Has anyone else here found that their attitude towards violent/realistic FPS games has changed as they've aged?

I'm playing CoD:WaW for the first time, and the level of hyper-realism and violence just doesn't do it for me. It seems tasteless, and a completely unnecessary aspect with regards to my enjoyment of the game. And I also feel somewhat that it's a little bit disrespectful to even try to emulate that level of violence in a game based on a real-life situation, because no matter how realistic the game gets, it's still going to fall far short of what it was like to actually be in those situations.

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against FPS's in general, nor am I becoming one to proclaim that violent video games lead to real-world violence. I just find that as I've aged, excessive realism and gore has become something that I feel is completely unnecessary for a good game, and may even detract from a games other qualities. I was curious if others here felt the same way...

COD is not, and has not ever been been hyper-realistic. They are basically Tom Clancy novels with out any of the attention to technical detail. They have massively melodramatic, suffocatingly scripted stories that take themselves extremely seriously while you are shrugging off 500 bullet wounds over the course of the game by hiding behind a wooden crates for three seconds.

Realism/violence is fine if it contributes to a well crafted story and/or a well crafted game. It's not fine if it's actually just asinine, lazy writing that pretends to be realistic, and drives transparent and contrived game-play. Games that actually attempt to be simulators are extremely difficult to get into, but have deep mechanics, often require a high degree of teamwork, and can be very rewarding if you are the sort of person who has the time and inclination. As a result they tend to appeal to an older audience. CoD is not an example of this in any way shape of form.

Finally, I don't want to hear that COD has gone downhill since CoD4. That one sucked too, and it was the last one I bothered playing. It's fine for the very occasional, mindless MP game with a couple of other people who also rarely play shooters, but that's about it.

Well, I wasn't thinking so much "realistic" in terms of tactics and gameplay... mostly just the violence.

My attitude towards the genre hasn't changed (I really don't give a damn how realistic it is, I grew up with Star Wars games ffs), but rather I've fallen out with the MP concept altogether. According to X-Fire I have over 900 hours logged in the Battlefield series, but I know I have even more than that invested. But even with the series I've spent the most time in, I haven't touched that in months. Sure, there's more expansions, but I've reached a point where I really don't give a damn. I'd rather play a SP game (Sins of a Solar Empire, Supreme Commander 2, just did Deus Ex:HR, etc) instead of dealing with the idiots that tend to be found on public servers. Even the clans I used to run with (although never joined) have moved on, so it's always a crap shoot on what I have to deal with. It gets to a point where it's just not worth it.

Don't get me wrong, I love to grab a sniper rifle and be a Lone Wolf, and every now and then I'd pair up with an awesome squad mate, but dealing with all of the dumbasses to find one good guy just wasn't worth it anymore.

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No but I was raised on superbloody FPS's. When buying Xbox games for my nephew (who is 10), I do give a little consideration to violence but honestly there are a lot of M rated games in his collection. The violence has to be really extreme, like I passed on Sniper Elite V2 due to those xray-organ-exploding killshots. I'm more concerned with sex and inappropriate language being present in the game.

It has become apparent to me over the years that games that depict war scenarios try way too hard to appeal to our emotions. Once that became clear, these games became funny to me, because I could see right through their disguise.

This has actually led me to become disappointed with today's generation, as people actually BUY this crap, AKA (kak) believe that this kind of melodramatic **** actually happened. People died, and a lot of them just came and went as though they were flies to an electric lamp. There was no heroic score to illustrate their demise, they just kind of... died. However, because we live in a time of (relative) peace, it's okay to paint a picture that fills our heads with grandeur. Those of us who are older than 16 can understand that these are unrealistic views on how war works, but these games exploit poor parenting and invade the minds of impressionable young people.

Basically, people who make cheap, popular war games are bastards who know exactly what they're doing. They may not have known what they were doing up until CoD4, but after that game gained popularity, they knew precisely what they were doing: making money off of the poor saps who actually get involved with the crap they spew out.

TL;DR: If you think CoD is a realistic interpretation of war, then you don't deserve the guilt-and-responsibility-free upbringing you are likely receiving.

[EDIT: Games that sell themselves as super-bloody action-y fantasy splurges are free of criticism on this level because they don't take themselves seriously. CoD actually tried to imply that "this is how things were, PRIVATE" and thus removing any respect I ever had for them. They're a lie by definition.]

This is pretty much how I feel, too.

This is true for me, too. I can't remember the last time I went online and played an MP game. I'm sure I've only done it a handful of times in the past 3 or 4 years.

Welcome to America.



Welcome to the entertainment media (film / television / games). Those who have taken a film class (for example) surely are privy to the sheer manipulation present in any good film.



And this is why many (most?) American students are assigned "All Quiet on the Western Front" in high school. (The ending of this fine book came to mind as I read this sentence of yours.)

That was a fantastic book. Thank you for reminding me about it.

I could never get too upset over this sort of thing. If you dig it, then you do. If you don't, then you don't. I understand how as people grow up and the idea of mortality catches up with them, death becomes less entertaining, but to me it's just entertainment. It's not even like it's a fantasy as some people put it. It's like a movie that I control. It doesn't really bother me unless the content is deliberately objectionable, to where it's obvious that they're trying to get a reaction. But for games like Fallout 3, I think the violence is hilarious most of the time because it's so over the top. It all depends on the tone. It's the difference between Army of Darkness and a Saw movie. Both are really violent, but the tone means a lot. It's also the difference between Saving Private Ryan and Commando. Both are violent. One is comedic. If the tone upsets you, odds are good it was meant to, and you just didn't get it when you were younger.

Well.... yes and no.

The only change now is that the FPS genre is almost completely dominated by quasi-realistic military manchild obligatory-multiplayer games with achievements, social networking features, and day one pay-to-win DLC. i.e. completely unplayable trash. So, on average, I certainly like FPS games a lot less than I used to.

My attitude about the games hasn't really changed, though. The games have. Hyper-violence doesn't bother me, **** games do. It's just a coincidence that the new games are violent and ****ty.

Looking back at my old rants, it seems that I've always said something along the lines of "wow, 99% of the games are just of the 'GENERIC MILITARY BASED SOLDAT SHOOTER'-type WHAT HAPPENED TO GOOD MOLD DAYS". So I guess it's actually always been like that. That said, all those games do cater to a certain audience and if they manage to keep the said audience within those games only.. hooray!

As for the violence itself, eh, not really. However, I've never been interested in games where the only point has been "lol gore" like Manhunt back in the day.

I'm laughing at all you fuddy-duddies who can't even remember what it was like to be 14 anymore.

You all did the exact same **** as the current generation

WaW was one of my favorites CODs (After WaW they all started going downhill). I loved the atmosphere, the action and the music.. Honestly for an FPS it's not all that violent at all. I mean of course there is violence but that is just the nature of FPS.. The stage is WWII and it's just a game. The WWII elements are really what draw me into it. It's far from realistic and I don't think they were going for that anyway. It's just meant for fun, man.

Also I'm vaguely reminded of



DARN LAWN get offa my kids

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The sexual content bothers me way more than the violence does. That said, there's not that many games that have that problem right now. I actually am more bothered by all the sexual content on TV. A prime example being House of Cards. A great show that is, in my opinion, very tainted by the forced sexual situations. Even if they wanted to make that part of the plot, they don't need to show it.

I have entirely experienced the slow creep of violence dysphoria when playing these specific titles. I think someone hit the nail on the head in that it crosses a line when the violence is professed as realistic, and it's depicting actual or potential events. For example, I get kind of grossed out when I haven't played a COD for a while and then I jump in. In the opposite direction, Last of Us appeals to me the same way films hint at the dramas I couldn't claim to understand, like war. I still don't think that videogames are exempt from evoking those kinds of experiences is my point, I just think applying a run and gun shooter to the themes of war is irresponsible and shallow, and if we're throwing out respect all together, just not very evocative.

yeah i see why there's the M rating on some games, just wish parents would pay attention to them like mine did.

I don't play many violent games as of late since I don't play many games these days. The latest "violent games" I've play were Dishonored and Metro 2033, both of which I enjoyed and quite bloody.

I was hoping, when I was younger, game violence would allow games to become generally more fun or at least more driven in atmosphere. But certain modern standard-issued FPS games treat violence now in this weird "fetishistic" light in the name of "realism" that I didn't anticipate. Like the virtual wank of some developers with unchecked sexual problems. Meh

As I've got older, my disappointment at ECHOMAN not finishing his JA projects has already passed its climax.

>> Has anyone else here found that their attitude towards violent/realistic FPS games has changed as they've aged?

Nope, not really. I enjoyed the gibs in Fallout 3 as much as I've enjoyed them in Fallout 2. Wish Monolith would make Blood 3, but fat chance of that ever happening...

This is what I like so much about Battlefield 3. You really feel like you're in a war zone, you can die at any given moment, and nobody will give a ****. Rockets exploding, machine guns firing, grenades flying, snipers shooting, it's war, baby, war!

That reminds me of the time some EA execs explained Battlefield III's lack of editing tools with "lol they'd be too hard". While retaining all of the bugs in the game that were already present in BFII and fixed by modders...

In fact, now that I think of it, as I've aged my attitude towards EA has advanced from "lol company" to:

I'll admit there was a point in COD:WaW where the violence got too much for me--when they give you a flamethrower and you're just burning hundreds of people alive, I couldn't enjoy it. I couldn't suspend my disbelief and put myself into the game world and enjoy what I was doing at the same time. So that was kind of ****ed up. My issue is less with graphic depictions of violence, though, and more with how so many games' vocabularies are limited to violence. The best example I can think of is in Assassin's Creed 3--they go to all this trouble to paint this compelling version of the revolutionary war period, with great cutscenes and facial animations and research and etc etc etc. Then you have this mission where you "play" the Boston Tea Party. And what do you do? You run around on the ships murdering literally scores of British troops as they try to kill Benjamin Franklin or whoever. It's a ludicrous idea, it totally kills the immersion and the investment you have in this supposedly historical event. But the worst part is it feels like you're only doing it this way because it's the only way the game knows how to be. You have this amazing world but literally your only means of interacting with it is stabbing people to death, so they have to turn a non-violent protest into an unprecedented mass slaughter of British troops because that's the only way the player can participate. That's what I hate, more than the violence itself. It doesn't mean anything anymore, it's just the default state of being for so many games.

Wow, Thrawn, you've divined the ultimate reason why I gave up games. Thank you for educating me about myself.

I've spent a decent amount of idle time dreaming up how one might make a cool fps-like game that is more like reality than target practice. Morrowind comes to mind, and I guess a bunch of other immersive RPGs do as well. Then you have WoW, which feels more like manual labor.

I don't enjoy realistic shooters & usually stick to sci-fi shooters where the game feels more like an escape from reality. I do enjoy realistic &/or fun physics in games though. I think that military-style games, especially those based on historical events are quite boring. I pretty much automatically take off a point or two if the game features Nazis (from a historical perspective--space Nazis are fine though a bit tacky). If the terms "allies" & "axis" are featured, it's not even a consideration. There has to be at least one totally ridiculous firearm in my arsenal (e.g. anything with plasma is great) or I get bored. I suppose that since I grew up in a military family & was surrounded by guns that they just put me to sleep.

I hate the quasi realistic games, too. It's a sorry state when a sci fi game set in an alternate reality where Chernobyl NPP's reactors were using CHEMICAL X as fissile material* ends up a more realistic shooter than something supposedly set just around the corner, next sunday, AD.



I have to ask, where do the Wolfenstein games, the perfect collision of these two considerations, rank on your list? If you've never played Return to Castle Wolfenstein, I highly recommend it, it's that sweet spot of old enough to run like greased butter but new enough to still look kinda okay.

-*Not actually the backstory of STALKER, but explaining further would bring up spoilers.

I've only played it multi-player a few times & didn't much enjoy it (the realistic weaponry is a real turn off for me unless it's balanced out with a few sci-fi weapons--like the combination you'd see in the Half-Life, Quake or Unreal series'). Traditionally I'm not much interested in single-player but Half-Life 2 (I'm a bit behind due to system constraints) & Portal 1 & 2 have opened my eyes a bit so I'm perfectly willing to give Return to Castle Wolfenstein a shot--though it's certainly not at the top of my list of things that I feel I've missed out on. There are certainly exceptions to my rules (e.g. I loved Goldeneye back in the N64 days) but in general they tend to hold true.

While the game starts off very situated in some variation on reality, towards the end you get a lightning gun and a ridiculous flamethrower and things like that. Also, the entire time you have your indomitable boot which the game defaults to some key lost in the middle of your keyboard, stick that sucker on Q or E or F or one of your mouse buttons and never let it get away from you, because it's the only weapon that opens doors. This gives it an absurd lovability that can't be conveyed in text.

-Even your realistic guns are like colt revolvers and tommy guns and things like that. You fight nazi S&M ninjas with these, as well as ******* skeletons.

RTCW has a lot of silliness, I've got to admit. Yet it's in my Top 5 list of the games I've played the most (SP of course). Some of the levels still have pretty nice atmosphere (the beginning of the game before you get to the catacombs), some are just plain forgettable (catacombs).

But alas, I've always thought (or at least, that's what I think these days) that more realistic games like Rainbow Six or the new CoD games certainly are technically impressive and they do get a lot of things right. But overall they really just don't interest me at all. And while it's a good thing that the people who like those games can enjoy them, it's a bit shameful if every game developer focuses on making new "CoD-killers" instead of something I'd enjoy.

Or perhaps I wouldn't, I'm starting to believe that with DXN not only am I through with game editing but games in general. Still gonna try and play all those mostly unplayed games I've amassed in the past 5+ years...

Last FPS I played I would argue was Skyrim, on account of the camera and general gameplay mechanics, but I can see how that's an unfitting answer. Steam informs me the last (steam) game I played that's closer to that definition was Fallout New Vegas, but we're still in gray area here. Prior to that, the last memory I have of recent FPS gameplay was probably my emulated copy of Banjo Tooiee which I stopped playing as much once I realized I wasn't going to get 100% due to not being able to button mash.
It has an FPS segment in it, trust me.

-Really, thinking of it, my last pure and proper FPS experience was either S-MOD for HL2, which is bonkers, Call of Pripyat, which would mean it's been a while, or L4D2, which means I was achievement hunting with my boyfriend and our friends. That said, I've been wanting to install Call of Pripyat again and try for the, uh, "evil"(?) playthrough.

If you haven't played them, the Borderlands games are absolutely worth playing. They are the only reason I haven't written the genre off for good.

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Biggest line of bull**** ever spouted. Borderlands has an amusing plot (albiet thin like most FPSes), excellent gameplay, a good variety of bosses and tons of skills to mix it up. In short, it's Diablo 2 as an FPS, and that is not a bad thing. I enjoyed the loot, the huge selection of weapons, and such. And although you COULD grind out weapons, the game most certainly didn't require it. Hell, even the "monsters" weren't repetitive at all. Most areas had their own unique enemies, and the few reskins that existed also had completely different gameplay mechanics.

The only way I could find that you wouldn't like Borderlands is if you absolutely hate FPSes in general, or if you hated Diablo 2. Otherwise, you most likely didn't play the game at all.

I pretty much hate Borderlands as well. I didn't need any of that in my shooter. The pacing of killing droves of enemies and then wandering around looking for their **** absolutely kills it for me. I played through the whole first one with a friend, and because we didn't always play together, the level of our characters was way out of synch to where I couldn't hope to hurt his at all in duels, and he could one shot me. By the time we finally restarted dedicated characters together, I wanted to play any other game. I agree with everything Reid said, especially about the constant carrot. In general I think I'm done playing games where I'm getting items to get slightly better items. I'm far more rewarded by strategy, story, and skill in videogames than loot.

Edit: I got 2 games with my graphics card recently: Borderlands 2, and Assassins Creed 3. I haven't installed either yet. I'll eventually give them both an honest shot, but I don't see Borderlands becoming fun to me any time soon.

Don't play Assassins Creed 2. You only kill enemies and complete missions so you can kill more enemies and complete more missions. You will hate it.

The term you're looking for is Skinner Box.

And you're playing it wrong.

I've beaten Borderlands and all the DLC at least three times. It only gets grindy if you want it to.