Anyway, I've read the Armed Assault forums while it was coming out, and now the forums here. There seems to be a notable subculture of users who want difficulty because they associate it with realism.
Examples from the AA forums were posters who found that their screen didn't bobble enough, their gun didn't recoil hard enough, it was too accurate, that they didn't have to break it down and manually clean it after each round.. you get the idea. It honestly seemed like people wanted to be playing an untrained recruit instead of a professional soldier.
I've been playing shooters since Wolfenstein 3D, so it's not as if I don't know unrealistic combat from realistic combat.
I also own guns, and make a strong habit of shooting them as much as possible.
Since most of the complaining is about shooting in general, that's what I'm going to address.
First is something I saw on here, mocking people who choose the SF kit becuase it has an optic, as n00bs who want a "laz0r sight." Um. Optics vs iron sights? I'll take optics, tyvm (although a backup set of larue irons is a good idea) and so will most people in a combat zone. They aren't that expensive or rare, you can have a durable and cheap holo or red dot if you want. I know the BF2 engine is limited to fullscreen optics, though, so reflex sights and the like are out. I'm just saying that although you may have a serious stiffy for iron sights, and there has been a major realism fad for irons over the last year or two, having the option to use optics is not unrealistic at all.
(I'm reminded of an aquaintance who was building a very large and expensive house in the early nineties. He had local contractors doing the major structural work, and flew in some old world builders from Europe to do the finishing and interior work. He was very excited about how they would lovingly do all the work with traditional hand tools.
However, when they were on the jobsite, they got a good look at the contractors and their plethora of the-very-latest power tools... and guess what they were fascinated by and wanted to use? That's right.
They ended up doing half the work with stuff that ran on electricity, not sweat, and only the most final finishing with the unpowered tools. He wasn't too happy, but they also finished ahead of schedule.)
Then there are complaints about recoil, or the lack of it. MOAR RECOIL PLS seems to be the order of the day. I have noticed people complaining that the AK47 for insurgents doesn't recoil enough.
What.
I own a Kalashnikov. It doesn't have the happy switch, but please don't try to tell me that's why it doesn't recoil as much as the AK in the game. I can bumpfire from the shoulder which provides just as much recoil - if not more because I have a looser grip on it in order to bumpfire.
Would you be surprised to learn that the PR AK is harder to keep on target in both single fire and full auto? I'm not a marksman. I haven't even put more than a few hundred rounds through the AK, but I'm still capable of using it accurately and keeping a sight picture.
Apparently my avatar within PR is a palsied idiot who doesn't know how to hold a gun or aim it. I don't mind that if that's the premise of the game, but a halfway decent insurgent who has probably shot thousands of times is probably going to be even better than I am.
Now, I'm not going to diss airsoft, but from reading up it seems like half the people making definitive statements on how guns should behave are kids from the UK who got their experience from battery powered pellet guns. (Nothing against airsoft, I have few green gas replicas of my own handguns for practicing force on force drills.)
.223 platform rifles don't really recoil that badly. I don't own any class III hardware, but I learned at the knob creek shoot that I can fire a DIAS AR15 one handed with almost no muzzle rise, after running a few mags through for practice. They aren't hard to handle. Why are people crying for more recoil on the M16 and M4, let alone L85? Not going to even mention the SAW, it's so heavy that all it does is a sustained push, not even a kick, no rise whatsoever.
Do you people want realism, or to be playing as a raw recruit who has never fired a gun before? Because, that's what some of you seem to be demanding.
