I hate realism in games

GodotBeginnerRich For most of my friends, COD introduced them to guns, which introduced them to tanks, which led to a rabbithole to discover they love planes, ultimately resulting in most of them being electrical or aerospace engineers.
It also gave a few a gaming addiction, so I don't see it as any better or worse than a caffeine habit.

That video is going to give me nightmares. Someone should make a whole game like that.

packrat Yeah but drinking coffee is legal for under 18s, playing stuff like COD and GTA is not, go figure.

GodotBeginnerRich kids aren't legally allowed to play it

AFAIK in most of the world that is not true. The ratings(PEGI and similar) are industries own creation and self regulated(as a group) and they are meant to be indicative. Parental advisory sort of thing. So the parents decide what to buy and let their kids play, or so it's intended at least.

Megalomaniak In the UK, it's a crime to "supply" a minor with a "mature video presentation" (games included), unless it's "exempted supply".
I'm not a lawyer, nor british, but I'm pretty sure that means the only "crime" in underage gaming is whoever sells/gives the kid Battlefield 3 while holding some legal status that involves giving stuff away or selling stuff. Stores, government, charities.
it's under section 11
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/39/section/11
Basically, it's not a crime to buy your 15 year old Halo Infinite for christmas. Not that it matters since no one actually enforces the law
In America there's no law at all as far as I know, it's purely a "this game's kinda violent" message to the parent. In fact, my first COD game was for the Wii, and I got it because my mom asked the dude at Gamestop what to get a 13 year old.

Imagine if you had to send Steam your state ID to prove you can legally buy the big boy games.

packrat In the UK, it's a crime to "supply" a minor with a "mature video presentation" (games included), unless it's "exempted supply".

Yes, I implied that the parent would be buying it. As in a T for Teen game to a pre-teen say for an example. Mature in that ahem kinda way is a way different thing.

packrat Not that it matters since no one actually enforces the law

In Russia there is a saying: The cruelty of laws is compensated by their non-enforcement.

Tomcat I'm glad. Do you know how many years in jail I've got from "trespassing" cuz the sun sets a little faster than I expect? Oregon wetlands are beautiful at night, it shouldn't be a crime.

When I'm playing Euro Truck Simulator 2 with my force feedback wheel and a VR headset, I start thinking about how much I wish it used OpenStreetMap to build the road networks so the map is more realistic (like how X-Plane uses OpenStreetMap for the entire planet).

packrat Yeah my sister in law's sister lives over there with her husband and 2 kids.

She says it's nice.

Although there's one place in the US I'd really like to visit, Hershey, PA, I've had Hershey's chocolate before and it's really nice.

GodotBeginnerRich As an American and a chocolate enthusiast, that's the last place I would have expected anyone to want to visit.
In America, we/I like to bully "fake food". We/I also like bullying corporation, and we/I especially love bullying BIG corporation.
Food's complicated, so I won't get into why Hershey's is barely chocolate, but I will urge you to visit Oregon and one of our millions of whole food stores. How they make 90% cacao chocolate taste so sweet is bizarre. It's a brick of pure choco. It's super bitter for a split second, then you crunch on a big sugar crystal. Suddenly, your whole mouth is sweet. It's awesome.
I think the brand is "Alter Eco" or something yuppie/hippie sounding like that.

I just looked up Hershey, Pennsylvania. It's super americana. Call me a terrorist but I really dislike the americana vision. Therefore my opinion is heavily biased and the smart thing to do would be to ignore it.

I think the reason for all this dislike toward realism is because abstraction is a tool that a lot of major game studios have just kind of forgotten how to use. red dead redemption 2 is a peak example of what I mean. in real life it takes a dedicated amount of time and effort to get on and off a horse, so the game makes it take a while. thing is, if you have to get on your horse, realize you forgot something, and then get back on, it's way more time consuming and annoying than in a game where it's a simple 1 second "hop on/hop off". and the game is littered with moments like these, little touches that add to realism but make the game even more of a chore to play. I consider it the culmination of everything wrong with gaming realism and I'm still shocked it was so loved when it came out. I didn't expect people to hate it or anything, but it seemed like everyone just didn't care that literally everything was such a slog because of how long the animations took!

it just seems like developers these days forget that the old guard did stuff like use dynamite explosions for gun sounds because they sounded more like how guns sound in our head, and made it feel more real even though it was actually more fake!

granted, it's not always a negative. stuff like "snake = poison" or "man with armor is harder to kill" are excellent uses of realism, because they play on our perceptions to give us quick and easy visual identifiers for important stuff.

cybereality check the game "thomas was alone" if you don't know it already, uses a similar concept of only simple shapes allowed.

packrat so I won't get into why Hershey's is barely chocolate

There's a video for that:

Chocolate is overrated, although highly addictive. All the worship it gets is just rationalization of sugar+cocoa addiction. If you go cold turkey for a couple of months and then put one of those things in your mouth again, they all taste like sugared-up vomit or bitter cardboard. Even the fancy European ones. Being from Europe, I can only imagine the horrors of Hershey's taste for an unconditioned palate.

Yes, Witcher 3 marks the time when AAA games started becoming too realistic, and I never even noticed the hair and beard growth. It still looked good, but later games became so realistic they actually looked bad, and they spend billions of dollars on artwork (is it even 'art' when it's all mocap, photo textures, and 3D scans?) while neglecting gameplay.

However, I make RPGs so I have to strike a balance; I can't simply say "no realism". Most RPGs have fuel and ammo. Anything that adds an interesting challenge is good realism, but excessive simulation adds nothing to gameplay or worse, leads to hair-splitting decisions or overly-precise aiming. If it's an open world RPG without fast travel, players will denigrate it as a "walking simulator". It also needs to look good by RPG afficionado standards, which are pretty forgiving compared to the latest normie AAA standards.