Should a head-shot always be a one-shot-kill?

[DementedSheep]

Not unless the balance of the game is built around that and not all games need to have it.

In the real world if you get shot 5 times in chest you might live, you might even keep going for a short time but you can't just patch up with a med kit and keep fighting like everything is fine. Not sure why head shots are what break peoples immersion.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

No, not always. Even in the most realistic of settings. But if it does damage, then yes probably. But there's always the possibility of helmets to consider. Somehow, I buy that if you shoot somebody in the head, and they have a helmet, that their helmet would pop off and you'd need to hit them again. Unless you're using armor piercing bullets, then fine.

If you shoot someone in a helmet, they're still going down for a while, and will need 24 hours of observation just on the basis of the concussion alone. You don't shrug that shit off. Games don't do "glancing blows", which are the only kind that you might reasonable expect not to render a person senseless at best.

 

[Lacedaemonius]

Games don't do "glancing blows", which are the only kind that you might reasonable expect not to render a person senseless at best.

Why couldn't games do glancing blows, or the simulation there of? I assume you don't mean all games, because I know for a fact that Warhammer 40k has a glancing blow mechanic for tanks.

I'm thinking of shooters only, and they don't do it because a hit BOX is a lot easier than a hit "3D model including simulations of statistically unlikely grazes".

 

[Squilookle]

Personally I believe so, and it has nothing to do with realism. The head is a smaller, more difficult target than the easier, more instinctive centre-of-mass aiming spot, and therefore should reward the better aiming needed to hit it with greater damage dealt. So in shooters, especially stealth/sniping shooters, headshots should always be one hit kills if they are unarmoured. Helmets that can stop bullets can up the difficulty if you want.

 

[kekkres]

People are Ignoring here that, realisticly, almost any serious weapon injury, an axe wound, a shot to the leg, a spear to the gut ect, will all realisticly take you out of a fight just as surely as that headshot will, and yes, occasionaly people will adreniline through their wound, but that is the exception not the rule.

 

[Blacklight28]

Depends on the game. The Division presents itself as a realistic shooter. Real guns, realistic(as far as games go) setting, Tom Clancey name. That's why it feels off to have bullet sponge enemies. In something like Fallout where the world is completely ridiculous, its easier to suspend that disbelief.

 

[Lucane]

If the enemy can be one shot in the head it's only fair that you can be too so if the game wants that to be an option it has to be even
the only time the rules change is when there are weak points players never have one if the enemy does unless it's flanking/backstabbing damage like with the Spy form Team Fortress 2 but that's player vs. player. So army or not,If the A.I. can't do it to you shouldn't be able to do it to them. Now if you wanna ask why the AI never runs out of ammo...

 

[Thaluikhain]

People are Ignoring here that, realisticly, almost any serious weapon injury, an axe wound, a shot to the leg, a spear to the gut ect, will all realisticly take you out of a fight just as surely as that headshot will, and yes, occasionaly people will adreniline through their wound, but that is the exception not the rule.

The other thing that generally gets ignored is that a fatal wound isn't always fatal immediately. If the enemy has a few seconds left in them, that can be a problem as presumably they are shooting back.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

In your RPG leaning games, I'm okay with it not being insta-death, but I had better get some solid multiplier from doing it. In your general shooters, one to two shots to an unarmored noggin should be down for the count, three for a helmet.

 

[Joccaren]

Depends on the game.
RPGs? Of course not.
Plain shooters? Depends, is the game balanced such that you have a tiny amount of health and there are a lot of enemies to take on, so even if you quickly kill one you've still got a lot more to contend with, and your health is low enough that you can't just sit there popping headshots all day? Then yeah, 1 hit kills. If its a more 1v1 situation, or you've got a ton of health and the enemy side could get like 5 headshots on you before you die, then no, headshots should not be 1 hit kills.

Multiplayer? Depends on range. If the weapon is very close range and slow firing, I can understand one shot headshot kills - though it should also be slower to aim than faster firing weapons so it isn't just a one shot wonder. If its a long range weapon, where it attacks outside the range of what other weapons can hit, and especially outside the range of what other players could reliably have been able to shoot first and see their aggressor - no one hit kills. It sucks to be running around and then suddenly die because someone somewhere is sniping, and there was nothing you could do about it. Such weapons should still take out a chunk of your health though.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

It has to be if you're shooting a zombie in the head. Otherwise what's the point?

 

[Bob_McMillan]

No, not a good idea.

For one, balance, whether in an online shooter or a RPG shooter. As much as I despise The Division's spongey ass gameplay, you just really cant have realistic or even pseudo-realistic bullet damage.

But game developers can easily make the 3 or even 4 bullets to the head thing realistic and not jarring. In Wolfenstein and Uncharted, having to shoot off armor or helmets before killling dudes with one shot doesn't seem weird at all.

The OHK headshot is less about realism and more about rewarding the player for intentionally aiming (supposedly) and successfully shooting a much smaller target instead of just doing body shots.

 

[Bilious Green_v1legacy]

It depends if you are trying for realism or not. The problem with The Division is that it's trying to be all grounded and "Tom Clancy"-ish in its setting, but it's gameplay is utterly unrealistic. It's the disconnect between the setting and the gameplay that is so jarring and that is a failure of the design. The Division should have either been a realistic shooter with realistic shooting mechanics (low TTK) in its current setting, or it should have been a shooter RPG in a much more outlandish/scifi setting. If the Division was fighting against aliens and robots (third person X Com, perhaps?), the fact that you have to dump a mag into an enemy's head would not be so implausible. Basically, the gameplay mechanics and setting/narrative have to co-exist, not work in opposition to each other.

 

[Wrex Brogan]

...why is headshot the go-to? Getting shot in the torso is just as lethal in real life. Hell, getting shot in the shoulder is often fatal, yet everyone just walks that shit off like it's nothing.

The reality of it is it comes down to balance. One-hit kills in RPGs are horribly unbalanced, since those games are built around using abilities and stats; they have to be balanced out, either with accuracy problems (see Pokemon, Final Fantasy), rarity (again, Final Fantasy) or low probability (Repeaters from Xcom 2). Easy one-shots get unbalanced because you just end up rinsing through enemies without care for stats or abilities or equipment, just pop every poor bastard one with the starting pistol, no problem.

Headshots in action games are balanced, since those are less about stats and abilities and more about accuracy and skill; it's a reward for being able to hit a small, usually moving target, and it's balanced by the fact you'll typically be able to kill an enemy in 3-4 chest shots anyway. Notably, boss type enemies or 'heavies' in shooters tend to have armoured heads, providing an extra 'challenge' by way of their resistance to the headshot, resulting in outside the box thinking (or just dumping an entire LMG magazine into them).

The balance in Action RPGs comes from classifying the head as a 'weakpoint' - where hitting it results in extra damage, or guaranteed critical hits. It mixes both systems - you're rewarded for being able to hit the head, but you're not steam-rolling content with beginning equipment all because you know how to aim. Some games like Borderlands even utilize this, with classes or weapons specifically built around exploiting headshot multipliers, with abilities that boost the damage on hitting a weakpoint or grant assorted buffs for a duration afterwards.

So, tl;dr - It's a game mechanic, not realism. Easy 1-shot kills are unbalanced as hell in RPGs.

 

[9tailedflame]

I don't think it always should be. There's a lot of factors to consider, and there's plenty of circumstances where shooting an enemy in the head wouldn't be a one-shot-kill, E.G. a metal helmet vs. a handgun, or a giant alien, but i do think games often take it way too far, and enemies could definitely get harder in more ways than just increasing health, what about increasing speed, or AI as the game goes on, but i digress.

 

[Callate]

I tend to say "no", especially in games where such effects can target the player. I think at the least there should be a way to avoid a one-headshot-death (a perfectly plausible one exists in real life; it's called a helmet.) I still haven't forgiven "Gun", an otherwise fairly good game, for teaching the player all game that headshots were the way to go and then having a boss who was immune to headshots... because he was wearing a breastplate. (Seriously.)

It's all well and good for headshots to do extra damage, especially when the game's mechanics make it difficult to get one. But unless the intent is for sniping to be the be-all and end-all of the game, it's poor design to make the player try to make every shot in every fight a slug to the cranium. If nothing else, it's well to consider that a shot to the heart is every bit as likely to be lethal, and an untreated shot to the abdomen is quite likely to be lethal as well. But most of us don't tend to enjoy games where being shot in 60% of the body is incapacitating and potentially lethal, especially when the same rules apply to our own characters.

 

[EternallyBored]

Borderlands doesn't have the #1 excuse and all it's weapons are high tech killing machines. I like how Borderlands handles headshots in that usually, it's a critical hit. Though no one ever starts to limp with knee shots as far as I know.

The thing is in Borderlands there's also the matter of the people themselves having been altered genetically or cybernetically given the easy availability. Even the average bandit probably has some basic enhancements for manual labour that aren't shown externally. And just look at the Goliaths.

The problem there is that this isn't true in cutscenes, so bandits tanking headshots is entirely a gameplay mechanic, the genetic manipulation done to bandits doesn't really give most of them superpowers, it's just an explanation for their insanity, weird proportions, and propensity for killing anything that moves, there's no evidence that they get significant upgrades, even goliaths are mostly just crazy mutants. Bandits get one-shotted by bullets in story scenes all the time, so while we can say that genetic mods make sense, its mostly just an excuse to preserve suspension of disbelief.

By that same level of stretching you can justify The Division's damage with their magic healing grenades, medkits that make your bullets do more damage, aid stations that teleport ammo, or backpacks that can carry 60 guns.

On-topic: I'll go with what seems to be the majority answer and say it depends on the game, games like the Division would not work with one shotting enemies, especially on PC: challenge, gear, and abilities would be thrown out the window in favor of just maximizing number of headshots.

The idea of stats effecting accuracy is something Bethesda did with Elder scrolls and Fallout 3. In Morrowind a low stat meant you missed most of your shots, which lead to dumb scenarios where you could swing a sword through an enemy and spend 10 minutes missing every swing because your skill isn't high enough. In Fallout it mostly resulted in people just spending most of their time in VATS rather than actually shooting if their small guns skill wasnt high enough.

This doesn't strike me as any more realistic than enemies tanking multiple headshots, it's still a stretch on suspension of disbelief, and has the added irritation of causing low stat skills to feel actively worthless rather than just ineffective. People definitely complained about the "realism" of missing hits in Morrowind, so while its a viable way to do things, you still end up with people complaining about their suspension of disbelief being broken.

Personally, I don't find it to be a big deal, whether destinies aliens, The Division's factions, Mass Effect's enemies, or Borderlands Bandits, the idea of unarmored enemies tanking headshots makes about as much sense as any other video game logic. I dont find it any harder to buy than Geralt sticking his sword through unarmored bandits multiple times, shops charging a government agent for equipment, hiding behind a wall to regenerate health after eating a grenade at point blank, carrying an arsenal of weapons without even wearing a backpack, having your sword pass harmlessly through an enemy because your skill level is low, and peasants in rags eating fireballs to the face.

 

[FalloutJack]

I kinda do, yeah. An anti-armor sniper round should reduce the health of even a high-level raider to nothing if he doesn't even have a helmet. (Raider Veterans in Fallout 4 will survive a good headshot, even some criticals.) A challenge is a challenge, but the challenger for headshots is hitting them, in my opinion.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

For me it

 

[Chaos Isaac]

In a Tom Clancy game, yes.

In general... no. Well, no in the thought that there are a lot of different shooters with different things that stop headshots from being instant kills. Rather from armor or shields or aliens with multiple heads. Or insane over the top world. Whatever.