FF prevents nade spam and shooting on sight
We limit nades on maps we don't want many deaths from nades to happen
It is very realistic when a friendly fighter drops a bomb on you and all enemies around you die while you run around.
No it's not, but then again I can make a top#100 list of other things which aren't realistic either
difference is, my things happen all the time all over the server, constantly, while bombs being dropped on friendly is a rare occasion, which don't affect the overall flow of combat much (less than 1% of total game play)
Then again - as in all cases of design - it's not a black-and-white decision. It could totally be that smallarms, roadkills etc don't hurt teammates, while bombs and heavy explosion does.
When developers recognise these gradients and tune the games is when best experiences happen. blindly setting things "on" or "off" based on arbitrary laws is where stale and uninteresting experiences happen.
The issue here seems to be fun vs immersion. While turning off FF can potentially decrease the amount of frustration for everyone, it can also hurt immersion when you don't have to care where you point your pointy stick... For games that are set in a fictive world this is ok, but for games that try to emulate real world events and situations it can be a detterent for the potential audience.
But you do need to care, because you need to point it at enemy and kill
him. And when you don't need to worry about the teammates, the interaction between you vs enemy has a good chance of becoming deeper and more exciting.
Or when someone fires his nadelauncer at his feet, killing enemies near him. But fuck realism, noone needs that, at least its fun. Oh, wait....
Again, explosives can hurt you a bit, but not teammates... there's the gradient again. Try BFP4F, pretty much nailed it. You get hurt from your own grenades/explosives, but don't kill teammates.. trust me, I fail alot of time with C4 and nades, often killing or hurting myself with them.
For FH2 and how the maps are designed etc, a decent design for explosives could be;
Enemies = 100% damage
You = 50% damage
Teammates = 25% damage
That would mean by tossing a nade in to an area where both teammates and enemies are, you'd hurt your teammates a bit, not killing them. Then again, already wounded teammates would die, and you yourself would die if you are within say 2meters of the nade and you already had some reduced hitpoints.
It wouldn't be completely unimmersive at all. I mean how often do players from opposing team occupy the same space without killing eachother anyway? A grenade flying in and killing the axis and slightly wounding the allies wouldn't make it less fun to play for the allies. They don't have that awareness, wouldn't be able to say exactly where the nade landed and the "realistic" damages they should take. No one would question what just happened, but game play would triumph.
Open your eyes for these things and take actual test cases as example, and you'll see that all these fears of making FH2 "unrealistic" are just delusions. The mod has potential to be so awesome, but good game play is handcuffed by a bunch of wild speculations and fears. This is sad, and is one of the reasons I will stop developing for the mod. It's like seeing the most brilliant kid in school piss away his talents because he wants to be in some cool group of kids or something. Talent, experiences, game play, all is sacrificed because of some very loose and unwritten and highly subjective ideals that pretty much no one believes in anymore, and which differ from person to person.
That, is heart-aching to see. A real shame and waste of enormous potential.
