/games/ - Games

It's not a problem of going too far. It's a problem of not being implemented well. For instance most of the stuff in RDR2 that is tedious could easily be done in a way that is engaging and interesting. It's largely an issue of the developers either not caring to do that or intentionally making it tedious because they think that's realistic. It's probably kind of inevitable when you make games that are this big. There are too many cooks in the kitchen, and/or the project leads have too much on their plates as individuals to really work well together, or it's just too ambitious and the different elements have some fundamental tension that's not resolved. That doesn't make the games bad necessarily, but it does make the whole thing messier and gets in its own way. With a lot of games "realism" is mostly code for "feature creep" where they keep adding things without fleshing them out enough to make them interesting or worthwhile.

You can do something as basic as include a rhythm element to repetitive tasks and make them engaging. Like when Arthur is carving the X's into his bullets, instead of making it slow as fuck with a large delay between each input, you can require 2 or 3 button presses in a sequence that if you time them right will make the animation play faster. Gears of War integrated that kind of rhythm into the gunplay with active reloads back in 2006. RDR1 had something a bit like this as well, where you could sprint indefinitely without losing stamina if you timed pressing the sprint button to John's footsteps. I tried that in RDR2 and it never seemed to work, so the game actually regressed on this point. But you could apply this design principle to a lot of the tedious tasks where currently you just press a button occasionally to trigger a new animation. It stands out particularly against the way that single-action guns require you to press the trigger twice - once to cock and again to fire.

The other thing you can do is multitask. Idk why this seems to be such an issue but if you really do want to be realistic, the characters (PC or NPC) should be able to multitask. While you are doing tedious work you should also be able to have conversations, tell stories, sing, etc. The recend God of War games did this correctly, so there's an excuse for characters to drop exposition and backstory and so that the traveling sections don't get tedious. Closest you get to this in RDR2 is conversations on horseback, which is stagnant from RDR1. As far as I can tell the main reason for this is the game put so much emphasis on portraying the gang through staged scenes, complete with motion capture, that there's a lack of dialogues that only use voice/face and could run while doing other things. If anything this makes the game feel less realistic because it's like every time you come back to camp there is a new episode of a TV show waiting to trigger just for you to see it.

There's also no reason at all Arthur could be doing any of the stuff he does at his own personal camps while in the gang's camp, having incidental conversations with passing NPCs. If they'd implemented that kind of system it would also make the random chores you can do feel more integrated instead of how they are actually these very isolated mini games where you have to do extremely little (e.g. carry one bucket of water from point A to point B) because it's too boring to make it longer without losing 99% of players. But if you can do activities that materially contribute to the camp's resources (cooking, crafting, maintenance, etc) while in the camp then it'd give you more incentive to spend time there other than the story driving it, and the story could unfold more organically as a result of the time you spend there.

The problem here, as with a lot of AAA games, is there's very little integration of systems. The company and the project are both so big that all the pieces are kind of being built separately and the whole thing ends up like a giant quilt where the patches aren't fully sewn together. People talk a lot about the conflict between the open world and the railroaded story missions (like how you can customize your loadout only for a mission to override that because the game wants you to have a certain weapon for this scene). But really the problem persists at all levels, because once you get to a certain size a game can't really have a cohesive vision any more. This is part of why AAA games have been struggling more recently, because the scope of the projects have become so large but there's a limit to how much the developers can integrate together. AA and indie games with smaller budgets and by extension scope tend not to have the same issues and that's partly why the market is moving in that direction right now.

>>46417
>instead of making it slow as fuck with a large delay between each input, you can require 2 or 3 button presses in a sequence that if you time them right will make the animation play faster.
And oh yeah both RDR1 and 2 already have the five finger fillet mini game that literally does this so this kind of interface already exists in the game's code. They could have just incorporated some similar pattern and timing based inputs for all the various tasks. They just didn't.

I don't think realism is a worthwhile goal in itself because at the end of the day you're trying to make a game rather than a simulation, and like >>46417 said you need to make sure these systems combine with each other in a satisfying and intuitive way. A lot of "realism" just ends up being a sink for player time and effort (and in the worst implementations actively takes them out of the gameplay loop, or makes the player feel like they're being punished for engaging) rather than adding depth to gameplay or pressure in the moment. They also often have the drawback where depth/pressure aren't consistent across the story, where what feels engaging initially turns into a slog by the middle of the game. Like not knowing where you're going to get food in the beginning, but later it feels like you're just keeping a meter full because you have it figured out. Or not having fast travel feels immersive early on because the world feels dangerous, but later on it feels like punishment because there's nothing interesting or threatening anymore between points A and B.

>>46420
is there any game that is nether "too realistic" or "too unrealistic"? like some goldilock zone in the middle