Firearms Expert Reacts: Sniping in Video Games (Bonus Episode)

this is jonathan ferguson the keeper of firearms and artillery at the royal army's museum in the uk which houses a collection of thousands of iconic weapons from throughout history and on this bonus episode jonathan discusses the basics of a modern day snipe rifle its historical definition and how they work or don't work in video games make sure to subscribe for more videos featuring jonathan and if you'd like to help out the royal armies museum and continue to support jonathan's work check out the links in the description of this video right over to jonathan it's easy enough to define what one is now i think maybe which is um a highly accurized rifle firing a cartridge of a certain power level that enables you to reach out to really quite extreme ranges so beyond 800 meters up to maybe even 2 000 meters with some sort of an optical sight with high magnification 12 power 20 power something like that so that you can even identify your target at long range and then so that you can put a reticle on them put in all of the data that you need to the right clicks onto your scope to land a precision single shot at very long range that's in essence what a sniper rifle has to do and so it means that they they're relatively easy to define and they're operated in a team of two typically you might be on your own but typically a team of two a spotter to identify targets as to what that means for the actual weapon well traditionally it's been a custom set up if not custom made bolt action rifle typically with a magazine low capacity five rounds maybe and you might even single load it because you're so far away and you have people protecting you snipers will typically carry a second primary weapon effectively or their secondary weapon will be something like an assault rifle or perhaps a sub-machine gun increasingly complicating matters a bit is the are improvements in semi-automatic weapons they're so good now that you can get semi-automatic rifles that are just as accurate as bolt action rifles and so those are taking over now um there's less and less reason to go for a bolt action [Music] so we're fairly comfortable with what a modern sniper rifle is but the definition changes over time and space so the dragon of the svd is still called a sniper rifle even though even in the soviet and then later the russian and other armies it was always treated as what we would call in the west a designated marksman's rifle which is something that is typically semi-automatic not bolt action it might fire the same sort of cartridge as a sniper rifle it'll probably have a reduced power optical sight so not 20 power more like six power something like that or four even and so different different countries terminology factors in here and that actually ties up with what sniper rifles or what sniper rifle used to mean which was really any rifle used for sniping i'm doing a lot of air quotes here because terminology changes over time so we know what a sniper is today very highly drained all of that but a sniper in its original meaning as it was originally coined in like the 19th century sniping and a sniper could be anyone with a rifle anyone taking a pot shot essentially so just a a normal rifleman could act as a sniper by picking out an individual target and taking careful aim shots at them the rifle wouldn't be a sniper rifle they wouldn't be a trained sniper the first time in history we get proper trained snipers and we start to see modifications to the rifles is the first world war britain france germany all of the major powers start to look at making more of a science out of sniping so instead of just oh good old alf he's good with an smle get him on that firing point those guys evolve into the designated marksmen later on um but some of them the really skilled ones would go away to a sniper school and have weeks of training and be given a known accurate rifle so it'd be just like alpha's smle but it would be one that had been selected from the factory as especially accurate and tested and you knew that it would create a good group at a given distance speaking of distance we're talking here about relatively close ranges probably not much more than standard infantry engagement ranges so 300 maybe meters yards doesn't really matter these these guys were by 1918 highly trained experienced skilled um they some of them were hunters in civilian life some of them even brought their own rifles they invented the ghillie suit to camouflage themselves that kind of thing and then as as militaries tend to do after the first world war we don't need that anymore we get rid of the sniper schools but we certainly did in britain and we have to relearn it all again in world war ii second world war by 1918 we'd invented specialist sniper versions of those standard infantry rifles so they had scope mounts and they had telescopic sights but they were very low magnification so three three and a half power what we would now regard as not just a designated marksman site but a standard infantry rifle site and the exceptional guys would be the snipers of today snipers and spotters so it's a real evolution over 100 years there were snipers before there were sharp shooters who were highly skilled we had the rifle regiment in the uk famously the american riflemen were highly skilled in the war of independence so it's not that we haven't always had snipers but as a dedicated role and especially as a specialized weapon the first time you can really say we have snipers and sniper rifles is during the first world war as to the sniper rifle in its video game incarnations over time i think it's been perhaps more successful than more difficult to handle categories i think it's easy to get your head around something that's very slow firing very powerful very accurate and it has a you know this different interface probably the very earliest times games like hostages even you would get a depiction of the scope so probably a black screen or maybe just superimposed over your view and so i think games generally have an easier time of it than more nuanced classes of weapons like machine guns submachine guns rifles the implementation is what isn't always successful draw distance is a huge thing yeah very few games early on had really good draw distance in any meaningful way that would allow you to exploit the relative advantage of having a sniper rifle your standard rifle is capable out to the maximum effective range of the game's graphics engine so the sniper rifle doesn't really do anything unless you make it more powerful what the scope the representation of a scope lets you do is get right up to that maximum distance within within the engine but again you need you need sufficient graphics horsepower to be able to make that work and even in games like battlefield we see that for partly for gameplay reasons not just graphical reasons you have to scale down the effective range of a sniper rifle you end up with exaggerated bullet drop so i think i think broadly if we're taking um the video game as a pantheon um the sniper rifle is usually quite a distinct thing having said that only only a certain selection of games really try and nail the the experience of being a sniper in terms of lying in shrubs for hours on end which which no game does but um some kind of get part way there like famously the sniper elite series you know if you want to role play a sniper and shoot a sniper rifle that pretty much replicates a real one you can do that but your your typical mainstream aaa first person shooter can't really do justice to the sniper rifle but i think that's more to do with the limitations of gameplay and if we go far enough back the limitations of software inevitably because games are trying to replicate or at least look like reality pulling it off is difficult so this is this is how we end up with the infamous call of duty effect of quick scoping no scoping where you can just gain the mechanics of what's going on in a way that's just not possible with a real gun or or even i guess in like a vr representation of a sniper rifle you've got to sort of semi-physically bring that up to your eye and align the put the crosshair on the target potentially compensate for bullet drop and windage and all that and then pull the trigger whereas your more high-energy first-person shooter you're able to just peel back the or draw back the curtains of the the veneer of realism and just treat it like a super powerful one-shot gun it doesn't really matter that it's a sniper rifle if you're really good you can literally just you know well quick scope i think we all will know how frustrating it is when when people employ that strategy it's not so much the the that sniper rifles fail as a class of weapon in video games it's really the implementation that varies quite a bit if somebody is in concealment 800 meters away or more um and knows exactly where you are knows the wind speed and direction knows all the data to dial into their scope they can take you out without you ever knowing that they were there that's a tremendous problem for player frustration and enjoyment in a game of course to try to compensate for that well there are various sort of mechanics you can implement of course perks that make it easier to detect snipers and the big one is of course scope glint which is one of those game mechanics that's based on something real if you have a look at the front of various scopes on sniper rifles some of them have a sort of a honeycomb grille and that's what's called a kill flash and that prevents the direct reflection of sunlight off your very large shiny lens it's sort of effective it's almost like a silencer for light it sort of baffles the um the incoming beams of light and redirects them scatters them off essentially um there are other ways to avoid um scope glint in real life placing foliage in front of you positioning yourself just like just like a photographer so that the light isn't causing that flash in practical terms i mean i'm not a sniper i'm not trying to train military person i don't know how big of a problem scope glint is it's clearly a problem or they wouldn't wouldn't have invented the kill flash but there are various ways around it now what we see in computer games is like most features of real life it's greatly exaggerated so you end up with this insane million candle power uh beam of light that may as well be an arrow on the hud saying here's the sniper shoot back um but even a really really quite realistic series like sniper elite does include um a scope link because you've got to have some parity you've got to be able to fight back you know you are typically one man against however many enemies including enemy snipers and just like the movies do you have to exaggerate certain things to make something enjoyable if you'd like to support jonathan and the work at the royal armouries check out the links in the description where you can donate become a member pick up jonathan's new book or subscribe to the royal armories themselves thank you so much for watching you

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 487,061

Keywords: firearm expert reacts, sniping in video games, sniper rifles, sniper

Id: flz9IFoVAbE

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021