If I took you out in a field, and gave you a bolt action rifle. Put you in a fox hole and then had a team of battled hardened trained marines back from Iraq shoot a 50 caliber machine gun at you... Would you be able to reload very well?
No, but (a) I'm not trained, (b) I'm not battle hardened, and (c) this isn't real life. It's a game.
The problem is if you aspire for realism you must simulate fear of death. Your average soldier in WWII were not drugged up on PCP or were inhuman robots. When you shoot at someone in real life, they tend to freak out or do other interesting things like crap their pants.
I don't aspire to "realism" in the sense that many people do. I aspire to immersion and the removal of interposing random features in the game. We already have the suppression effect. Likewise, I don't know about you, but sometimes when I'm under fire, I'll take MUCH less time to aim properly when firing back.
Finally, "Fear of Death" is this mythical BS concept that gamers have invented. It can't be done. It's a video game. No one will "fear death" in the game. Ever. Imposing a random system that gets in the way of a player controlling his avatar creates a "barrier", if you will, between the player and the game world. It removes control from the player's hands.
In general, I'm against that. If you want more immersion (which I think is ultimately the goal of the "fear of death" crowd), you need to DECREASE such barriers.
Its not something you can control either without either:
1. Being drugged up
2. Being extremely drunk (well that did happen on the Russian side a lot)
3. Being so oblivious to your own well being that you get shot the first time some yells "Get down!" (you would probably forget how to load the gun)
4. Being mentally retarded (like Forrest Gump)
Irrelevant to what I'm getting at. I recognize that people who feel fear will shoot poorly. But screwing up their ability to reload a weapon by interposing some random calculation by the game that "You feel fear now, so your reloading is screwed up" is just going to piss people off, especially if they DON'T feel fear.
Simply playing a game as though you are robot is not realistic. It is impossible to not flinch or be freaked out when you are about to die and it does affect how you are.
Most modern soldiers do through extensive training to get around these human instincts but the average Soviet and German soldiers did not get this other than long term experience and even then the smart ones would keep these behaviors because it kept them alive.
Playing a game itself is not "realistic." It's a game. We have rules. We respawn. We have no command structure. We have time limits, reinforcement counts, we're forced to fight within a circumscribed area (IE: the "outside the battlefield" minefields), etc. Absolute realism is a fantasy. What we should strive for is verisimilitude and immersion. Not realism.
If the player feels immersed, he'll feel some level of excitement. That may cause him to screw up his aim or hang back and plink instead of charging forward, or whatever. But all of that should depend on the player's immersion in the game world and the player's own abilities.
Imposing systems that remove player control is a bad thing, generally speaking. all it'd take is one time where the GAME says "You feel fear. Your reloading is slower" but the PLAYER doesn't feel it for people to start complaining and nitpicking. Fear is also a highly individual thing, with many many triggers and different symptoms. What makes you feel fear might not be what makes me feel fear and vice versa. So, imposing someone else's concept of what causes fear and how it manifests is likely to be nitpicked to death. Think about it.
"WTF?? I'd never be scared because there's an SMGer within 15 yards of me. I'm awesome at hip shooting, but now the game makes my barrel shake if an SMGer gets close."
"This is BS man. In REAL war, I'd have sacrificed myself willingly to save my squaddies, but the game prevents me from popping up to kill that MGer who has us pinned down now"
And so on and so forth. And who knows. Maybe these people are right. Maybe that suicidally brave soldier who wants to save the platoon will pop up and shoot at the enemy MGer. I don't know and neither do you. So imposing some system that claims to know how every soldier should react in the game is hardly realistic either, and is simply annoying.
