Simulating suppression and fear of death in vidya (2024)

>One of the gripes I have with "realistic" video games is that players have no fear of death ... especially so in PvP situations
There are some games that try to include psychological factors, notably the Close Combat series. I always liked those games. Your soldiers will freak out and break down. But yes, it's very difficult in PvP shooters where everybody is the equivalent of a suicidal jihadist on captagon pills. The one exception I've seen was playing in a private ArmA community (ShackTac) where we'd play several scenarios over the course of a Saturday and you'd be out of the game for the next hour if you died and until the scenario was over. There was no respawn. First contact was a "scary" situation because you could die in a flash, and if you did, you'd be in spectator mode for awhile.

Red Orchestra/Rising Storm impedes your accuracy and vision with suppression, but for a real-life suppression effect I'd say the very early days of the Battle Royal craze had this to an extent.

One of the first examples was an ARMA 3 mod that required you to join an extremely janky browser-based server list, then sit around waiting for enough people to join to begin the game. It was not uncommon to have to wait nearly an hour to get in a game, knowing that a single mistake once the game began could end it all in an instant. When you got lit up, diving for cover wasn't a tactic, it was instinct

Semi serious answer based on vidya experience from 2 decades.

You can't punish player with tedious things like walking to obj or long respawn. This will drive your customers away.
No, just because you're autist doesn't mean everyone likes it. I live for that 20min dopamine rush between rounds. If my fried boomer mind wants to focus, I'll go play strategy games or do some (e)RP

What works:
Visual cues like bluring, shaking, making screen go dark.
Slowing players movement during suppression so they can't go John Wick and solo entire bunker with pencil.
Make their aim wobble. Can't aim, can't snipe.

Arma, PR, Squad did those above to some extent

In order for player to feel fear in your game means to make them invest in their character a little bit more.
Gated communities of Arma2/3 that do weekly launches of 100vs100 without respawns do not have to simulate anything - if you die next attempt is 7 days from now.
Another example would be something like Tarkov where game uses player's obtained equipment as some sort of invesment, akin to gamble - you took your time to get all that gucchi gear assembled and when sh*t hits the fan most of the players actually feel something akin to real fear of death.
With all that said, even the most extreme methods to try to instill some sort of self preservation mechanism in players in relation to their character will go away the more experienced they get with the game, let alone more subtle variations of this.

TLDR: Yes you can instill REAL fear for their own lives into players using game mechanics, just not for too long.

If you want to avoid the screen blurring sh*t, based on my experiences with ARMA 3 I think that having a punishing, but not necessarily deadly health system is the way to go.
For example in arma 3 with ACE, shots to the limbs mean that you are severily impaired and must take a few seconds to heal, depending on the settings, getting shot in the head or body won't instantly kill you either, but you impair or make you go unconscious until you receive treatment from a medic, imo instadeath is not ideal because it takes the player away from the experience, but a punishing health system will condition players to take cover because they don't want to deal with the immediate annoying consequences of getting hit.

50% chance of one year ban whenever you "die" in-game; this percentage is adjusted for things like special equipment (death-resistance armor versus death-enhancing weapons) and "time since your last death" (oh, and "pay real world money not to be dead" premium features).

Imagine if your character died in-game and stayed dead for the next 365 days... unless you paid a microtransaction via credit card of maybe $100 to "un-ice" your character early, based on such factors as time remaining until death period ends, character class & level, value of equipment (optional -- you can just opt to lose it all instead of paying), et cetera....

Do it. Implement it.

Just play Tarkov. It will achieve this for you. Play badly enough and eventually you've:
>Wasted all of your time not having fun
>Lost all of your gear and are forced to use either nothing at all or scavenge off of dead bodies
>Gain zero experience thus preventing you from advancing in the game
>Still waited 20 minutes in queue each round before getting 1-tapped

Tarkov is fun and great I highly recommend it

Judging from your examples you already know how it is.

The only way to make fear of death work is to punish players harshly for dying, make them really attached to their possessions. But that just makes the gameplay sh*tty (extraction shooters being the worst offender) except for very specific kind of niche hardcore games.

But suppression effects, shellshock, etc. can be implemented easily in FPS games, just have a stacking effect that messes with player vision each time a bullet passes close by.
Suppression *should* be done with game mechanics because you can't force fear of death without sacrificing gameplay fun. Also when it comes to genres that aren't first person immersive stuff, it's the only way to do it.

Red Orchestra 2 did this really really well back in the day. There was a powerful suppression mechanic. There was in redibke voice acting, characters crying for their mother's as they bleed out. There was a Pacific DLC that included banzai charges, get like 30 japs in a group, charge over the wall. Proximity voice is on so the enemy can hear you screaming "TENNO HEIKA! BANZAIIIIIIIIIIII" and they get hit with megasuppresion and can't aim for sh*t. Many a match has been won or lost on a 32 man banzai charge.

The big problem with the game was the progression system, you get stronger as you gain experience, at max level you're immune to suppression. Its total bogus for a new player to join in and get sh*t on by someone who not only has been playing for years but also arbitrarily gets a more accurate, faster firing, larger magazine rifle with a bayonet that you don't get until you grind 50 hours. A level 50 with the BAR + foregrip sh*ts on any size banzai charge.

The mistake you're making is thinking that because suppression is caused by the fear of death that therefore you need to make the player fear death.

It's a videogame. Give the player a "suppression meter" which fills when they're being shot at in a suppressive manner. When the meter is full, the player is "stunned" and the character goes prone and is paralyzed.

The player can cause the meter to fill up more slowly by doing things which are realistic responses to suppression (crouching, taking cover, not shooting back). This gives the player flexibility to either try to minimize their suppression or do the risky thing and stand up and shoot back and try to be a hero at the cost of getting suppression-locked faster if they fail.

Players are already used to the idea of getting stunned or stun-locked in videogames. You're thinking one step too close to the problem.

Just make dying have repercussions, e.g. long/no respawn time at all, losing equipment, punishing the player by having them lose XP etc. Someone was actually making a multiplayer FPS where you get permanently banned if you die, meaning you can't even create a new character.

https://www.pcgamer.com/one-life-is-a-multiplayer-fps-that-locks-you-out-forever-when-you-die/

Same as life itself, it has to have an inherent value for a fear of its loss to be aroused.

From a purely mechanical standpoint, the logical step would be to create a progression system relating to proficiency on various platforms and weapons dependent on use of said weapons and platforms (i.e. like how TES IV: handled skills) that is reset upon death.

Granted, that is purely a baseline approach, a more comprehensive approach would be to add the minutiae and more mundane elements involved in a deployment.

- Downtime (With benefits or downsides reflecting on the general mood of the player's character)
- R&R (With benefits or downsides reflecting on the stress levels of the player's character)
- PE (With benefits reflecting on the physical aptitude of the player's character)
- Zeroing optics (With benefits or downsides reflecting on accuracy)
- Receiving letters/e-mails/texts from home (Adding another layer of complexity and affecting morale and stress either positively or negatively)

Elements that add a layer of humanity, complexity and personality to the player's character to the point its loss is felt, instead of merely inconvenient. Inconvenience drives anyone away from anything most of the time.

At that point it would be closer to an RPG than an FPS though.

Best way to do it is to make guns fricking lethal
if you're playing insurgency and there's an MG shooting tracers right above your head you won't wanna pop your head out because anyone of those rounds firing at 800+ RPM will insta kill you. I'd also say that making respawn times more lengthy could work too but this could have the adverse affect of making player's more frustrated

It really depends on the game though. A game like battlefield, an arcade shooter with some "realism" elements absolutely sucks ass with suppression. 9 times out of 10 it ends up making a 1v1 situation one sided because the dude you're fighting happens to be using a DMR/sniper/LMG. However in BF4 I still duck my head when I see LMG tracers fly by because I can die in 3 hits and there's a good chance I'm already down a bit of HP. You could also limit the healing pool by restricting the ways you can heal yourself or how much health you can regen on your own. BFV had you only heal to half health and have to stop off and get a med pack to heal back to full

You can't. You've already identified that your only two choices are punishment with long/no respawn timers or a sh*t artificial game-mechanic. Another thing to note is that artificial games-mechanic supression is massively overtuned. By now, we've all seen hundreds videos of real-life random militia not giving a sh*t about bullets pinging overhead and around them as long as they're behind cover. They know, and game players know, if you're shooting for suppression you're less effective than patiently waiting for a head to pop out from that wall, and it's just an attempt at psychological warfare that does nothing else. Suppression like you see in the textbooks is about bringing massive overmatch in firepower. It only works if you are fighting low morale forces or have so much lead flying around it kills anybody not impressed by the firepower. Neither is going to happen often in a game, and when it does happen players do actually get suppressed.

An average player (well, depends on the game) will not charge into a chokepoint if he's alone and the entire enemy team is unloading into it. How often will that happen? Well it depends. In some games killing yourself is simply faster than retreating, and you'll be wanting to rejoin the rest of your dead team anyway so you can respawn at the same time and place. Ironically these would be the games with long respawns and artificial suppression-mechanics like certain Battlefield games and its spiritual successors that try to create suppression and stop suicide tactics but instead create perverse incentives. Meanwhile in Counter Strike if you're alone because the guy in front of you goes through a door/corner and dies to a what sounds like half the enemy team you're going to stop or just go back and quickly try another route.

The thing is though, you, players and game designers think suppression should happen between two equal forces and that's just stupid.

Some twelve years ago I played an MMO called Haven & Hearth which was focused on base building and crafting. It had the gimmick that death was permanent. You had to make a new character if you died (or just switch to one of your alts I guess). It made trust among friends super important and meeting other players very tense. The way this was sorta balanced was that killing people left a "scent of murder" at the scene for a while, which people could use to track you down, and killing a murderer wasn't considered murder.

I used to keep some Russian / Cyrillic text for use in the chat when meeting people. Russians were murdering scum, so it scared off many people, and tricked Russians into thinking you were one of them which was useful for killing them. You just had to be careful because some people (like me and other Poles) would generally try to kill Russians on sight.

I think the game is still around but I stopped playing when they switched from a charmingly simple 2D style to absurdly awful 3D graphics.

Great immersive audio is expensive and finnicky to implement. Visual cues are more effective. Desaturation should be subtle, not full monochrome. Zipping rounds could have exaggerated visibility of vapor trails if in a certain proximity. Dirt kicked up and spalling of ricochets would help. Specifically the sound of rounds on plates and sickening thuds of other players being hit nearby. Ear ringing subtle, not annoying-- rather, a global diminishment of ambient noise cues from environment.

Grotesque persistence of wounded/KIA player bodies along with blood pooling/staining environment for the duration of the match is probably the simplest, combined with hard to look at gore/anatomical accuracy. Who needs destructible environments when your battle buddy can be stripped buck naked by a mortar round and thrown in two halves against a berm before your eyes along with this viscera splattered over everyone nearby.

Mechanics wise I think it will be good to take the advice given here, desaturation of visuals, dust kicking up etc. especially the ones where that the more you get suppresed the more visible the enemy bullet trail gets. Gives you an idea where the fire is coming from. It would also be cool if ingame voice chat will more quiet apart from the leadership roles.
I would solve it like that give each soldier a little bubble, if a bullet hits inside the bubble you get your suppresion resistance reduced. If squad, platoon leader, a medic, a player which got an in game distinction nearby you take less. which is a multiplicative factor (0,5*0,75 [...]). If you simulate the bubble that it doesn't extend past cover you'd also have a solid incentive to seek cover. If cover is to the left of you and the bullet hits the cover you get the suppresion damage *0,1 dealt to you. The bubble decreases in size the lower your position.

From a gameplay flow I'd say make people wait for a wave. For example smallest size of reinforcement wave is a fireteam, all relative to total player amount.