for a cross wind to be the difference between a hit and a miss... even an shooter firing an assault rifle at a target 200 meters out may find they need to adjust for wind. For example, if you are trying to pass your marksmen test with an m4 with a wind blowing left to right you want to aim near the left shoulder to make sure you hit somewhere in the torso area.

If you watch a marksmen competition they will take their own good time to aim... at 15-30 seconds min... and after ever trigger pull you have to start over... if you are just pulling the trigger as fast as you can you might as well be firing from the hip. Plus, the "circle" doesn't gradually decrease in circumfrence... you start aiming, it all snaps together and you pull the trigger... if you miss that window things tend to go blurry and you have to start over, its tough to keep your eye that focused and your muscles that still for much longer than an instant.

All that being said, I've never been a particularly good shot myself... I just know everything people kept telling me every time I missed

Oh, and I know i can't stop talking... but generally the larger the caliber of round, the less important the accuracy of the sights... rifles being the weapon where the sights are most likely to be accurate, as generally each person zeroes their own sights... and the quality of the weapon/sights determines how much wear a weapon can take before the sights start getting out of whack and need to be zeroed at a range again... and here familiarity with the weapon helps a shooter maintain accuracy as the sights start needing adjusting.

None of this rambling mess applies to my game at all.

Oh.. and also, in line with what facehead1992 said, a hand gun doesn't have "30 rounds" it has two magazines of 15 rounds each.. meaning, shooting three times then reloading leaves you with 15 rounds, not 27. Stealing ammo only works if they are using a weapon with a compatible magazine.

1. I am totally aware of this AND taking it into account.

2. This has nothing to do with the topic.

That's your core problem You know, you don't have to implement it if you don't want to (I know, I keep forgeting it myself too). Simply don't simulate heart maybe?

Realism is a priority with me. I want accurate real-world knowledge and player logic to be applicable to the game. So I DO have to include the heart. Especially since it makes players stop idiotically aiming for the head. (Aiming for the head in a real fight is a good way to get yourself killed without hitting your target once.)

I would echo what people have said about expecting realistic results (frequent death) if you do a realistic simulation. Having said that, better body armour would reduce the chances of instant death. Or have the effects of a shot be a bit variable, e.g. the bullet ricocheted off a rib. Or limit the amount of ammo that has that direct punching power, favour ammo that fragments and doesn't penetrate deeply.

Realism!=Instant death bullets.

Realism==Gunshot wounds causing body damage and organ trauma, impairment resulting from such injury, followed by heavy bleeding and possibly death from exsanguination minutes later, death from shock hours later or death from infection days later.

As for the rest of this, there's no ammo you're going to find for a rifle, and very little you're going to find for a pistol, that will fail to penetrate deep enough to reach the heart. At best, I can argue that the sternum might stop a hollow-point pistol round and the spine might stop a regular pistol round and include some kind of DR/DD multiplier for those regions. In fact, I'll totally do that. That and some minor AI changes to make it unlikely to happen unless the player picks a fight with somebody they should be leaving the hell alone or ends up collateral damage in the war.

JustinS, you seem to be getting angry at people for making suggestions when they could not know what the game you're making is. Read your earlier posts- not once did you say this was a survival game, not once did you say this wasn't a war game, not once did you state there were no enemy troops (the closest was that there are non-humanoid enemies such as dogs). ALL that we knew before this post was that A. It was a cooperative shooter that B. had a heavy focus on realism. Most of the feedback they gave was the best they could've given based on what they knew- don't expect them to read your mind and understand exactly what you want.

Try to forgive a simple slip of the tongue, I didn't literally mean instant death. I just meant that thing you're talking about which sums up to near-certain death which is usually very rapid but occasionally instant. But that's a bit long to type often. Also note that in this thread some people may not distinguish between instant and rapid death on the basis that many gamers and/or developers would consider a heart shot a guaranteed loss condition, and wouldn't differentiate greatly the length of time death takes. There are exceptions, for example if survival is not the end goal or if there is content between fatal wounding and death. I understand that you consider it significantly different, but I'm not sure why.

Your comment re the weapons... well, fair enough. You didn't mention what selection of weapons was available, so I didn't know that pistol and rifle were the main options.

Also please keep in mind that not everybody has followed all your threads, and therefore some people commenting here know next to nothing about your game. You may say:

I HAVE ALREADY SAID MULTIPLE TIMES THAT THIS IS NOT A WAR GAME. I WILL NOT SAY IT AGAIN.

However you never said before in the thread that it's not a war game, so cut people a little slack. If anything, statements like the below would only confuse people who haven't read your previous threads:

The war in this game looms over the horizon like a great, horrible beast

JustinS, you seem to be getting angry at people for making suggestions when they could not know what the game you're making is. Read your earlier posts- not once did you say this was a survival game, not once did you say this wasn't a war game, not once did you state there were no enemy troops (the closest was that there are non-humanoid enemies such as dogs). ALL that we knew before this post was that A. It was a cooperative shooter that B. had a heavy focus on realism. Most of the feedback they gave was the best they could've given based on what they knew- don't expect them to read your mind and understand exactly what you want.

They could have guessed from these statements, if they possessed the ability to read subtext:

"That way, a sneaky player who manages to get the drop on their enemy can pull off a heart shot for full effect, but the player won't get shot in the heart by the first thing they fight smart enough to use a gun and have to start a new game."

-Game includes stealth, the first things you fight aren't smart enough to use a gun and when you die you have to start a new game. NONE of those are shooter traits.

"It controls like an FPS, for the most part."

-If it was an FPS, you wouldn't say it controlled "like an FPS", and especially not with an addendum like "for the most part".

"Target lock is both, basically being an on/off button for the autoaim in first person (the autoaim is strongly limited, stat-based and frequently inferior to manual aiming for a skilled player even when you're in range) and a true target lock in third person."

-Includes both first and third person, something not common to shooters, and mentions stats, a trait of RPGs also not common in shooters.

"(In third person, locking onto a target makes all action relative to the target, the game aims for you, and this basically gives you action game controls like Dark Souls or Fable.)"

-Both games mentioned are action RPGs, and this mechanic is also something that cannot occur in shooters.

"But, keep in mind, not all or even most enemies are humanoid. If you're shooting a wild dog, for instance, it's not as hard to hit a specific body part because their body moves around less and moves more predictably. (And they don't move laterally, and can't dodge without rolling.) And a dog will die even faster from a heart wound that a human would. A lot faster, actually."

-If this was a war game, could "most" of the enemies not be humanoid? You might see the occasional dog in a war game, usually presented as some kind of unstoppable, bullet-proof super-beast instead of the weak, fragile animals they really are, but would enemies like them ever be the majority of enemies in a war game? Of course not.

Try to forgive a simple slip of the tongue, I didn't literally mean instant death.

Well, that's good then.

I just meant that thing you're talking about which sums up to near-certain death which is usually very rapid but occasionally instant. But that's a bit long to type often.

Well, nobody understands that better than I, but I still feel that this illustrates why it's so important to make sure your statements are accurate.

Also note that in this thread some people may not distinguish between instant and rapid death on the basis that many gamers and/or developers would consider a heart shot a guaranteed loss condition, and wouldn't differentiate greatly the length of time death takes. There are exceptions, for example if survival is not the end goal or if there is content between fatal wounding and death. I understand that you consider it significantly different, but I'm not sure why.

For a couple reasons.

1. It means an enemy fatally wounded can still attack you, and possibly kill you.
2. It means you can do the same while fatally wounded. This is especially important in co-op, but even in singleplayer you might take some satisfaction in taking them with you even if it doesn't change your loss.
3. There's an ENORMOUS emotional difference between a sudden, painless, instantaneous death and watching yourself die over the course of a minute, long enough to see it coming and scramble to stop it, but not long enough to actually have any hope of surviving. It's the emotional impact of it that matters. I believe I said something to that effect in my last post.

"It is very much not instant. Even shot through the heart the player has the better part of a minute to watch themselves die. A minute, to stumble on in disbelief, then realize where they're hit as they fire a few furious final shots at the enemy, crashing to their knees as they desperately try to stop the bleeding only to end up slipping into shock and realize there's nothing they can do to stop it and then shake it off, sigh and return to the menu to start a new game when their character finally dies.

Which, on inspection, actually really fits the emotional tone of the game REALLY well. I've seen somebody go through all five stages of grief in minutes playing a game before, I did it myself like four times playing Spec-Ops: The Line, it's a beautiful thing both to see and experience, and I'd love to see it here. So... Maybe it's okay if it happens on occasion when the player screws up. There's a lesson in it, something to learn. Call it a very painful learning experience."

Ah, yes. That's it.

Your comment re the weapons... well, fair enough. You didn't mention what selection of weapons was available, so I didn't know that pistol and rifle were the main options.

They're just the two I chose as examples. There's other weapons, even just in firearms there's shotguns, submachine guns, carbines, light machine guns, and if you manage to get one somehow a full-fledged heavy machine gun is *technically* usable. Outside of firearms, there's melee and hand to hand weapons, unarmed combat if you are desperate, explosives, primitive ranged weapons such as bows and crossbows, a few throwing weapons here and there but they suck, and due to the setting the occasional crude energy weapon.

Also please keep in mind that not everybody has followed all your threads, and therefore some people commenting here know next to nothing about your game. You may say:

I HAVE ALREADY SAID MULTIPLE TIMES THAT THIS IS NOT A WAR GAME. I WILL NOT SAY IT AGAIN.

However you never said before in the thread that it's not a war game, so cut people a little slack.

Alright, fair enough. I guess the fourth time I had to write the same post, I mean the exact same one because of site issues, I both lost my patience and lost track of when I said what. Although my own statements before did contradict the idea of this being a war game QUITE strongly, I did never actually say it outright. I shouldn't have to to keep people from assuming it is one, but whatever.

If anything, statements like the below would only confuse people who haven't read your previous threads:

The war in this game looms over the horizon like a great, horrible beast

The full quote:

"(The war in this game looms over the horizon like a great, horrible beast, growling and bearing its teeth at the helpless little civilian it'll one day rip apart, no matter how they run, how they hide or how they fight. It's like the monster in a horror game, except there's no way to escape alive because this game doesn't stop until you're dead, and when you die it's over forever and you lose everything. The game's ending screen even tells them nobody will ever remember they existed, and the savages in uniform had forgotten all about killing them by the next day.)"

-If the war is over the horizon, they can't POSSIBLY be involved in it. That implies there's some distance there, they're detached from it. Then I specified they're a helpless little civilian, which ALSO makes it absolutely unambiguous that they're not soldiers and are not involved in the war. Then I specified that the war is treated like the monster in a horror game in that they're expected to just keep trying to escape it alive. Then I specified again that they don't have any actual hope of escaping alive because the game never stops until they're dead. Then I made it clear that when they die it's over and they lose everything, as in you start again completely from scratch.

This makes it 100% absolutely clear this isn't a war game. Multiple times. You can't honestly claim this causes any confusion on the matter.