How Games Get Grenades Wrong - Loadout

most games and movies get grenades wrong whether it's tactically cooking a frag in Call of Duty action heroes like our knee and slide pulling pins with their teeth or the huge fireballs be seeing classic blockbusters like commando or more recently in the Fast and Furious franchise games and movies have totally over-exaggerated the humble grenade while there is a grain of truth to have games and movies depict handheld explosives most of these depictions are blown way out of proportion so that begs the question where does the truth end and the action movie trope begin rudimentary grenades and hand thrown explosives have been around since a time of the Byzantine Empire around the mid 700 BC the first modern hand grenade however was the mills bomb that was issued to frontline British troops fighting in the First World War it resembles many fragmentation grenades that you may see in today's popular culture with its notched and raised edges colloquially known as a pineapple pattern while these explosive things have existed in one form or another for hundreds of years it's undoubtedly the frags we see and on modern movies and games today that had a cultural touchstone we are all familiar with so to get the story on how grenades work in the real world I caught up with the Royal Armouries keeper of firearms artillery Jonathan Ferguson on the general side how does a real grenade work so you've got a cast metal body you've got your high explosive content filler you've got your fuse that is now stuck in from the top and then attached the top of that is this lever which is holding down this spring-loaded striker and of course the iconic pin that goes through that leave and holds it in place you pull out the pin which frees up the lever when you let go of it the striker itself typically throws the lever away from the grenade at which point you really do need to let go of it because what's happened is that striker has flipped over under spring pressure slap the percussion cap just like in a firearm cartridge and that fuse is now burning down to the middle where the splode e stuff is that exploding stuff is what has led to a number of tropes and misconceptions to be associated with the grenade chief among these is the fiery explosion that accompanies one going boom follow closely by those in the blasts being tossed around like origami action figures this whole grenades throwing chaps around like they're made of paper mache has been a long-running trend and that exists in modern movies and games lobbing one of these towards a group of bad guys is an easy excuse for a movie to cut some an explosion and immediately eject some over-the-top action into any set piece it was always entertaining to watch classic action films like commando on a Rambo franchise and see bad guys flung into the next continent by a fiery blast that came from something smaller than the protagonists fist in reality however the end result was much less cinematic in reality because what's happening is the explosive fracturing the casing and sending the case fragments flying through the air all you see you might glimpse a flash but what you typically see if you watch the videos is a puff of smoke quite a big puff of smoke what you can't see are the deadly fragments flying out you know within the sort of 50 meter effective range of a typical hand grenade they're more than enough to go through your body or into your body and kill you and there's also a blast effect there's not enough of a blast effect to fling you through the air so yeah it's it's pretty anticlimactic when you actually see these things go off aside from the common fiery blast we see in our entertainment there are a handful of tropes that have become key quotes or tactics and games the ability to cooked grenade has been around in games for over a decade with players on 2005 day of defeat sauce forums discussing how to drop grenades at your feet pick them up later and throw them again with a shorter timer obviously very aware of how advantageous and only explosion can be the core strategy when it comes to cooking your needs and games is to cut the enemy's response time be that the time it takes for them to run away or throw the thing back at you and while cooking your grenade means you can't wield a gun and thus leave you open to fire for longer taking that risk could be the difference between clearing a room and downing an enemy squad while having your payload returned to sender in real life however the idea of keeping a bomb in your hand or even picking one up there's been unfortunate enough to land in your vicinity isn't much more complicated and obviously riskier venture your average military-issued fragmentation grenade is not infallible as they work on chemical fuses there is not an exact save time in which you can hold on to them and depending on what military is serving or what grenade you're throwing fuses can vary in timing and these are just the kind of uncertain variables you don't want to play with talking about british and commonwealth experience so their grenade our grenades I should say range from three to four seconds so if you cook a grenade and the recommended cooked cooking time I don't know what gas mark are talking about the recommended cooking time is two seconds for the American grenade well if you wait two seconds on a three to four second delay and either get it wrong or there's a match slight manufacturing floor or whatever your grenades gone off on your hand and we have accounts of that happening a lot of these this is medal award time if you're practicing something like this you've typically done something to win an award or at least that's how we hear about it similarly throwing your grenades back to the enemy has been a strategy in FPS games for a while as well with one of the earliest appearances of the technique being in day of defeat sauce and 2006 is Call of Duty 3 it would then become a mainstay in modern action titles appearing as a gameplay mechanic in everything from battlefield to uncharted interestingly however the tactic was born from real-life war stories drain grenades back absolutely did happen again it's not a tactic that you can really rely upon because if they have cooked the grenade or it's been rattling around on the floor for for a few seconds the window of time to pick it up and throw it is limited and yet there are various accounts of this this being done but it did happen so I've got an account here from a captain Martine Brandtner again United States Marine Corps this is in Vietnam interestingly I'm laughing again because he described this this bit of the battle almost like a snowball fight he apparently threw back three grenades in a row and threw himself on the fourth so in one example you've got proof that absolutely did happen and it might happen more than once pretty much all of these tropes involving the person using a grenade in a certain way potentially because it was medal winning it was picked up by news and you know feel-good propaganda and your nap kind of starts the upward slope of popularity and exposure to it leaking into entertainment I think you've hit the missing link there and that's the news media absolutely the this these middle citations these stories from in a wind guys go back to their hometowns the local papers would have picked it up we're just so good at exaggeration and extrapolation aren't we because it happened once that's how it's always done so games and movies may depict grenades in an exaggerated and unrealistic way but as unrealistic as the trope may seem there is actually a grain of truth behind it while cooking a grenade or throwing an enemy's brain back might not always be advisable in the heat of battle those feats have happened admittedly they happen in extraordinary circumstances but these are what make for the most exciting stories and inspire what can sound like tall tales and just like in real life those unbelievable last-second throws declare a room or exciting videogames stories to recount - as pieces of fiction our games and movies allow us to relive these heroic deeds from the safety of our own home so it's only natural that they would exaggerate the truth to create amazing action set-pieces for us to realize there may be no consistency in the world of film when it comes to explosions but that's totally fine because their impacts exist and are contained within their own genres or universes and while often a visual spectacle and games grenade noises flashes and damage rarely behave realistically battlefield soldiers being able to survive a blast just feet away of them is unrealistic and call of duty operatives being able to hurl them back as they blow up barely a couple of metres away only end up with a ringing in their ears and jelly on the screen is pretty ludicrous but for those that want it there are more realistic digital portrayals for grenades in games like armor or escape from tarkov which even take into consideration individual pieces of shrapnel are flung around a room when a grenade goes off for the most part a game will calculate the damage dealt to the player based on their distance from the initial explosion from lethal at the origin and less damaging moving outwards in a sphere of coverage more realistic titles however will simulate shrapnel patterns and object penetration to create a much deadlier and more unpredictable explosion but again this showcase is the breadth of utility that the humble grenade has many games choose to tone down the damage potential to allow them to be a tool to reward strategy rather than a damage dealer take the Call of Duty series for example and I mean both the campaign and multiplayer in this instance I'm sure I've got more kills by making an enemy move out of position to flee a grenade than I have with the actual explosion well in the real world the objective is to throw your grain in such a way that the enemy doesn't have time to react in the virtual one it's often to gain a positional advantage but what really allows games the wriggle room to explore what was possible with a handheld throwable is that in pop culture the word grenade is now an extremely broad term anyone picking up a game with even the briefest knowledge about a grenade will know simply that if I throw this explosion of sorts will happen and in many ways that's enough it has been fascinating to learn how something so dangerous and so volatile has both changed and inspired our fiction while also growing into a virtual entity that nearly every action game features in some form even thinking about the bizarre versions of videogame grenades we see can tell you just how much they can be co-opted and altered to fit the narrative and setting of the most bizarre pieces of fiction be they the fantastical Borderlands remains that heal you the ones we find in death stranding made from Norman Reedus is poop and blood for the more realistic and deadly depictions in tarkov of Rainbow six siege the grenade is a versatile device that can add a big boom to your game and even bigger opportunities for gameplay and action [Music] thank you so much for watching this episode of loadout no doubt you've noticed that this looks a little different into other episodes that's because we're all working from home right now but I hope you still enjoy the video nonetheless if you did and you want to see the rest of the series then you can check out our youtube playlists and subscribe to our youtube channel so you don't miss any other episodes and of course we all here at GameSpot hope that you're all safe and well in the comfort of your own homes perfect excuse to stay inside and play video games right

Channel: GameSpot

Views: 1,033,842

Rating: 4.8834 out of 5

Keywords: Call of Duty, Modern Warfare, battlefield, warzone, Battlefield V, Commando, grenades, grenade tropes, grenades in games, grenade gaming tropes, how games grenades wrong, grenades explained, grenade breakdown, grenades work in real life, how grenades work in games, how grenades work, call of duty, arma, escape from tarkov, pubg, uncharted 4, grenades gameplay, loadout, dave jewitt, jonathan ferguson, royal armouries

Id: xzrh5uuOLtY

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020