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Comment by nonbirithm | Hacker News Reader

I was curious, so I searched for "most realistic video games" and most of the pages were concerned with "realistic graphics" rather than "realism." Also, I didn't see FC2 mentioned in any of them.

It feels like the two qualities overlap in some ways but are different in others. In 2 there was so much detail that you could shoot the blades on a fan and it would spin. A lot of this detail seems to have been lost in the later titles. As someone else put it Far Cry 5 "looks realistic" while Far Cry 2 "is realistic." Maybe they felt that excessive realism didn't contribute to making the game fun, although the impression I got was people saw FC2 as "superior" in some sense because of the attention to detail (such as nearly all vegetation being destructable in 2 but not in 5).

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I don't play many games but I remember playing the original Ghost Recon and being impressed/frustrated at the fact you can die with two shots and you have very little sense of where they came from. The second shot could follow soon after and still none the wiser.

I'm not sure if other games (indeed, other games in the same series) followed that pattern, I enjoyed it though.

Rainbow Six had that right from the initial game, one bullet - you are dead, unless your wound is treatable and a medic takes care of you within a minute or so. That is the pinnacle of realistic combat.

I assume that in the game, though, being treated by the medic means you go straight back into play, rather than being medivaced and spending months in hospital followed by years of learning to walk again?

I frankly don't remember how it was in the first game, I think you switched over to other members of your team (you started levels as a team and then got killed off one by one). Getting a team member dead meant you couldn't have the same team member again (i.e. you had to use worse people).

The Delta Force series liked its realism.

In another genre, Bushido Blade & Bushido Blade 2 are semi-realistic (jump height's exaggerated, but otherwise pretty real-ish) weapon-based fighting games. I'd love more like them but haven't seen anything similar since (both are on the original Playstation). One-hit-kills are common, and you can cripple limbs—arms in the second, legs in the first—both are limited in the realization of their ambition by technology and, presumably, budget.

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