catbarf on 21/11/2023 at 17:21

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I have also played a fair bit of Arma 3 and have run into situations where the lack of jump is unrealistic and frustrating. It's usually things like a narrow but deep crevasse, stream, or trench, and the right way to get past in real life is to take a running leap across. Arma won't let you do (https://c8.alamy.com/comp/DWG4H3/us-army-soldiers-jump-across-an-irrigation-ditch-during-a-reconnaissance-DWG4H3.jpg) this, it forces you to wade through, and there are times when that is not appropriate.

I'd argue the problem is less that people in real life never leave the ground, and more that the representation of jumping in shooters is just a purely vertical impulse, a mechanic originally to provide the ability to traverse vertical terrain in otherwise simplistic FPS engines. It's a way to interact with the physics engine, rather than representing how people interact with the real world. If you have mantling (preferably with a generous height allowance to simulate jumping, grabbing, and pulling yourself up) and climbing over things, that's the two vertical movement use cases accounted for through fixed animations rather than bunny-hopping over things. Add in an ability to clear horizontal gaps as above and that pretty much covers it.

Speaking of Arma and interacting with the world, one thing I really like in it that I haven't seen anywhere else (except System Shock, I guess, of all things) is the ability to vary your stance more incrementally than just standing/crouching/prone. It makes taking cover feel more natural, and avoids the common FPS situation where a window or sandbag is too short for standing but too tall for crouching.



Yeah, this is one thing that especially stands out to me in videogame adaptations of other media. Metro 2033 is a book with a lot of danger but not a lot of actual violence, but then in-game you slaughter your way through hundreds of bandits and mutants, and nobody seems to comment on the body count. The moral system is symbolized by one NPC outright telling you 'if it's hostile, you kill it', while another encourages you to try to understand the world, but either way you're going to shoot a lot of dudes and critters and your moral points just determine what ending you get.

I can think of a number of RPGs and imm-sims that play with the idea that killing everyone maybe shouldn't be the default conflict resolution, but they often achieve it through heavy-handed moral systems and finger-wagging at you for using the gameplay systems as designed. The one that always comes to mind first is Dishonored, where there are major consequences to killing, but if you go the stealth route you deliberately forgo a ton of game content.

I'd say Thief is a strong example of a game that subverts the 'if they're enemies, they must die' expectation. Combat is an option, but mechanically it's a bad way to get through the levels. It's a game that's very close in design to a traditional FPS, but successfully manages to discourage violence as your go-to solution without making you feel like you're missing out on gameplay. I suppose you could also lump in a lot of survival horror, where combat might be an option but only as a last resort. Alien: Isolation did that pretty well; most other survivors will not kill you on sight, and avoiding them is a better idea than engaging in a gunfight and attracting the alien. But even then, you can kill every survivor you meet and the game doesn't comment on it.

On the flip side, there's Spec Ops: The Line, which dives headfirst into the protagonist-as-psychopath trope and does one of the most direct critiques of it that I've seen in a game.