The_Oracle said:
One hundred and eighty-three? Games? Wow. I had no idea there were that many. Quite an interesting fact.
But, how many of them are good?
Probably surprisingly many of them. A better question would be how many were actually
bad, in which case you'd probably end up with about half the popular mainstream WWII games of the past years. That figure of 183 (hopefully) also include niche games, which tend to be good - from personal experience, I know, for instance, that Shrapnel Games always publishes quality games, and they've got at least half a dozen WWII strategy/tactics games in their line-up, I don't doubt their quality. Steel Panthers would be a good example; it's a hex-based tactical war game, and it's just plain
good - but it's not
popular.
Another good example, one which I'll probably reference several more times in this post, is the Codename
anzers series. The "series" actually only had two games, but they were just plain good - ok, the voice acting for the non-British/American heroes sucked balls, and some of the cutscenes from the second game were just cheesy, but apart from that the games are very, very good. But they never became popular mainstream games.
I guess the list of bad games would contain mostly stuff like CoD3 (and 5, depending on who you ask), Blitzkrieg II (the commercial game, not the C&C Generals mod), Turning Point and maybe some of the endless list of Medal of Honor games (though I couldn't say from personal experience, I only ever really played the first), and some '90s games that came before my time.
The Infamous Scamola said:
I hate all this black and white shit. I want morally gray areas! Give me a Vietnam game anyday.
There were a few Vietnam games a few years back, released fairly close to each other, but as I recall they just weren't very good. That might've put developers off. And then there's the matter of the terrain - there's only so much jungle you can have on-screen before it begins to lag horrifically and become so confusing you can walk in a four-foot circle for fifteen minutes without noticing. Plus the difficulty of accurately simulating underground guerrilla warfare, which mainly consisted, as I recall, of hiding in tunnels, digging pits with spikes and inciting the local population. "Use L2 to put spade in ground, analog sticks to move spade and R2 to dump soil. When done, press L1 to cut sharp bamboo sticks and R1 to put them into the pit. Use the X and Y keys to chop local foliage and use it to hide the pit. Then sit in a bush for half an hour waiting for an American patrol to fall in."
Khell_Sennet said:
-I like the weapons. World War 1's gear is crap, Vietnam and later is OK but it becomes less about aim, more about putting as much lead in the air as possible. WW2 however had the right balance with rifles that could be fired while moving, and still kill in one shot.
WWII weapons were largely the same as WWI weapons with the exception of the various types of newer automatic weapons (SMGs, better machine guns), which are basically about putting as much lead in the air as possible. The standard service rifles of most major powers were all designed in the late nineteenth century - Mauser Kar 98k, Mosin-Nagant M1891/30, Carcano M1891 - even the early-twentieth-century Springield M1903 and Lee-Enfield (1907) rifles were pre-Great War. The only real innovations were the limited numbers (except in the US military) of semi-automatic rifles that began appearing before (Tokarev SVT-40) and during (Gewehr 41&43) the war, and the aforementioned SMGs and improved machine guns (Bren, MG34&42, DP-28).
-I LOVE the vehicles. Them Nazis had hundreds if not thousands of cool toys to play with. Everything they captured of the enemies got a new "Sd.Kfz. ######" Designation, and then they tinkered and modified them, coming up with dozens of variants for each. Even the other forces had wide selections of planes, tanks, APCs, and other vehicles. Today, the US Army relies almost exclusively on the M1 Abrams and the M2 Bradley, while the "bad guy" nations all have T-72s. It's boring having the same damn vehicle in every damn game.
All true, but even so, the Germans mainly used PzIIIs and IVs early on, and IVs, Vs (Panthers) and the occasional VI ausf.A (Tiger) during the latter stages of the war - you only rarely see, for instance, Pz38(t)s. And the American tank force consisted mostly of various kinds of Sherman, with the occasional light (Stuart) or heavy (Jackson) tank thrown in for good measure.
-Occult Mysticism. Hitler was one fucking daffy duck. He was into all sorts of dark playtime activities such as blood sacrifices, witchcraft, and lying under a glass table while someone stands on top of it and craps. Oh kay, the last one is just speculated, but Adolf was into weird shit. That, as Wolfenstein shows, can make for some rather interesting historically-inaccurate storylines.
Unfortunately, this is featured in only a very limited number of games. Wolfenstein is basically the only example of a popular, well-known game that features this in great amounts (excepting the Nazi Zombie mode of CoD5, but that's just a game mode, the game doesn't revolve around it).
-The enemies are just so fun to shoot. Targets that babble and swear at you in certain foreign languages are just so much fun as video game enemies. Japanese and German being pretty high up on the list, third and fourth place behind French and Irish.
Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese sound, to us Western infidels, as meaningless babble too - hell, the entire Russian language sounds like a lower demon with pneumonia
-Nations other than the US to play as. WW2 had so many participants, you can make a smashing game and never even include the Americans. It seems that anything past the Korean War, becomes a US vs Someone game, and I'm sick of it.
That is very true. The only "real war" games I know of that take place after WWII and don't involve the Americans are relatively unknown niche games - and then only from Shrapnel Games' line-up (including, for instance, one game set during the Falklands War, and another featuring "Arab/Israeli armoured combat from 1956-2009").
KDR_11k said:
I think modern weapons still have clear cut differences in their optimum combat ranges and roles but it seems game designers see anything that can be set to full auto as a machinegun, apparently only few know the difference between an SMG, assault rifle and proper machine gun.
Don't I know you from someplace else as well?
Anyway, on topic.
Even if designers do "know the difference" and manage to implement that in-game, there's only so much variation you can use in the weapons themselves. Modern main-line infantry are without exception armed with assault rifles or assault carbines (e.g. M4, AKS-74, that sort of thing), and I believe SMGs are rarely used outside special forces these days (at least, when it comes to the major powers in the world).
Actual machine guns are big and cumbersome, and hard to use right (excepting the few LMGs, such as the M249 SAW, that can also be used in the manner of a normal rifle) - the only game I know that incorporates machine guns remotely correctly is Red Orchestra; machine gunners as a class spawn with their MG in hand, which you cannot fire (well, you
can, but you have to use the iron sight toggle, you're firing from the hip so you can't aim well and you've got major recoil), and instead they must be deployed on a bipod somewhere on a suitable surface (e.g. the ground, a wall or a windowsill), at which point they can be used as they should be. You need to reload every now and again, you can run out of ammo (but your allies can resupply you), your barrel can overheat (and you can change the barrels on the German MGs) and you can relocate as you desire. All other games I've ever really played that feature machine guns have them as rigidly fixed weapons that never overheat or run out of ammo, and that can endlessly pour lead downrange so long as you don't get a sniper bullet to the brain or a rifle butt to the back of your neck.
Nuke_em_05 said:
You would think, hypothetically, that it is so predominant is because it was a war set in almost every arena possible. Sadly, you generally only ever; 1. Storm Normandy, again 2. Fly over Midway, again, or 3... what else happens in WWII games? Only if they wane super-fictional do you see any of the action in Africa.
3. Fight in the streets of Stalingrad, again. As for Africa, I suggest Call of Duty 2, which has an extensive British campaign in North Africa, and Codename
anzers Phase 2, which takes place almost exclusively in North Africa. (And also the Shrapnel Games war games, and the Hearts of Iron grand strategy series.) As for other theatres, the flight sim IL-2 Sturmovik features basically
everything that
ever happened in WWII - there's campaigns for every major player, minor power and every other nation that ever had a plane in the air during that time. There's career modes for the Finnish, Dutch, New Zealand and Slovakian air forces, among others.
Asehujiko said:
Also, there's 18 WWI games? How come that the only one i know is Warfare 1917 which is a flash game?
Necrovision would be an example, but that list doesn't merely include shooters. The article itself even says that the WWI games that DO exist basically amount to strategy games and flight sims.
__________
Wall of text over, here's my own post.
See, one of the things with WWII games, especially shooters, is the immense variety of the weapons involved. You've got everything from late-nineteenth-century bolt-action rifles to the direct predecessor of the AK-47 and everything in between. You can have one game feature everything from short-range SMGs to mid-range rifles of at least half a dozen types (Kar 98k, G43, MN91/30, SVT-40, just to name a few common ones), to machine guns that spew lead so fast you can't even distinguish between individual bullets being fired (I'm talking, ofc, about the ubiquitous and endlessly popular MG42).
Weapons technology changed about as rapidly during those six years as during the entire nineteenth century. At the outset of the previous century, soldiers were using inaccurate muzzle-loading muskets that took ages to load and had roughly the same effective range as a thrown pebble; at the end of the century, the first magazine-fed bolt-action rifles appeared. Those very same rifles were the most common weapons at the start of WWII, but at the end, SMGs had become standard infantry weapons (supplanting semi-automatic rifles, which were in their infancy at the war's start, just as bolt-action rifles supplanted breech-loading muskets) and the assault rifle had made its debut. There's essentially a whole century's worth of weapons to be found in that one conflict alone.
After the war ended, the variety ceased almost instantly. Within about a decade and a half, all major powers were using weapons varieties of which we're still using today. The AK-47 came first ofc, and while the Americans were initially focusing on the M14, the M16 was already widespread during the Vietnam War, and the only real changes since then have been either gradual modifications or minor offshoots (AK-74, AKS-74U, M16A2-4, M4), with most new weapons only seeing use either in special forces or Europe. From the Vietnam War to the present day, there have been no essential changes in what weapons were commonly used - it's always been AK47 vs. M16, be it in the jungle, the desert or the desert again. That's one of the major turn-offs for making a post-WWII game.
