Re: Elaborating on "Dirty, nasty" Friday Night Firefight.
1. Weapon Handling
Most video games treat firing a weapon as the equivalent of aiming a mouse or your FOV.
More realistic ones have environmental and personal considerations largely equate to the aimpoint being less reliable with an expanding potential impact area, but this can all be offset by a near perfect and easy decision to look down sights, be they iron or optic. After that point, perhaps long range weapon systems will incorporate breathing, but fire will be as unerringly accurate as if it were a calm day on the range.
This tends to make shooting, even in the most realistic of games, little more than swinging the mouse over the target, resulting in unparallelled lethality, especially when combined with impressive levels of recoil control and ability to retain a clear sight picture even when firing full auto.
Real firefights simply are not. Rifles get snagged, body positions change, bits of gear get in the way, butt-stocks slip out of the pocket, weapons are in inopportune positions 9porbably especially when carrying them under trench coats) , and you never get your sight picture just right the first time. A vest can make shooting harder, and the heavier your vest, the more likely it is to throw off your aim. Add in raw fear, adrenalin, and the loss of fine motor control for all but the most steely eyed killers...or don't, because aside form that "circle of error" it doesn't count.
But none of that is accounted for in your average video game besides maybe a few degree "circle of error", with hero characters (and AI pumped to give the player with these abilities a challenge) being able to point, click, massacre continuously in a few second cycle. the whole concept of health is largely there to give people a chance to actually survive more than a fraction of a second in a world where everyone can kill anything they see in moments.
But Cyberpunk isn't about heroes. Its about living on a nasty edge that doesn't care, where a few gang bangers might just wreck your day if your stupid, and deciding to open up with that gun is a decision you don't make without realizing you might be very dead, be it form corp hit squad or drug addled ten year old. So embrace a game mechanic that makes it legitimately hard to kill someone unless you set the conditions in your favor.
All of this would matter less if....
2) Cover, or the lack thereof.
Cover, in current video games, largely represents nothing more than reducing the profile of the target available for the "drag, click, kill" method of shooting mentioned above, adding perhaps half a second to the acquire-shoot cycle before death. Maybe half the body is exposed, or in the most advantageous case, a fifth of the character model. Models don't conform to cover, aside from a few per-programmed snap points. Enemies and the player certainly don't try to make themselves as small as possible.
In addition, what cover is present is often delineated by clean lines, fairly obvious half and three quarter cover positions, and is often more likely to make the player easier to find due to its relative scarcity than it is to protect the player.
The idea that cover both conceals and protects, resulting in thousands of rounds being expended to no effect in many firefights, is lost in favor of easy, clean lines that either cover half the model, most of it, or conveniently obscure at just above head height.
No truly conformable cover system that makes hitting the target legitimately harder by a order of magnitude exists. Combined with #1, this results in preternaturally accurate and effective shooting.
3. Wound effects.
Most of the time combat is not to be feared because the effects of a single bullet are either dead or mildly annoyed. You would think the first would make players fear, but with 1&2 it usually just means that the player can slaughter each other or the AI all the more efficiently and joyfully - you know you hit, you win, and that's that. The second naturally reduces fear.
There is no middle ground where being hit makes it a dirty, real, consequence that takes you out of combat and puts you into self-preserve mode but isn't so universally lethal that firefights are simple clean stacks of bodies.
Thanks for the guide.
