Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics

A bit of background where I'm coming from here:
I was originally drawn to games like Red Orchestra and Insurgency back in the day of them being mods specifically because they attempted to do the best job I had ever seen in a game up to that point of trying to simulate what it's like to to actually handle and fight with these weapons.
However, as I've learned more over the years about what actually is entailed in shooting firearms, I'm somewhat shocked that the developers have not sought to amp up the fidelity of the gun simulation to account for some pretty glaring errors in the way it currently works. I mean, some of this stuff you could just find out by browsing youtube videos about the guns, much less talking to people who actually use them.

Some of the biggest errors and oversights:

  1. No heat management. There's a reason the SAW was developed with a quick change barrel. Red Orchestra incorporated overheat and barrel changes into their MGs over a decade ago. Heat management also extends to other areas of the game. All rifles will experience varying degrees of degrading or shifting accuracy as the barrel heats up. If the heat buildup gets worse you'll have more malfunctions or changes in firing speed. If it gets bad enough with mag dump after mag dump then it will be destroyed and unusable. That's why you don't use assault rifles as machine guns.
    Furthermore, there's a reason you never see suppressors on MGs. The heat buildup in a silencer is massive. Sustained firing will cause it to fail and blow up. It will also probably result in more heat buildup in the barrel or in the case of ARs (because of their gas system design) more buildup of heat in the receiver.
    This all needs to be modeled to properly differentiate the ups and downs of the various platforms and accessories. As of right now there's actually too little reason not to always use a suppressor if you can. And there's no reason not to dump mag after mag repeatedly without concern for the consequences to the weapon.
    ---Heavier barrels will also be less effected by heat. But the weight penalty of a heavier barrel doesn't seem to be properly modeled.
    ---Certain gun designs (like being open bolt), and handguard or heatshield designs, will also do a better job of dissipating heat. So this is another way that the differences between guns can and should be modeled.

  2. Overall equipment weight doesn't have enough of an impact on performance.
    There's a reason that US soldiers actually say they wouldn't want to wear more armor than they currently do, despite the added protection, because they are concerned that the lack of mobility that comes from that would be more likely to get them killed by not letting them be nimble or fast enough in combat. There's a reason soldiers don't want to pack around the weight of a full combat loadout of 7.62x51 ammo, preferring the 5.56 weapons for that reason. There's a reason soldiers historically hate being the ones who have the carry around these heavy squad support weapons despite the weapon being more effective in many roles over the standard issue rifle.
    You need an endurance meter that is effected by overall weight and endurance is depleted with actions and movement and to a small extent firing (based on the gun used and the position it's used from). Endurance levels effect aimsway and recoil management to a degree. It can also effect sprint speed or sprint duration.
    Overall weight should also effect your transition speed between positions and transition time into sprinting.

  3. Weapon weight and balance seems to not be taken into account with weapons handling and performance. Heavier weapons have drawbacks in reality that aren't properly represented in the game. If this were modeled properly then you wouldn't see the need for artificially making the SAW so inaccurate as the only way to make everyone not want to use a SAW over an M4. A heavier weapon should take longer to swing from one side to another. It should take longer to bring the sights on target. You should lose more endurance the longer you're moving with it or holding it up to aim down it's sights. It will likely also impede your ability to transition between positions and sprint if you're holding the weapon in your hands as opposed to slung around you.
    Adding accessories to the gun will increase overall weight which should increase these problems, but it also will aid in reducing recoil due to the increased mass of the weapon.
    As for balance, you need to represent the inherent disadvantages that exist for tricking out your gun with accessories at the front end of the muzzle or handguard. The more muzzle heavy your gun gets the harder it is to swing around quickly and accurately to adjust your aim. Also, the more endurance you will lose as you try to hold out that heavy long gun, which can translate to more aimsway. Although this can also have beneficial effects on recoil reduction. Being too back heavy as in some bullpup designs can make the gun more difficult to control in recoil.
    Having a gun that is too long can also hinder your agility around corners and windows.

  4. Body armor. Now I can't be 100% sure, but my impression is that body armor is not properly simulating how body armor works. It seems to be treated as just increasing hit points. But this is not accurate. Certain kinds of armor plates can block pistol rounds all day long without any degradation to the plate or even injury to the person being hit. Heavier types of body armor can block even 5.56 rounds unless it's armor piercing. Some types of body armor will experience degradation to the integrity of the plate from successive shots, and this should also be modeled. Some shots are so powerful that they can cause blunt injury to the person being hit even if the round is stopped, but not much damage in the scheme of things compared with a bullet wound. However, even non-lethal hits against armor can have the effect of stunning the person hit or causing flinching from pain, and therefore delaying or hindering their ability to respond effective effective return fire, depending on the type of round or the type of armor. Body armor should be physically represented as plates on specific areas of the body which, when struck, result in blocking shots outright or mitigating some of the energy.

  5. Being forced to make compromises in weapon assembly that make no sense logically. There is nothing stopping me from having both a heavy barrel and a suppressor on my weapon. There is also nothing stopping me from having both a laser light and a flashlight. It's not necessary from a gameplay standpoint either when you have a points system for gear. Doing a better job of modeling the downsides of these using these various accessories, or too many accessories at once, would obviate the need you feel to arbitrarily restrict what players can put on their weapons.

  6. Night vision illuminators and pointers. You don't simulator the downside of nightvision which is the difficulty of using your sights through them. That is why they have IR pointers that allow them to see where their gun is aimed so they don't need to look down the sights. Some optics do better than others at being viewed through nightvision. It probably makes for longer sighting time and less accuracy on ironsights. The illuminator is used like a flashlight, but has the benefit of nobody being able to see the light without nightvision because it's in the infrared spectrum.

  7. Not enough fidelity in ammo modeling. You can do better than the basic "better against fleshy targets" or "better against armored targets". Get some data on specific ammo types and how they differ.
    For instance, armor piercing rounds will have more recoil kick because you're throwing a heavier bullet at high velocity. They might also have more bullet drop at longer ranges.
    In contrast, a 5.56 green tip round might not behave much differently from an FMJ round in terms of recoil and ballistics, but you only gain a slight increase in penetration effectiveness (It's not true armor piercing), but you actually get much worse stopping power against flesh as the trade off. That's why green tip is regarded as a bad round. It was designed to let you shoot more effectively through car windows but it does just about everything else worse.
    These are only a few examples of how you're missing out on the potential of modeling completely different tactical options with both upsides and downsides by not delving into more specific ballistics profiles. More variety in ammo types would add both customization fun and realistic fidelity.
    Understanding this freely available ballistics data is important to accurately simulating the performance of an M16 vs an M4. For instance; the 5.56 loses terminal ballistics effectiveness (stopping power) rapidly as you get away from an 18-20 inch barrel. By the time you get down to a 10 inch barrel you start to run into horrendously poor performance. This is because the 5.56 depends on velocity to be deadly but you lose so much velocity with a 10 inch barrel that your effective killing range for the 5.56 becomes very short. This is why the military is looking at other caliber options currently (like 6.8 caliber). Although changing the ammo you use can mitigate a lot of these problems in the 5.56, such as using the 77 grain SMK 5.56, you still run into significant problems when you go down to a 10 inch barrel (the severity of the problem is just decreased).
    In contast, the 7.62x39 won't suffer so much in terms of killing power when you put it into a shorter barrel because it depends less on velocity to be effective (due to being a larger bullet, having more mass). It's important to understand the nuances of how one round behaves differently than another because if you just assume they all react the same to different barrel lengths then you won't get an accurate simulation of how the weapons differ in handling and performance.
    The point being: there are significant enough differences between round types, and between different weapon platforms the rounds are used in, that it deserves to be modeled in specifics based on ballistics data. It would make a significant difference on how the various weapons play out in combat.

  8. Suppressors do effect weapon performance in reality so they should in-game. Recoil will be reduced by slowing down the expansion and release of the gas out of the barrel over a longer period of time, thus resulting in less sharp spikes of recoil. As well as the effects that having more mass on the end of the gun will always reduce recoil further. They also give extremely minor gains in velocity and sometimes can increase accuracy.

  9. Flash hiders. I don't know if you model their positive effects on weapons so it is noticeable when you don't have them equipped. A flash hider will save you from losing your night vision when you fire and probably not interfere with night vision scopes as much. A compensator can make seeing your target in fully automatic fire difficult or make follow up shots more difficult from a user's standpoint due to the concussive blast distracting you and flash of light obscuring your vision - although it depends on the weapon and the ammo used. Short barrels with high velocity rounds will suffer the worst effects by having more unspent powder coming out of the end of the gun in the form of a larger explosive flash.

  10. Large caliber weapons cannot be effectively suppressed even with a suppressor. There is too much energy for it to be made movie-quiet. Suppressors on smaller caliber weapons also shouldn't be movie-quiet when you're still using supersonic ammo. The bullet makes a crack as it breaks the sound barrier. A suppressor will still help obscure where the bullet came from, but we should have the option of using subsonic ammo to achieve better quietness - but this comes at the cost of a lot of velocity (ie, power, range, and penetration lost).
    Some weapons like the 5.56 also do very poorly when suppressed, forcing you to turn the gas system up higher to ensure the gun operates reliably. And having more gas go into operating the bolt will increase your recoil, if that recoil force is not offset by the advantages of the suppressor.
    You can't actually shoot subsonic ammo in 5.56 and have the AR platform cycle reliably, which is why 300 blackout was created as a cartridge designed to be fired subsonic from the start.

  11. Malfunctions. America's Army got this right in their game about the need to incorporate a button used to clear the gun of malfunctions. It's a very significant part of realistic weapons handling and a reality that will impact combat. It's part of whats separates a genuine shooting sim from an arcade shooter.
    It also is important to model this if you want to bring about the realistic differences between certain weapon platforms in terms of their inherent reliability, differences in ammo reliability (where it exists), how well they handle the fouling caused by continued firing, and how well they handle heat buildup, and how easy the gun is to clear from malfunctions in the first place (some weapons are faster to clear and some weapons malfunction in worse ways than others).
    Some weapons will malfunction less to begin with. Some variants of the AR will malfunction less than others. Some weapons are easier and faster to clear of malfunctions than others.
    Shooting suppressed will cause some guns to get dirty faster and causes more wear on the gun's internal parts. Some guns perform more poorly suppressed than others to begin with, in terms of reliability.
    Overheating your gun should lead to more frequent malfunctions and in extreme cases total failure of the gun.

  12. Vertical grips don't always benefit the handling of a gun. A vertical grip on a standard length shotgun, without even having a pistol grip attached to it, would be largely useless and might even be ergonomically worse for handling. Typically the only reason you want to use a vertical foreward grip is if you're using a platform that has a very short barrel, because then your front hand ends up resting at a more natural angle. But, if you have a longer barrel, you want to move your hand forward more to benefit from better recoil control and aimsway control, which then makes the vertical grip angle feel unnatural and worse. There are other types of grips that competition shooters use like angled grips or side grips because they make more sense with longer barreled rifles.
    You also have to factor in that vertical grips increase control in certain contexts more than others. For instance, with a short barreled M4 they will give you good control over the gun in full auto and be more comfortable to hold over the long term in a raised position (lowering endurance loss). However, for controlling the gun in repeated single shots, the vertical grip may provide no significant advantage.

  13. More optics options. There should be the option to have a red dot style optic with a flip mounted magnifer that can be flipped into place when you want more range, and then taken down when you want close quarters combat. There are also different types of reticles and scope qualities that could be represented which all have different advantages. Different types of iron sights have different advantages too.

  14. There are a lot more options that could be incorporated into customizing some guns, especially the AR platforms. Although I don't know how practical a lot of this stuff is for a general infantry squad, you might still see special forces taking more liberty with their gun customization.
    Different triggers would be an example of this, something which competition shooters do a lot of. It can impact semi auto accuracy in providing a more smooth and quick trigger pull that is less likely to knock the gun off target, and follow up shots will have better speed and accuracy. It probably doesn't have significant impact on full auto.
    But that does also bring up another point: Which is that you have to factor in trigger quality when determining how different guns will handle. This can be a big deal in a weapon's single shot accuracy to consider when modeling the gun's performance.

last edited by GM29

I do agree with a fair bit of your points here. Also I would like to aplaud to this very thorough analysis and insight given.

While I think that realism and the resulting authenticity are very imperative for good game design, I also think that you can go overboard with it. You get to a point where real life would lead to frustrating game experiences.

Point 3 especially. Though sway would realistically occur with heavier weapons, it is a RNG element that I generally frown upon for it not being manipulatable by the player. Adding high amounts of recoil to a weapon instead makes it controllable by a skillfull player without it being random. It is not realistic, no, but it still feels authentic, doesn't it? The SAW being more unwieldy and uncontrollable without sacrificing immediate and satisfying controlls for the player.
Though the point about longer ADS for heavier weapos is very right.

Malfunctions in point 11 would be another RNG element with very limited controll by the player, I think it doesn't belong into a game that is as fast paced as Insurgency, at least not in the competitive modes. It belongs to full on milsims like Arma in my opinion. The same goes for the many different kinds of ammunition, which would be especially intimidating for newer players/ players who aren't as knowledgable about firearms as you.

A huge +1 for the flip-up optics though, and interesting points you make about supressors, armour, calibres, barrel length and weigth.

Malfunctions can go fuck themselves, but the rest of this is pretty much on point.

I understood Ins/DoI to be hardcore guns with arcadey gamemodes. They've made steps in the right direction with weapons handling such as the staged reloads, but the bullets especially in this game just do not deliver.

Agreed with most of your points, although to be honest I wouldn't like to see hajis with heavy body armor, since they just don't have access to it. And if they can't have access to it, in a way so shouldn't Security either, since the 1st thing we would hear is people complaining about their precious "balance", not understanding that the battlefield is not a fair place.

Also when people put suppressors on M249 always this video comes in my mind:
Youtube Video

And that's all it took to entirely destroy the suppressor. Having worse and worse bullet trajectory comes way before that.

I think that sometimes is easier to hit a target in a real life. Recoil is so huge. Sometimes where is an impression that weapon holds a people that totally can not handle a weapon in hands. But when i use a hipfire where is an impressionn that weapon holds a 70 years old grandmother. Shooting at this game is very interesting, but very hard and nervous.

Personally I think the core of the gameplay is right now in a relatively good space. There are obviously things to improve and I am not talking about technical issues.

But Insurgency was never a "hardcore realism simulator" (whatever that means these days). Before the usual accusation of being a casual CoD Kiddie comes, I am 34 years old and I basically "grew" up with realism focused stuff like the original Red Orchestra Mod etc for Unreal Tournament 2004. So I think I know a bit about what I am talking here. Regardless of that, those are obviously only my personal opinions, but I will try to explain them.

First at all I never saw any Insurgency Game as a game that puts heavy focus on realism. The game also describes itself like this:

Insurgency: Sandstorm is a team-based, tactical FPS based on lethal close quarters combat and objective-oriented multiplayer gameplay. Experience the intensity of modern combat where skill is rewarded, and teamwork wins the fight.

Heat Managament
Modern weapons and especially Machine Guns came a very long way and so you cant compare something (relatively) modern to a WW2 ERA Machine gun. In the game you also dont go crazy with Machine Guns because the distances are usually shorter and engagements work differently that for example Rising Storm 2 which features some overheating mechanics. I don't think it will add anything to the game. To add it to normal rifles would also be absurd in my opinion.

Weight
Personally I would say remove body armor completely from the game and merge them with the ammo carriers. Light, Med and Heavy carriers should not just give you more ammo for your guns, but should also lock you to how many grenades you can carry. I agree that heavier players should have a smaller stamina pool.

Weapon Weight
I think you are thinking in very simple terms here and forget that weight is not just something being heavy. Weight can also mean how the weight is balanced. A heavier weapon could have "less" or more controllable recoil. Also the weight of weapons is often just a big factor in something that the game will never take into account, which is you carrying it around outside of combat. This is something that people can find in games like ArmA 3 where carrying a GPMG and the ammo is actually a issue any time you are not in combat and moving on foot.

Gun Attachments
The selection is there for balance of Gameplay and so far I see nothing wrong with it. This is a instance where gameplay has to have absolute priority over what is "felt realism".

Night Vision
We playing the same game? I have yet to see night vision in Sandstorm. Realistic Night Vision would also not fit into the game I think. I play ArmA 3 in a realism unit and we ACE3 Mod brought in some "relatively" realistic night vision. Long story short. We toned the realism factor down by a lot and still you have a lot of people moaning when they have to use them. Its not really fun. Currently you also have no working IR Lasers (and why should there be any without night maps and nvgs).

Suppressors
Another simple instance of it being a game. You already have two attachments that directly change recoil (foregrip for vertical and compensator for horizontal). You don't need a third option on top of its own mechanic also decreases recoil.

And this is where I feel like stopping. I just think you see this from a very personal perspective and it looks more like a: these are features I want in my "dream" game, regardless of the actual game you want to apply it.

@ryuk47 said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

While I think that realism and the resulting authenticity are very imperative for good game design, I also think that you can go overboard with it. You get to a point where real life would lead to frustrating game experiences.

"Overboard" is a matter of perspective. You have to understand that 15 years ago people would have mocked you for creating a game where you had to aim down the iron sights of a gun to shoot.
In fact, I remember watching a review of World War 2 Online that did precisely that.

But now even the most arcade of military shooter wouldn't try to make a game where you didn't look down the sights/optics to aim a weapon.

Insurgency, America's Army, and Red Orchestra pushed the limits of realism further when they were released.

The simple fact is, if your goal is to be a better simulation of gun handling then you're going to end up pushing the limits of what people currently consider to be acceptable levels of realism in existing games. And if you do it correctly your game will be better off for it.

Everything I've recommended would be easily incorporated into the game (not saying it would be easy to code, but easy to incorporate into the game design), and would result in a better game.

The only people who wouldn't understand why it would create a better game are those who don't have the experience or understanding of what they should expect from mil sim level gunplay. These are the kinds of people who never would have thought introducing overheating MGs into a game like Red Orchestra was necessary simply because they didn't understand enough about how guns work to realize both why it was important to properly simulating the gunplay and why it would add to both balance and gameplay experience in a positive way. Go back further and those are the same people who mocked making people look down their iron sights to aim a gun.

Point 3 especially. Though sway would realistically occur with heavier weapons, it is a RNG element that I generally frown upon for it not being manipulatable by the player.

I, also, do not like things being out of the player's control. I am against random aimsway models in general for this reason. It's one of the main reason I love the freelook system of hip firing.

However, I never said my recommendations for aimsway was beyond the player's control. You're making assumptions about how it has to be modeled.

There are ways to model weapon sway that still allow the player to make intuitive judgments about when to fire. For instance, if you model the gun swaying in real 3D space then you can see while behind the ironsight that the front post is shifting out of alignment with the back post. You can surmise based on the direction and angle of the shift where your bullets are actually going to be landing relative to where the front post is. So control for individual skill expression is still there. It's not a complete random dispersion of your bullets that you can't intuit and account for to some degree.

Now, if you're against any form of aimsway at all, well, the game already has it and every mil sim shooter always has - so unless you can come up with a better way of simulating this aspect of firearms handling on a PC then this is so far the best compromise we've found. And there's no way around certain compromises being made when you try to bring a simulation to a game control scheme.

The simple fact is, you cannot make a mil sim based shooter where your gun is a fixed rail that never sways and is 100% responsive and predictable to your mouse movement because then you'd end up with an experience that is absolutely not representative of what these weapons are capable of. Some level of aimsway abstraction is required at some point to achieve a simulation. Without virtual reality headsets and guns for controllers that have pistons in them to be programmed to kick around with each shot there's just no other way to properly simulate this aspect of firearms handling in a game.

Adding high amounts of recoil to a weapon instead makes it controllable by a skillfull player without it being random. It is >not realistic, no, but it still feels authentic, doesn't it? The SAW being more unwieldy and uncontrollable without >sacrificing immediate and satisfying controlls for the player.

No, that's an objectively bad way of simulating weapons behavior. It's the worst thing you could do, to give a weapon arbitrarily excessive recoil. That completely alters not only how the weapon is used by the player and handles but it alters what the weapon is capable of doing effectively in combat. Both are the exact opposite of what you want to achieve if you're aiming to create a military simulator. At that point you are creating a fantasy weapon and may as well have it shoot lasers for all the good it now does simulating real weapons combat.

Malfunctions in point 11 would be another RNG element with very limited controll by the player,

Your premise is wrong to begin with because you are under the mistaken belief that malfunctions should be something under your control. Malfunctions aren't something that is under a real soldier's control in most cases.
Yet it is still a reality they have to deal with, and it does have consequences in combat.

You're trying to make an issue out of something that isn't an issue. It's like complaining about how your milspec M16 barrel only has an accuracy of 4 minute of angle, and it's beyond your control to use it to reliably shoot the wings off a gnat at 1,000m.

The fact is random patterning of inaccuracy based on the design of a weapon is a part of real life you have to deal with, and there's no reason why you shouldn't also expect to deal with it in game. It doesn't matter how skilled you are in real life, your 4 MOA barrel is always going to be 4 MOA because it's not engineered to be more accurate than that. You can't, through pure skill and experience, be able to guess which direction the bullet is going to veer off this time and therefore always be 100% perfectly on target. It's completely beyond your ability to anticipate or control or compensate for.

In the same way, seemingly random malfunctions are a fact and reality of how these weapons are engineered. You can't expect everything about a weapon to be under your control if you want to have a military simulation of gunplay.
However, you can use proper heat management to reduce your risk.
You have the power to pick different ammos or accessories that don't increase your chance of malfunction.
You also have it within your power to choose guns that are inherently more reliable if you really don't want to be at risk of a jam during a time where it could cost you your life.

In fact, the reason Delta Force switched to using the HK416 is because they operate with zero tolerance for failure and would rather deal with a platform that is inferior in other ways to the M4 but has the advantage of being built like a tank that will work as close to 100% as reliably as can be achieved. It's heavier overall, it's more muzzle heavy, and it recoils more because it's overgassed to force the gun to keep working despite debris and buildup. The piston system of the HK416 is also inherently going to have more recoil than the gas system the AR uses even if it's not overgassed, but that system provides more reliability. From a pure shooting standpoint it's inferior, but as far as these guys are concerned they have zero tolerance for failure with the high stakes stuff they do so they'd rather have a somewhat more difficult to shoot platform that will hopefully never fail on them during a critical time.

In fact, the HK416 is built so much like a tank, and is so uneffected by heat buildup, that the marines have adopted a version of it called the M27 to replace the SAW. The only reason they can use it like a squad automatic rifle is because it's so durable and reliable that it can handle sustained fire in a way your typical fully automatic carbine/rifle can't.

This is about modeling the trade offs and sacrifices of different designs. That's what the fun part about a simulation is. If you don't model things like heat and malfunctions in your simulator then you'll never be able to appreciate the HK416 for what it is and how it's different from the M4 or M16. Without heat and malfunctions modeled, the HK416 would objectively perform worse in your military simulation of gunplay, and then you're left wondering why special forces even want this thing instead of the M4.

I think it doesn't belong into a game that is as fast paced as Insurgency, at least not in the competitive modes. It belongs to full on milsims like Arma in my opinion.

Fast paced has nothing to do with it. Real close quarters combat can be fast paced and malfunctions don't put themselves on hold just because you decided combat is happening too fast for you to deal with it.

The real question is do you want to have mil sim level gunplay or not? I came here with the expectation that Sandstorm cares about realism because the original Insurgency did. Although if the devs don't give a damn about attempting to push the boundries of realistic gunplay then my post might be in vain.

However, I think it's a mistake for them to not care about pushing those boundries of realism. I think there's way too many semi-arcade shooters out there for Insurgency to really stand out from the crowd unless it is firmly exploiting that niche of people who want more realistic gunplay yet in a more fast paced combat environment (ie. They don't want to have to deal with the piss poor excuse of bad game design that is Arma 3, where you run around a giant map never seeing the enemy for an hour, which is why Arma players prefer co-op game modes rather than PvP).

The same goes for the many different kinds of ammunition, which would be especially intimidating for newer players/ >players who aren't as knowledgable about firearms as you.

You're making assumptions about how it would have to be implemented and used that aren't true.
People could have easily said similar things in the past about anything that is now taken for granted as standard in a military shooter but at one time would have been considered too complicated and unnecessarily realistic.

The fact is, you as the player never need to understand the engineering behind why something does what it does. Just as they don't need to understand the engineering principles behind why one gun handles differently from another in order to learn by experience that they are different, or to look at a basic overview of stats in-game that briefly describes why they are different.

The same is no different for ammo types. A very basic graph can communicate a lot to a player about various things like armor penetration, effective range, and flesh damage. Of course you can give them more info about what's going on under the hood if you want; but it's not required for them to be able to use it and either learn from experience or read a basic overview at the loadout screen that gives them some pointers on what circumstances each ammo type is good for.

last edited by GM29

@sgt-kanyo said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Agreed with most of your points, although to be honest I wouldn't like to see hajis with heavy body armor, since they just don't have access to it.

That is not actually true.

Over the years the number of insurgents using top military body armor has increased. No doubt supplied by America's enemies behind the scenes.

This has been the main impetus behind the military's attempt to find a new round to replace the 5.56 with because some enemies are using body armor that can stop the 5.56 cold and even stop 7.62 non-armor piercing rounds.

In the short term, they've introduced the stuff like the MK13 which uses winmag cartridges that I'm sure are capable of penetrating this armor at long range when the right ammo is used.

I don't think this move in the military to find a new cartridge is fueled just by a need to tackle insurgents who get their hands on the best Russian armor. I think, rather, that finally having to fight against enemies who wear such armor has merely woken the military up to the fact that if we ever had to fight an army equipped with body armor that we'd be in serious need of a new round that can reliably defeat it.

And if they can't have access to it, in a way so shouldn't Security either, since the 1st thing we would hear is people complaining about their precious "balance", not understanding that the battlefield is not a fair place.

Well if we want to talk about access then security automatically wins every night map. No insurgent force can ever fight the US military at night and expect to do well.

Oh, and security already wins most every map automatically anyway because they can call in near unlimited JDAM strikes, artillery barrages, apache gunships, battle tanks, infantry support vehicles, or AC130 gunships on any concentration of enemy troops all day long. Meanwhile insurgents have only MGs mounted on trucks and almost nothing in the way of indirect firesupport - maybe just mortars or light rockets that can't even fire for very long before air assets find and terminate them.

But the fact is the game doesn't really attempt to represent realistic restrictions on what each side can access. And that's fine because that's not really the scope or purpose of the game.

It's sufficient, for the purposes of this game, IMO, to allow the insurgent forces to use Russian gear that could end up in their hands. Because it's really a simulation of how relative squad infantry weapon systems perform against each other, namely Nato vs former USSR/current Russian weapons, in the context of squad vs squad infantry engagements.

Also when people put suppressors on M249 always this video comes in my mind:
Youtube Video

And that's all it took to entirely destroy the suppressor. Having worse and worse bullet trajectory comes way before that.

Exactly. A video says 100,000 words.

Insurgency was great in it's day, but the idea of dumping belts through an M249 with a suppressor on it is just absurd.
Not to mention the utility of that suppressor is greatly questionable considering how loud it would still be in reality.

Notice how those guys are still wearing hearing protection in that video. There's a reason why.

Now, I'm not against the idea of giving us options, like the option to put a suppressor on it. But don't give us the option if you aren't going to properly model the downsides of putting a suppressor on an M249. Of course I love the idea of being able to play around in game with a suppressor on an M249, just because I'd like to see what it's like and if it improves performance in a mil sim context, but I want to do so in the context of one is that is accurately modeled. A movie-quiet suppressed M249 is a fantasy to begin with. And there's a very real downside to using that suppressor, in terms of heat generation, that needs to be modeled.

last edited by GM29

@mefirst said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

But Insurgency was never a "hardcore realism simulator" (whatever that means these days).
...
First at all I never saw any Insurgency Game as a game that puts heavy focus on realism.

You claim is proveably wrong.

Description of Sandstorm:
"Prepare for a hardcore depiction of combat with deadly ballistics"
"tactical FPS" (CoD isn't labeled under the "tactical" tag of steam games, and there's a reason for that. This word has meaning).

From the steam video of Sandstorm:
"Hardcore tactical shooter"
"High lethality gunplay" (A marketing way of saying "realistic damage modeling")
"Each weapon and it's ballistics were created with meticulous care"

Insurgency, when it first came out, was one of the best simulations of military gunplay we had at the time. Other games may have had more of a sim design to the game environment and objectives (like operation flashpoint or rainbow six) but their actual gunplay leaved a lot to be desired, was insufficiently modeled, and didn't feel right. Insurgency, like Red Orchestra, actually attempted to make you feel more like you were using these weapons and simulated control over them in a better way than other sims.

The devs are the ones who have set these standards and expectations. I am merely taking them at their word when they say they want to create a hardcore tactical shooter that is designed with meticulous attention to gun/ballistics detail, and I expect them to continue to deliver on what Insurgency was originally trying to do by pushing the envelope further with Sandstorm.

Heat Managament
Modern weapons and especially Machine Guns came a very long way and so you cant compare something (relatively) modern to a WW2 ERA Machine gun.

You demonstrate you don't really have a clue how guns work when you think heat management of MGs was just a WW2 problem.

There's a reason the SAW has a quick change barrel.
There's a reason that M16s were taken off of full auto in Vietnam and turned into burst fire guns. Troops were destroying them by rapidly mag dumping their entire loadout during an engagement.
There's a reason only the HK416, as the M27, was the only rifle that could ever fill the void of a SAW and why you can't just use a normal AR rifle for it.

If you don't understand those reasons then you won't understand why the dynamics of heat are important to accurate modeling of weapons in a game.

It's fine if you don't understand much about modern guns or history, but don't pretend you do and then claim Insurgency is just fine the way it is based on your lack of knowledge and understanding.

I don't think it will add anything to the game. To add it to normal rifles would also be absurd in my opinion.

If you don't understand how MGs and heat buildup of rifles works in reality then you won't be capable of understanding what that realism would add to the game or what the lack of that realism takes away from the game.

I've already outlined in detail why it's important and how it would change the game, and you haven't said anything that contradicts that other than make bogus claims about how modern MGs and rifles magically, somehow, for some unknown reason you don't attempt to even elaborate on, don't suffer from heat buildup the way WW2 era guns did.

Weight
Personally I would say remove body armor completely from the game

That would be a nonsense change. You can't simulate a modern battlefield environment, and how that effects simulated gunplay, with the absence of body armor.

I agree that heavier players should have a smaller stamina pool.

There's a lot more to it than just stamina pool that I outlined. Things like aiming endurance, delays in position changes, and slower windup of sprint speeds are examples of the wide range of things you'd need to do to accurately simulate the extent to which overall weight impedes your capabilities in a firefight.

Without that you can't properly simulate the true advantages and disadvantages of the various weapon platforms and loadout options.

Weapon Weight
I think you are thinking in very simple terms here and forget that weight is not just something being heavy. Weight can also mean how the weight is balanced.

You clearly didn't read what I wrote very carefully, as I specifically talked about the need for the game to also better represent weapon balance in it's modeling of weapon behavior.

Also the weight of weapons is often just a big factor in something that the game will never take into account, which is you carrying it around outside of combat.

That is irrelevant to the issues being discussed, because the game doesn't even properly model the in-combat disadvantages of a heavy weapon. Let's deal with modeling those before we worry about the out-of-combat disadvantages of a heavy weapon.

Gun Attachments
The selection is there for balance of Gameplay and so far I see nothing wrong with it. This is a instance where gameplay has to have absolute priority over what is "felt realism".

Your premise is wrong to begin with. Nothing about this is even necessary for a "balanced" game. If you actually modeled the downsides of heavier or longer barrels and the downsides of suppressors, then there would be no arbitrary need to restrict people to making a choice between one or the other. Because of poor modeling, you have only represented the upside of using these rather than the downside.

Furthermore, the premise behind your complaint is abhorrent.
The word "balance" and "simulation" don't exist together in the same sentence as far as modeling weapon behavior is concerned.
Either the devs are trying to be true to their word of modeling the weapons and ballistics according to meticulous detail, or they are throwing reality out the window and arbitrarily tuning things according to their personal whims and preferences. You can't have it both ways.

The fact is, reality has it's own way of balancing itself out, if you just put out the effort of accurately modeling both the downsides and the upsides of a given option.
The reason we have multiple weapons and continued development is precisely because every weapon represents a compromise, a natural balance of trade offs. Accurately model those trade offs and the game will be fine.
Sometimes problems creep into games precisely because they don't model the real trade offs of a given weapon, leaving it to appear overpowered by comparison to the alternatives.

Night Vision
We playing the same game? I have yet to see night vision in Sandstorm.
Realistic Night Vision would also not fit into the game I think.

It's only true if you fail to properly model the game to have it play a significant part in combat.
Because night vision does play a significant part of all military gun usage and infantry combat.

Any proper attempt at modeling a simulation of modern gunplay can't get away with leaving this central aspect of warfare out - that's why night vision was a big part of Insurgency and they did their best at the time to simulate it's role in infantry combat. But there was a lot they needed to improve on. If you're going to put it in the game you want to make sure you do it right.

I play ArmA 3 in a realism unit and we ACE3 Mod brought in some "relatively" realistic night vision. Long story short. We toned the realism factor down by a lot and still you have a lot of people moaning when they have to use them. Its not really fun. Currently you also have no working IR Lasers (and why should there be any without night maps and nvgs).

Your first mistake was comparing what you think night vision would be like in Insurgency to what you see in another game that is as poorly designed as ARMA, and an incomplete/inaccurate modded version of nightvision on top of that, and then use that as your basis to claim night vision is not a good idea in a game.

You're commiting a basic logical fallacy of false correlations. Just because one game isn't fun to play and you look down ironsights in that game doesn't now mean that the game was not fun to play because you were forced to look down the ironsights, and therefore no game can be fun if you're forced to use the ironsights.
There's a lot of reasons ARMA isn't fun that has nothing to do with it's realistic gun modeling and handling.

Instead of looking at a bad implementation of night vision in a game and drawing conclusions about what night vision looks like in a game, you should be looking at how it actually works in reality and then extrapolating that out to how it could work in Insurgency.
But doing that would first require you have knowledge or understanding of how night vision works in real life. Which, based on everything you've been saying so far, you likely don't and didn't bother to try learning either.

Suppressors
Another simple instance of it being a game.

That doesn't work as an excuse when the devs already said they were making Sandstorm to be a hardcore tactical shooter with meticulous attention to detail in the weapons and ballistics behavior.

You may be content with an arcade game, but that's not what the original Insurgency strived to be, it's not what the devs claim they wanted sandstorm to be.

There's absolutely no excuse for not doing a better job of modeling how suppressors work. Especially when it would not only add more proper realism that impacts the way combat is conducted, but would also add more tactical variety and variation between the weapon systems as now not all weapons can be equally suppressed and there's actually a real reason to pick something like the MP5 if being the most quiet is your primary goal.

There's not a single downside to properly modeling the way suppressors work in a game that already attempts to model ballistics and weapon behavior so accurately, other than the fact that you mistakenly believe it's not important because you don't understand enough about how real guns work to realize just how big of an oversight the current modeling is.

You already have two attachments that directly change recoil (foregrip for vertical and compensator for horizontal). You don't need a third option on top of its own mechanic also decreases recoil.

What kind of bullshit arbitrary criteria is this you're inventing that has no basis in reality?
In a mil sim of gunplay, especially where the devs explictly said they want meticulous attention to detail, you attempt to model all the elements that impact recoil based on what actually impacts recoil. You don't decide to arbitrarily leave some out for no reason.
This isn't an arcade game where you just decide you already have a recoil reducing attachment so you don't need another one. There's no need to do that, and nothing about the way they've approached this game suggests that is the attitude they want to take towards the game's weapon modeling.

If your bullshit crtieria had any value, then none of this other stuff they spent time on modeling about ballistics and weapon handling even matters so why waste the time trying. The fact is, they do model all these other factors that influence weapon handling.

Furthermore, foregrips don't work that way. I already addressed why.
And compensators don't only work horizontally. They can also be made to vent gas upwards but not downwards which will reduce muzzle rise.

And this is where I feel like stopping. I just think you see this from a very personal perspective and it looks more like a: these are features I want in my "dream" game, regardless of the actual game you want to apply it.

This is the part where you project onto others what you're guilty of doing.

I outlined objective facts about how weapons should be modeled for mil sim quality gameplay. It has nothing to do with personal perspective. Either you want a mil sim level quality of gunplay modeling or you don't. And if you do, this is what it looks like. And the game would be a lot funner for it if you value Insurgency, and games like it, for it's more realistic weapon handling.

In contrast, all you've given us in factually wrong statements about how unimportant you think these things are to realistic modeling, combined with your own personal opinions about how you don't care about realistic modeling in Insurgency.

last edited by GM29

Some pretty interesting feedback. I'm not sure I'd really count any of it as a "glaring error" as they're all pretty minor in effect when it comes to actual gameplay.

Really, I feel like there's one point that applies to a lot of what you've posted: engagements in Sandstorm tend to be short in both duration and range. Many of the things you talk about simply won't matter in engagements with a few hundred rounds fired at under 50 yards.

@gm29 said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

  1. No heat management.

This would be neat to see, but I don't think it should be a priority. I don't think I've ever put enough rounds through a rifle in a Sandstorm match to warrant more than being glad my character is wearing gloves. Sure it can be an issue for a SAW gunner, but even then, unless someone is dumping entire mags in one go regularly, which I almost never see, it would not be a major problem.

  1. Overall equipment weight don't have enough of an impact on performance.

This has been tweaked a few times over the course of the beta. I'm not sure if I'd like to see an ARMA3 style stamina bar, but at the very least I think more weight should slow people down a bit more.

  1. Weapon weight and balance

I totally agree here and would like to see this added. I think significantly changing how weapons behave based on weapon weight and balance would be a much better way to tweak the weapons in game and balance the LMGs without making them have ridiculous levels of recoil.

  1. Body armor.

I'd love to see more specific hit boxes in the game to more properly model both character damage and body armor. Body armor and wounding are pretty complex subjects, so some level of abstraction is going to need to happen.

  1. Being forced to make compromises in weapon assembly

This could be interesting to see, but ultimately it is a game. Not only is balance a consideration, but so is the UI and user discovery. As it is people complain that it takes too long to select your equipment, adding more complexities to the system would likely make this worse.

  1. Night vision illuminators and pointers.

I've never seen a game that really tries to model NODs realistically. Pretty much everyone goes with the same compromises, which is what happened with the previous Insurgency games. I assume Sandstorm will do the same, but would be pleasantly surprised if they tried to make it a little more realistic.

In previous games the generic laser sight worked quite well with NVGs, so you can pretty much play as if you were running an IR laser.

  1. Not enough fidelity in ammo modeling.

I'm really not sure that there would be much difference in ammo variety within the the ranges we shoot at people in Sandstorm. Certainly any accuracy differences would never have a practical effect, and unless the damage model gets seriously overhauled I don't think it's worth it to look at how different ammo types might effect wounding either. A lot of differences in barrel length are already factored into weapon performance - the Mk.18 is noticeably less lethal than the M-16 for example.

  1. Suppressors do effect weapon performance in reality,

I'm honestly glad that in this game suppressors don't have a negative effect on ballistics like they do in most games. The realistic gains in accuracy and velocity again aren't enough to really notice within the range of a Sandstorm engagement. Recoil reduction could be nice, and could be implemented with an improvement to the way all attachments effect weapon weight and handling.

  1. Flash hiders and suppressors.

I'd love to see different muzzle flashes implemented depending on the muzzle device equipped. It would have an additional balancing effect, especially once we get night maps.

Compensators in real life though only make follow-up shots easier. Most direct the blast to the side, and the shooter barely feels it at all. There are lots of options, especially for 5.56mm, that don't direct any blast upward at all so they won't obscure your vision.

I used to scoff at suppressors on SAWs and shotguns in previous Insurgency games. Both are becoming a reality though. Modern military suppressors like the SureFire SOCOM line are pretty durable, and while they may not be able to survive multiple successive mag dumps, that's also not something that often happens in Sandstorm. For the amount of shooting most SAWs do in game, a suppressor is totally believable.

  1. Malfunctions.

I'd like to see these added too, it'd add some realism and allow some other balancing options for things like drum mags which tend to have a higher failure rate. It wouldn't happen very often though; most AR family rifles see 2,000+ rounds between malfunctions, that's a lot of game play without a single malfunction. I've seen some of the competitive guys complain about it being a random event that could dramatically effect the outcome of a match. I don't play competitive, but I see the point. Maybe it could just be disabled in that mode.

  1. Vertical grips don't always benefit the handling of a gun.

Grips are a pretty personal thing, and it's hard to come up with any kind of scientific rule about how they effect weapon handling. I put vertical grips on all of my 16" ARs as I find them the most comfortable. AFGs hurt my wrist with extended usage and I hate them. I've got a BCM KAG on my 10.5" AR. Everyone is different.

  1. More optics options.

I want to be able to flip my magnifiers and I want to be able to switch the 1X/4X switch on the Specter. Sadly it seems this is a game play decision and I don't think it'll change.

you have to factor in trigger quality when determining how different guns will handle.

In real life: sure, trigger break and reset play a large role in shooting, especially at range. But, no gun accessory is going to change the way my mouse clicks. Any accuracy advantage to running an upgraded trigger isn't going to make a difference in the sub 50 yard shooting that makes up most of Sandstorm.

Aaand already it turns into a dick measuring contest "who knows the most" about "real combat". Ironically we are talking about a video game.

tl;dr:
You want a gun simulator that the game will most likely (and hopefully) never be. I disagree.

Terms like "hardcore" combat are just marketing and extremely vague. Ask 10 people what they would define as hardcore combat in a first person shooter. You will get a lot of different answers and a lot of them will not have anything to do with "realistic" gun mechanics.

High lethality gunplay does not mean realistic. Quake has high lethality gunpay. Counterstrike has high lethality gunplay. Would you define these games as realistic? A low time to kill does not equal the vague term realism. It creates a certain gameplay and can shape a game. The low TTK (or call it lethality) is a core feature of the game but once again its also in favor of gameplay aspects. A example would be that pistols are not as effective as in the standalone Insurgency.

Meticulous care just means that the developers put a lot of thought and effort into their system (which they did in my book).

So when you say you take them for their word you take them for what you think they said or more like what you want them to say because it fits your personal preferences.

Then we start the dick measure contest with "you dont know shit about guns". Some of the examples you mentioned are wrong (like the M16 example) but I get the feeling you ill simply ignore points that do not fit your narrative and so I wont bother.

Insurgency does not simulate a modern battlefield environment.

@maa_bunny said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Some pretty interesting feedback. I'm not sure I'd really count any of it as a "glaring error"

What is the basis of you saying it's not a glaring error?
Only someone who doesn't use or understand these weapons in real life would look at a game like this and not notice these as glaring errors.
To anyone who doesn't get their understanding of guns from movies and games, but understands a lot about real military firearms, some of these oversights are as glaring and obnoxiously bad as if the gun shot backwards.

as they're all pretty minor in effect when it comes to actual gameplay.

Only someone who, again, doesn't understand the significance of how these things impact real life weapon performance in combat situations, would be able to come the conclusion that they have no significant potential impact on the gameplay of Insurgency.

I already outlined in some specifics how these things would alter gameplay. You haven't disproved any of that.

Really, I feel like there's one point that applies to a lot of what you've posted: engagements in Sandstorm tend to be short in both duration and range. Many of the things you talk about simply won't matter in engagements with a few hundred rounds fired at under 50 yards.

There isn't a single thing I listed that wouldn't have a significant impact on the game at close range with a few hundred rounds fired. You're talking out of ignorance of not understanding the significance of these issues.
Go ahead and try to talk in specifics about what wouldn't apply and why, and you'll quickly find out you were either wrong or you don't know enough about these issues to be declaring conclusions.

This would be neat to see, but I don't think it should be a priority. I don't think I've ever put enough rounds through a rifle in a Sandstorm match to warrant more than being glad my character is wearing gloves. Sure it can be an issue for a SAW gunner, but even then, unless someone is dumping entire mags in one go regularly, which I almost never see, it would not be a major problem.

You "don't think"? Oh what basis do you even presume to draw your conclusions? Have you even attempted to do basic research?

The fact is basic heat buildup will very significantly impact the accuracy and patterning of any rifle, regardless of whether or not you're noticing any obvious signs of excess heat. And it doesn't take long before you start noticing those effects. As little firing off one mag can do it, depending on the weapon.
And, yes, depending on the weapon, you may need gloves to not feel the uncomfortable heat buildup on the handguard.

If you were to dump an entire belt of SAW ammo in one go you absolutely would need to change the barrel.

Dump a few hundred rounds into some rifles without stopping and you run the risk of destroying them.

Even without catastrophic failure you will be experiencing degrading accuracy and increased malfunctions long before that.

  1. Overall equipment weight don't have enough of an impact on performance.

This has been tweaked a few times over the course of the beta. I'm not sure if I'd like to see an ARMA3 style stamina bar, but at the very least I think more weight should slow people down a bit more.

It's not just about speed or stamina - It's also about agility. Very important that you model how the extra bulk and weight of gear hinders your transition speed between positions, raising up the gun, or transitioning to a sprint, etc.

  1. Body armor.

I'd love to see more specific hit boxes in the game to more properly model both character damage and body armor. Body armor and wounding are pretty complex subjects, so some level of abstraction is going to need to happen.

I'm ok with some level of abstraction on the wounding of the body because there's few hard and fast rules that can be counted on when it comes to that - but there's no excuse not to model the ballistic plates and helmet as physical entities that you either impact or you don't impact, with appropriate ballistics results calculated based on the circumstances.

  1. Being forced to make compromises in weapon assembly

This could be interesting to see, but ultimately it is a game. Not only is balance a consideration,

Not a valid excuse. Reality is inherently balanced if you model it correctly, because real life weapons are inherently always about compromising one thing for another. That's why we don't have only one gun to do everything.

You don't need to worry about people loading up their gun with every option if you actually model the realistic downsides of all that stuff.
Where's the realistic downsides of the suppressor?
Where's the realistic downsides of the long barrel or heavy barrel?
Where's the realistic downsides of the foreward grip (unnecessary weight if you put it on a long gun that gives you no real benefit)?
Where's the realistic downsides of armor piercing ammo?
Where's the realistic downside of adding all that weight and barrel heavy crap to your gun that you don't actually need?
Where's the realistic downsides of drum and extended mags (increased weight, can mess with balance, increases the chance of malfunctions, and they are difficult to carry spare mags for without being excessive cumbersome and bulky)?

The problem is not that you need artificial limits to achieve some arbitrary sense of balance that doesn't exist in real life, but the problem is that you have failed to accurately model both the downsides and the upsides of all this kit. If you did that then you wouldn't have issues letting people freely put whatever they wanted together.

Your game is either simulation of real weapons behavior and ballistics or it's not and it just wants arbitrary subjective arcade balancing. You can't have it both ways. There is absolutely no reason to pick and choose which parts of real weapon behavior you do and don't want to accurately represent when your stated goal is to push towards max realism.

but so is the UI and user discovery. As it is people complain that it takes too long to select your equipment, adding more complexities to the system would likely make this worse.

Not a valid excuse.
You get over it once you learn what everything is.

if that were really a legitimate concern then you shouldn't have any options to begin with. Just dumb the whole thing down and force everyone to have a standard loadout.

In reality, those options are what make the game fun and interesting, especially over the long term. And it's not a serious hinderance to have to take more time initially to learn what the options are.

  1. Not enough fidelity in ammo modeling.

I'm really not sure that there would be much difference in ammo variety within the the ranges we shoot at people in Sandstorm.

Not really sure? Again, what is your basis for saying you're not sure? What is your experience and knowledge with different ammos? What research have you done?

From someone who has does know something about the various options out there, I can tell you that the options do matter at these ranges. There absolutely are major differences between a 55 grain M193, 77grain FMK, M855 green tip, or M855A1, significant enough to be worth modeling in specifics because of how radically they will alter your capabilities and how some AR platforms will prefer one rounds over others. And that's only one gun type and a handful of ammo types. Not all weapons are going to have the same ammo options available to them. Not all weapons can be made as effective against armor as another by changing the ammo, or made as effective against flesh, or made capable of doing both well by ammo selection. These differences matter in real life when choosing one firearm over another.

and unless the damage model gets seriously overhauled I don't think it's worth it to look at how different ammo types might effect wounding either.

You don't think? On what basis do you think this?
Don't just make assumptions. Do some research, pull up some data, then come back here and tell us the wounding profiles of these various rounds at different ranges are not significant enough to matter.

The difference in stopping power between an M855 and FMK is absolutely massive. Especially as ranges get longer and barrels get shorter.

A lot of differences in barrel length are already factored into weapon performance - the Mk.18 is noticeably less lethal than the M-16 for example.

I already pointed out in my first post that there's a lot more that goes into lethality than merely barrel length. The ammo design, and how that interacts with a given barrel length, is more important than the barrel length by itself. Especially with the AR platform, ammo selection will make or break the viability of the short barreled versions.

I used to scoff at suppressors on SAWs and shotguns in previous Insurgency games. Both are becoming a reality though. Modern military suppressors like the SureFire SOCOM line are pretty durable, and while they may not be able to survive multiple successive mag dumps, that's also not something that often happens in Sandstorm. For the amount of shooting most SAWs do in game, a suppressor is totally believable.

No, it isn't believable. Especially when you don't model the downsides of it, and especially when you don't accurately represent the fact that it doesn't make all guns equally quiet. There's a reason suppressors aren't standard issue. They have serious enough downsides even for rifles that they remain a specialty accessory.
Even special forces don't waste their time trying to put suppressors on their MGs.

Shotguns aren't even used in combat, just a door breaching tools, so the last thing they are likely going to want to do is attach a giant 12 inch silencer onto an already long gun.

I'm not against having the option in game of doing it, but don't expect to put it in the game without also modeling the downsides of it.

  1. Malfunctions.

I'd like to see these added too, it'd add some realism and allow some other balancing options for things like drum mags which tend to have a higher failure rate. It wouldn't happen very often though; most AR family rifles see 2,000+ rounds between malfunctions, that's a lot of game play without a single malfunction. I've seen some of the competitive guys complain about it being a random event that could dramatically effect the outcome of a match. I don't play competitive, but I see the point. Maybe it could just be disabled in that mode.

You know who else also thinks that way? Delta Force.
There's a reason they use a weapon that is inferior in terms of handling, because the stakes are too high for them to "lose the match" due to a malfunction. So they try to pick the firearm that will bring that chance of failure down to the lowest possible percentage. But even then it's not guaranteed.

However, this is the reality of combat. Just like bullet dispersion beyond your control is the reality of combat.

You can't have a real simulation of military combat and at the same time also demand 100% control over everything that happens with your weapon. That's not reality. And how you deal with those malfunctions, and showing how weapons differ with regards to reliability and ease of clearing problems, and how different pieces of kit impact reliability, or how different uses of the weapon (rapid fire) impact reliability, are all valid and necessary parts of simulating the gunplay involved.

  1. Vertical grips don't always benefit the handling of a gun.

Grips are a pretty personal thing, and it's hard to come up with any kind of scientific rule about how they effect weapon handling. I put vertical grips on all of my 16" ARs as I find them the most comfortable. AFGs hurt my wrist with extended usage and I hate them. I've got a BCM KAG on my 10.5" AR. Everyone is different.

It's not a personal thing. There are objective ergonomic reasons why a vertical grip is better for a short barrel but actually inferior on a long barrel. It has to do with the position your wrist naturally finds itself in. This changes as you stretch your hand closer or further out based on different barrel lengths.

What you find comfortable is not the same as what is actually objectively more effective. There's a reason competition AR shooters don't use vertical grips. For one, it is not as good for speed and accuracy of single shots. Second, because they aren't doing full auto so they have no need to gain that kind of leverage at the front of the gun to make it more controllable during full auto.

  1. More optics options.

I want to be able to flip my magnifiers and I want to be able to switch the 1X/4X switch on the Specter. Sadly it seems this is a game play decision and I don't think it'll change.

you have to factor in trigger quality when determining how different guns will handle.

In real life: sure, trigger break and reset play a large role in shooting, especially at range. But, no gun accessory is going to change the way my mouse clicks. Any accuracy advantage to running an upgraded trigger isn't going to make a difference in the sub 50 yard shooting that makes up most of Sandstorm.

Triggers do matter in real life at 50 yards, with regards to how quickly and accurately you can get shots off. If they aren't something you factor in to the handling of your weapons in Insurgency then you're doing something wrong.

This is an area where abstraction of how the various stock triggers on different firearms impacts their handling, because you can't really simulate trigger pull in a way that the player would have direct control over.

Likewise, any changes to a trigger system from one AR to another would also have to be abstracted.

Sandstorm isn't a simulator. Many of the things you suggest would sacrifice gameplay and make the game annoying and frustrating. While trying to shoot someone and having a gun jam is realistic it has no place in a video game. Adding RNG removes skill and leads to players feeling cheated.
Many of the things your propose are realistic but would kill the game. My suggestion to you would be go play arma.

@gm29 said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Only someone who doesn't use or understand these weapons in real life

Whoa there, careful what kind of assumptions you're making. I've shot many thousands of rounds and done hundreds of hours of combat and self-defense training with rifles and handguns. I've done force-on-force training with airsoft and simmunitions. What I've not done is much long range or competition shooting, which may be where our experiences differ.

When I say that I don't think that something would have a significant impact on game play, I do not mean to imply that I don't know how they work or what the impact would be. If things like barrel heating, ammunition variation, and modified triggers were implemented the effect on accuracy most of the time would be, what, 1 MoA? Maybe 2 in total? That's 1/2 inch to 1 inch at most at 50 yards. For combat shooting, that's insignificant.

While implementing some of these features would be cool and make the game more realistic, we're talking about something that will most of the time change point of impact by barely a few pixels. Something that most players will not notice most of the time when compared to the game play is it is now is, in my opinion, not a "glaring error."

@gm29 said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

@sgt-kanyo said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Agreed with most of your points, although to be honest I wouldn't like to see hajis with heavy body armor, since they just don't have access to it.

That is not actually true.

Over the years the number of insurgents using top military body armor has increased. No doubt supplied by America's enemies behind the scenes.

This has been the main impetus behind the military's attempt to find a new round to replace the 5.56 with because some enemies are using body armor that can stop the 5.56 cold and even stop 7.62 non-armor piercing rounds.

In the short term, they've introduced the stuff like the MK13 which uses winmag cartridges that I'm sure are capable of penetrating this armor at long range when the right ammo is used.

I don't think this move in the military to find a new cartridge is fueled just by a need to tackle insurgents who get their hands on the best Russian armor. I think, rather, that finally having to fight against enemies who wear such armor has merely woken the military up to the fact that if we ever had to fight an army equipped with body armor that we'd be in serious need of a new round that can reliably defeat it.

I'm not really sure about america's enemies supplying them, but tbh that's kind of like a political view. We probably won't know for sure.

However I do believe that most of the low life insurgents won't be supplied with armor, especially not next gen. That'd actually take a lot of money for someone or even a country to give expensive armors for soldiers.

Most of these fanatics don't care about their soldiers lives, they just feed them their bullshit propaganda saying "you're fighting for an almighty God, because we read about him in a book" and give the brainwashed nut an AK.

So maybe (I'm gonna say a number that pops into my head now) 1/10 insurgents have some type of body armor, but most of them will probably just have some type of clothing on without any armor. I mean they can't even afford a proper set of boots, they use sandals.

And if they can't have access to it, in a way so shouldn't Security either, since the 1st thing we would hear is people complaining about their precious "balance", not understanding that the battlefield is not a fair place.

Well if we want to talk about access then security automatically wins every night map. No insurgent force can ever fight the US military at night and expect to do well.

Oh, and security already wins most every map automatically anyway because they can call in near unlimited JDAM strikes, artillery barrages, apache gunships, battle tanks, infantry support vehicles, or AC130 gunships on any concentration of enemy troops all day long. Meanwhile insurgents have only MGs mounted on trucks and almost nothing in the way of indirect firesupport - maybe just mortars or light rockets that can't even fire for very long before air assets find and terminate them.

Well with the current mindset of gamers where run and gun is the only "tactic" being applied, no. But let's not forget that when US troops fought the al-Qaeda they were actually quite surprised when insurgents weren't fighting them head-on but used guerilla tactics like, ambushing them from anywhere. They couldn't "fight" them so well as they hoped.

If this game actually built on forcing Team Haji to prepare ambushes and other nasty tactics, we wouldn't really have to worry about Team Murika having way too much power.
For example, I'm pretty sure I've heard of many war stories where US troops couldn't ask for support, because either air support was way too far away, or occupied with other missions and what not. So this could be a limiting factor for them.

So tbh I wouldn't neccessarily think that Security would always win. Also for night maps the old Insurgency had the idea to also give NV goggles for the Insurgents (which I didn't quite like tbh), but once again people argued that they could have stolen those from the Security team's weapon caches or like you mentioned someone else supplied it for them.

Boring hypothesis coming, no need to read further:
Anyway to be honest I'm liking the idea of representing real war scenarios in games more and more. Imagine if we had a "push" like game mode, but with civilians running around, whom the Security troops could not shoot. Hajis could be armed with AKs and grenades or they could also have the option to only equip a pistol which they can hide, meaning they could disguise themselves as civilians.
Security would have access to a shitload of fire support, but if they mess up and kill too many civilians their mission fails. Team Hajis objective is to eliminate all Security troops, while Security needs to capture an objective / blow up a weapon's cache / disable a radio tower / or whatever.

I agree with some of your points. More attachment options would be great. That said,

This is a game, not a simulator. We don't need more RNG; losing a gunfight because your gun decided to stop working or it fired your rounds in the wrong direction would be complete bullshit. We don't need body armor that makes people invulnerable to certain guns. Armor piercing ammo dealing less damage to unarmored people would make gunfights with those guns up to chance. What's the point of paying points and weight on armor if there's a chance it will increase the damage you take? Overheating guns would be in the best case incredibly annoying and in the worst case it would cause further undeserved deaths.

@angus said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Sandstorm isn't a simulator.

@cyoce said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

This is a game, not a simulator.

Both incorrect statements and bad arguments from a logic standpoint.

Incorrect in the sense that Insurgency does attempt to accurately represent, and therefore simulate, how these weapons behave and perform in real life. Just because they don't put themselves on a giant map like ARMA and trumpet themselves with the title of "simulator" does not negate the fact that from a weapons handling and gunplay standpoint they DO strive to accurately simulate the use of these weapons in combat.

By the devs own statements this game is suppose to be a "hardcore tactical shooter with meticulous attention to detail with weapons and ballistics".

They are not living up to the standard they have set with many of the glaring oversights I've mentioned.

Furthermore, the original Insurgency put itself on the map by being the best representation of modern realistic gunplay we'd seen out of a game up to that point. Sandstorm should be trying to continue that legacy by bringing the realistic gunplay and detail to the next level and again set the standard by which other modern shooters are judged.

On to why those statements are bad from a logic standpoint:
Saying "but it's just a game" or "but it's not a simulator (However you define that)" does not logically prove or disprove the merits of what I've said would make the game better and be fitting for it.

If you said you wanted a moonraker laser put into Insurgency, saying "but it's only a game" or "it's not a simulator", doesn't automatically prove that it's a good or appropriate idea to put a moonraker laser into Insurgency.

You need to be able to articulate specifically why or why not specific suggestions would or would not be appropriate for what Insurgency is aiming to be. You can't just throw out the catch-all phrase of "but it's just a game" and expect that to cover over justifying whatever your opinion is.

last edited by GM29

@maa_bunny said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

@gm29 said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Only someone who doesn't use or understand these weapons in real life

Whoa there, careful what kind of assumptions you're making. I've shot many thousands of rounds and done hundreds of hours of combat and self-defense training with rifles and handguns. I've done force-on-force training with airsoft and simmunitions. What I've not done is much long range or competition shooting, which may be where our experiences differ.

I apologize for incorrect assumptions, but it is patently false to say that none of these are glaring issues that would have a significant impact on gameplay. A lot of the issues people are already having with the game come from failing to properly model some of these issues (like people complaining the SAW needs artificially bad recoil or bullet spread because it's other inherent disadvantages like weight and balance aren't modeled properly, the need to manage heat if you're going to fire a lot, or it's inability to use a suppressor effectively).

That's just one example but every weapon is impacted significantly by the things I brought up. It would not only bring greater balance to the game but also greater authenticity to the gunplay because they would significantly influence and alter what weapons you currently choose for specific tasks and would noticeably change how effective they are in different circumstances.

To say that none of that would have a significant impact either comes from not having the imagination to envision how it would change the game, or not having the understanding to fully appreciate just how significant it is to actual performance.

Now when it comes to the later you could be forgiven for not knowing some of this because it's not the kind of thing you'll likely pick up on without a ton of competition specific trials where the clock doesn't lie about what is or isn't more effective. Because the military doesn't have the option of picking and choosing or customizing their stuff, outside of some options in the special forces, you don't really have to ask yourself these kinds of questions. You don't have any reason to fuss over the nuances of how the M4 performs vs the Tavor, AK74, G36, etc, and you have no reason to analyze why different features result in different performance.
But in competition, where the options are endless, you pick up on just how much these factors truly effect performance in the hands of someone skilled enough for those differences to be very significant and noticeable. That's why a lot of improvements to military firearms actually first appeared in the civilian competition or hunting spheres.
And unless you're trained as a sniper in the military or law enforcement you'll probably never concern yourself with how various factors are influencing your grouping size or shifts in your patterning - but it's there and it does impact performance in certain contexts.

Although these questions are not much of a concern for a military with standardized equipment, these questions do matter when you want to talk about modeling how all these different weapons perform in a game like Insurgency. Suddenly those nuances do matter because your goal is to accurately give players a realistic handling of these different weapons. Players will delight in being able to discern the differences through the game of how real life guns are advantaged or disadvantaged, instead of feeling like they are all just generic artificial creations with different graphics models thrown onto them.

When I say that I don't think that something would have a significant impact on game play, I do not mean to imply that I don't know how they work or what the impact would be. If things like barrel heating, ammunition variation, and modified triggers were implemented the effect on accuracy most of the time would be, what, 1 MoA? Maybe 2 in total? That's 1/2 inch to 1 inch at most at 50 yards. For combat shooting, that's insignificant.
While implementing some of these features would be cool and make the game more realistic, we're talking about something that will most of the time change point of impact by barely a few pixels. Something that most players will not notice most of the time when compared to the game play is it is now is, in my opinion, not a "glaring error."

It seems like a recurring theme that you are only focused on how "accuracy" is impacted and aren't considering all the other factors that go into a weapon platform being effective that don't just deal with raw MOA numbers.

If you look at all the factors I talked about, they have a very far reaching impact on weapon handling and ballistic performance that goes well beyond simple MOA dispersion.

  1. Movement speed.
  2. Position changing speed and sprint wind up time.
  3. Endurance loss rates from carrying and using the weapon.
  4. Weapon swing delays from increased mass or how it's balanced. Weapon swing speed, and ramp up speed, from increased mass and balance. Overswing (how long it takes to stop moving from the increased inertia of mass, or the balance of having too much weight out front). Slower times in shouldering and sighting the weapon based on weight and balance.
  5. Aimsway due to various factors like length, weight, balance, and player endurance levels.
  6. Aim recovery speed after firing, and how much of your sight picture is lost, due to various factors like balance, weight, length, endurance levels, etc.
  7. Sight, hearing, and situational awareness being obscured more by differences in muzzle reports and flashes.
  8. How the trigger quality impacts semi automatic accuracy and firing speed.
  9. How effective the suppressor is on various platforms with various ammos.
  10. How grips really impact your controllability on different platforms, and how that differs from semi auto vs full auto.
  11. How the need to factor in realistic body armor will influence both where you choose to aim, how many shots you'll choose to fire, and what types of guns and ammo you'll choose to use.
  12. How night vision really impacts combat when modeled realistically, and how some weapons and optics are better suited to it than others.
  13. How different ammo loadouts can drastically influence your recoil control, stopping power, penetration, effective range. And the nuances of how some rounds perform better out of shorter barrels, or better when suppressed, or better with heavier rounds. Certain barrel twist rates won't handle all ammo types well. And some platforms just won't have as many options available. These are all real advantages and disadvantages that will greatly impact combat if modeled correctly.
    ---There's a reason the military often commissions particular rounds to be created to solve particular problems with a weapon system - because ammo can HUGELY change what a particular platform is capable of doing. For example, whether or not you're using M855A1 will make or break your ability to deal with barriers or armor plates in an AR platform. And 300 Blackout is seeing some military use in the AR platform (all you have to do is put a new barrel on) because it performs vastly better than the 5.56 out of a short barrel and also performs better with subsonic rounds plus a suppressor. And even though the 300 Blackout has similar supersonic ballistics performance to a 7.62x39 (The 7.62 having more overall energy though), the 7.62 loses a lot more energy and ballistic performance when shooting supersonic out of a short barrel or using subsonic rounds.
    ---The differences between what different rounds are capable of is significant enough that they should not be abstracted as merely "generic AP round", "generic hollowpoint round", or "generic suppressed round". For one, these ammo types have disadvantages that aren't even being modeled currently. Second, not all weapon platforms even have ammo options in these categories, or the options they have aren't as good, which is a mark against the versatility of that particular weapon. Those are differences worth representing to balance out why one platform is preferred over another. Some weapons will simply be better at barrier penetration, or better at suppression, better at long range accuracy, or better at stopping power for a given caliber, purely because of the different ammo options available to them. It would add a lot of value and variety to the game for this to be represented accurately as well as increasing the realistic representative differences between the various firearms.
  14. How you deal with malfunctions, how that impacts the way you use the weapon, and how that influences what weapons or accessories you choose to run will also have a significant impact on the game.
  15. A flip mount magnifier on a red dot, or even a variable power 1-4 optic with a red dot, both have significant differences between them, and furthermore present a huge potential impact in combat performance compared with a plain red dot or flat 4x magnifier like an ACOG.
  16. How your point of aim shifts or MOA gets worse as the weapon heats up.
  17. Heat management. You can't mag dump rifles too much without reliability problems. Barrel changes on SAW.
  18. How some weapons get too hot to hold after firing a few magazines, or how some weapons handle it better than others. You need things like vertical grips or handguard covers to overcome that which add weight and effects balance. Or wear gloves - but if you choose to wear gloves that impacts how certain weapons are easier/faster to use than others due to oversized trigger guards or oversized weapon switches.
last edited by GM29

@sgt-kanyo said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

I'm not really sure about america's enemies supplying them, but tbh that's kind of like a political view. We probably won't know for sure.

However I do believe that most of the low life insurgents won't be supplied with armor, especially not next gen. That'd actually take a lot of money for someone or even a country to give expensive armors for soldiers.

Regardless of what you think about it, the fact is they have encountered it in Syria. And that's part of why they know they need a new round that can penetrate better than the 5.56.

I can't think of a single successful insurgency in history against a major power that was not funded and supplied by outside forces at some point. Arms, ammo, supplies, money, etc. Whether it's the US backing them or the Russians or Chinese backing them. That's why some forces the US has gone up against in the middle east got their hands on stuff like the latest Russian bodyarmor or factory produced laser activated IEDs in Iraq that were believed to be coming out of Iran.

So maybe (I'm gonna say a number that pops into my head now) 1/10 insurgents have some type of body armor, but most of them will probably just have some type of clothing on without any armor. I mean they can't even afford a proper set of boots, they use sandals.

And if they can't have access to it, in a way so shouldn't Security either, since the 1st thing we would hear is people complaining about their precious "balance", not understanding that the battlefield is not a fair place.

Well if we want to talk about access then security automatically wins every night map. No insurgent force can ever fight the US military at night and expect to do well.

Well with the current mindset of gamers where run and gun is the only "tactic" being applied, no. But let's not forget that when US troops fought the al-Qaeda they were actually quite surprised when insurgents weren't fighting them head-on but used guerilla tactics like, ambushing them from anywhere. They couldn't "fight" them so well as they hoped.

If this game actually built on forcing Team Haji to prepare ambushes and other nasty tactics, we wouldn't really have to worry about Team Murika having way too much power.
For example, I'm pretty sure I've heard of many war stories where US troops couldn't ask for support, because either air support was way too far away, or occupied with other missions and what not. So this could be a limiting factor for them.

So tbh I wouldn't neccessarily think that Security would always win. Also for night maps the old Insurgency had the idea to also give NV goggles for the Insurgents (which I didn't quite like tbh), but once again people argued that they could have stolen those from the Security team's weapon caches or like you mentioned someone else supplied it for them.

Boring hypothesis coming, no need to read further:
Anyway to be honest I'm liking the idea of representing real war scenarios in games more and more. Imagine if we had a "push" like game mode, but with civilians running around, whom the Security troops could not shoot. Hajis could be armed with AKs and grenades or they could also have the option to only equip a pistol which they can hide, meaning they could disguise themselves as civilians.
Security would have access to a shitload of fire support, but if they mess up and kill too many civilians their mission fails. Team Hajis objective is to eliminate all Security troops, while Security needs to capture an objective / blow up a weapon's cache / disable a radio tower / or whatever.

I find many of your conclusions debateable, but there's no point in getting into that discussion here because ultimately that's an issue that doesn't even relate to this thread.

The fact is the way insurgency as a game is designed they want both sides to have equal access to equivalent equipment.
And this thread deals with the realistic modeling of that equipment.

If you want to complain about how you think Insurgents shouldn't get access to half the equipment they have then you can go start a different thread about it. For the purposes of this thread it doesn't matter either way.

I am not necessarily against the idea of creating more realistic map scenarios with assymetrical balance factors but, regardless of whether you did that or kept the map/game design the way it is, these issues with weapon handling would remain the same and the need to address them wouldn't go away.

last edited by GM29

@angus said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

Many of the things you suggest would sacrifice gameplay and make the game annoying and frustrating.

If your current gunplay model is a fantasy, yet the goal of your game is to have realistic gunplay, then you will celebrate killing the fantasy model to replace it with the realistic model you strove for.

Your personal subjective idea about what you prefer doesn't prove or disprove anything about what the game needs to meet it's goals of being a hardcore tactical meticulous representation of modern weapons and ballistics.

Furthermore, it's a logical error to try to use subjective standards of personal preference to talk about what would objectively be a good addition to a game or not - because your personal subjective idea of what you prefer may include a preference for all kinds of really bad elements.
Like maybe you think the game would be better without the need to change magazines, so you just decide all guns have 500 round drums attached to them. Then when someone points out "hey, you know, this is really hindering the realism of the gunplay to not have magazine changes", you would respond "quiet, don't ruin the gameplay by introducing such annoyances and frustration. I don't want to die or miss out on a kill because my mag went dry. And it's so annoying to have to keep topping off my ammo after a fight".

The fact is, just because you personally think it's annoying to have to change magazines, doesn't mean that objectively the game would be worse with magazines introduced into the game. It depends on what you preferences are and what your goals are.

Furthermore, it's pretty shortsighted and ignorant to jump the gun and make assumptions about what would or wouldn't be good for the game when you have no experience with real firearms to understand why things would be better if modeled this way in a game.
For example: 20 years ago people like you would have said "no way, don't force us to look down ironsights and free aim without a crosshair -That's just annoying and unnecessary!"
Yet, having actually tried it, now you wouldn't want it any other way.
People who already had extensive experience with firearms would have been the ones more likely to accept this feature in a game, and even want it, because they knew it would improve the fidelity and experience of shooting in the game.

While trying to shoot someone and having a gun jam is realistic it has no place in a video game.

Your conclusion is proven wrong by America's Army. It got along just fine with malfunctions being represented in the game.

Your statement is also meaningless by itself because plenty of people in the past have said similar things about other realistic additions to shooters.

"Aiming down the sights has no place in a video game, it's just annoying".
"One shot kills have no place in a video game, it's unbalanced".

And then, once aiming down the sights becomes mainstream, people are like:
"Allowing players to fire accurately from the hip with a free aim system has no place in a video game, it's unbalance compared with a crosshair and random dispersion model".

None of these are objective analysis of what would or would not make a game good or bad. They are merely expressions of what an individual has become accustomed to and an expression of the fact that they are set in their ways and don't welcome change.

Adding RNG removes skill and leads to players feeling cheated.

Your position is logically inconsistent and contradictory.
You have random bullet dispersion that no amount of skill will ever be able to overcome.
Yet you don't complain about the fact that the game doesn't make every bullet a laser.
You have some randomness involved in aimsway and don't have direct control over what happens to a degree.

The fact is; firearms are inherently random in some ways and any realistic modeling of them has to include this random factor to be realistic.

You only feel cheated if you have unreasonable expectations about what you should be capable of doing that don't line up with reality.

If you have an entitled mentality that says the bullet should always go where your mouse points, then you will feel cheated to discover there's dispersion, bullet drop, and aimsway to factor in, or that you are forced to deal with recoil that prevents you from making another accurate shot right away.

In contrast: If you have expectations of how a firearm should perform based on real life experience then you won't feel cheated when you come into a game and discoverer these things to be accurately modeled.

If anything, you will feel cheated to come into a game that purports to be a meticulously modeled example of firearms handling and ballistics yet then fails to meet some basic criteria of what that would look like.

Furthermore: It's not purely random. You do have some significant control over the rate at which you might experience failures if the game is properly modeled.

If you value reliability over everything else then you can prioritize that in your loadout.
-You can choose to pick different guns that are more reliable. But that reliability may come at the cost of other things (like the HK416 vs M4)
-You can choose to not use certain ammos, magazines, or suppressors which will all result in decreasing the reliability of some firearms to differing degrees.
-You can choose to modify the way you use the weapon. You can manage your heat buildup better by not mag dumping when it's not necessary.
-You can use different tactics which don't put you in the same kind of risk in the event of a malfunction (ie. Try to avoid going face to face with an enemy at point blank in room clearing if you are really concerned about the possibility of a malfunction).
-You can fast change to your pistol during combat if need be.

@cyoce said in Insurgency is missing a lot of necessary realism in the weapons handling and ballistics:

We don't need more RNG; losing a gunfight because your gun decided to stop working

Do you think Delta Force has the option of telling a terrorist "hey wait wait wait guys, stop, this is bullshit, my gun just jammed. No, stop firing, stop you idiot! You aren't allowed to win this fight because my gun jammed it's not fair! Let me go unjam my gun then I'll come back in and we'll try this a second time"?

The fact is, this is as much a part of a real gunfight to be concerned about as the random dispersion of your bullets. As I said above, firearms are inherently not 100% predictable and controllable platforms and any game that attempts to accurately model their use will have to incorporate that aspect of them.
That's precisely why America's Army knew it would be ridiculous to create a game that didn't include malfunctions being represented.

The only reason you think it would be ridiculous to have malfunctions in the game, instead of ridiculous not to have them, is because you have expectations given to you by other video games that you shouldn't have to deal with this factor; whereas anyone coming from the perspective of using these in real life will have the expectation that any game attempting to be realistic must consider this aspect of firearms handling.

How does Delta Force deal with this? They choose to use the HK416 which has bomb proof reliability. It's still not 100% guaranteed but it's brings that chance of failure down better than any other platform available to them. They do sacrifice handling performance compared with an M4 but they made a decision that they value reliability more than weapon handling - and that's a choice you can choose to make in-game too.

or it fired your rounds in the wrong direction would be complete bullshit.

Random dispersion of bullets is already in the game. You're contradicting yourself by claiming that's a problem.

We don't need body armor that makes people invulnerable to certain guns.

Logical fallacy, hyperbole. Your 9mm still has more surface area they can hit a player at than not. The armor plate only covers the upper chest and the ballistic helmet only covers part of the head (and you might still stun them with a hit to the head anyway).

Furthermore, on what basis do you claim to say what the game does or doesn't need?
The fact is if you want a realistic modeling of ballistics and weapons performance you need to realistically model how those guns will interact with their targets.

Just as the guns must be realistically modeled with regards to how they penetrate barriers or incapacitate players once they hit flesh, it's no different that the weapons must be realistically modeled with regards to how they interact with armor.

Armor piercing ammo dealing less damage to unarmored people would make gunfights with those guns up to chance.

Your claim is nonsense. Gunfights still come down to tactics and skillful shot placement regardless of the round you use.

However, some rounds will indeed give you an edge over others. If you want to take a target down quicker you don't use an armor piercing round that will pinhole them without transfering most of it's energy to them. You use a round designed to stop once it enters them and transfer all it's energy into them or a round designed to fragment/expand to deal more damage.

They are significantly different enough that it will impact how a firefight plays out - but it's nonsense to claim that now the ability to win a fight is out of your hands and it's all just up to chance rather than skill. A headshot is still a headshot. A heartshot is still a heartshot. Getting the drop on the enemy still means you can put more shots into them before they get their first shot off.

The rounds that are better against flesh just give you more margin for error if you don't or can't hit vitals. Or they give an advantage when all other things are otherwise perfectly equal equal - but only assuming you are up against a target that doesn't have armor on.

The fact is, if you both have armor plates, then sometimes the guy with the armor piercing rounds will have the advantage because his rounds weren't stopped by the armor and yours were because you used rounds that are better against flesh.

It's a trade off but everyone has the option to pick or choose the different round types knowing the advantages and disadvantages ahead of time. They then have the ability to act accordingly in a firefight based on what their loadout is.

If it bunches up your panties that much to do less damage to flesh then you have the choice to take the rounds that do better damage to flesh and then just try to not to hit the armor plates. If you don't want to have to deal with avoiding the plates then you have the choice to take the armor piercing rounds. Maybe you value complete silence more than either of those things so you sacrifice both in order to have subsonic rounds. The power is in your hands to make the choice you want with the upsides and downsides taken into account so there's no excuse for complaining that you don't have control over what your rounds do.

What's the point of paying points and weight on armor if there's a chance it will increase the damage you take?

Nobody ever said wearing armor would increase the damage you take.

You're going to take less damage from non-armor piercing rounds if it hits the plate.

You will have no change in the damage you take if it hits anywhere that isn't the plate.

It's possible you might even take less damage from armor piercing rounds, if they hit the plate, depending on what kind they are and what kind of plate you're using.

I suppose there might be some circumstances where wearing a plate might increase the wounding potential of an armor piercing round if it slows down and cants the round enough after it hits the plate that it starts to break up in the body or keyholes to cause more tissue damage and get lodged in the person instead of flying strait out the back like it normally would - but I'm pretty sure you weren't thinking of that scenerio when you made your comment.

Overheating guns would be in the best case incredibly annoying and in the worst case it would cause further undeserved deaths.

I refer you to above to everything I already said about subjective words like "annoying" and their irrelevance to discussing the objective merits of particular game designs. I also refer you to what I've already said cocnerning having unreasonable expectations about what you should or should not be able to count on in a gunfight that attempts to model realistic gunplay.

last edited by GM29