DOC: We get a lot of contention over grenades in the game. Could they be deadlier ? Of course they could ! The question is not could they, but *why* should they. Movies and television show us one opinion on this, and it is by far the more unrealistic one.We chose instead to study the mass, explosive power and amount of shrapnel you would get from such a device, based on it's real world mass, explosive content and casing thickness.
In reality, results with real grenades like these vary a lot. There are limited amounts of actual casing fragment flying about from the explosion, the blast of which is fairly small unless you are in a confined space.
Yes, if you get hit by a lump of fragmented casing it's going to wound you or maybe kill you. You aren't going to go flying off your feet nor are walls going to cave in. The trick is this: *if* you get hit by a piece of fragmented casing. There are not really very many of these and certainly not enough to blast everything to death within a 360 degree radius. In practice or real war, you are told to duck down behind safety because want ZERO risk of injury or death. The fact is you might not duck down as instructed by your drill sergeant and you might still not be hit by anything. Being safe isn't because everything in a radius of XX meters is going to be blown to smithereens. It's just a way to ensure close to zero risk to the soldiers in training or using them in a combat situation.
We have AARs from the real war where a soldier had a frag grenade land between his feet and was untouched by any shrapnel whatsoever. Other times the guy on the opposite side of the foxhole got whacked and the guy on the near side didn't. Or the other way around. Lot's of different results happened and they varied wildly. So if you study this stuff and want any realism then you have to take it that more results were possible than "wtf that guy should be dead!" Often the soldier hit didn't die at all he just got gruesome wounds.
If you are lying prone you are many many times more likely to suffer far less harm (or no harm at all) compared to kneeling. Kneeling is a more likely to see you survive than standing.
In beta testing just today, I threw 3 grenades into 3 different rooms on 3 different occassions that had ONE person guarding them at the time.
Result = 3 kills.
I would take that to be at least as successful as, if not more so than, the real items in the real war. Sure, we could have made them so they would better meet TV and movie type expectations, but since those examples are very unrealistic for the most part, we chose to model them like other weapons in the game and try to represent the variety of results that a more realistic approach would achieve.
To do this we studied real wartime data and ballistic models and modeled them as close to the experience that this knowledge and information indicates instead of the Hollywood version of things.
Real life normally had many times more variety in combat consequences than any game offers players. We try to offer as much of that variety as we can. We could reduce combat consequences to a range of limited results that you get every time, all the time, the exact same results but we think over the long haul that would make the game much less exciting with almost no tension at all and players would get bored with becoming overnight experts.
@Uriahjw - In real life, it would take a few seconds to raise your rifle after throwing a grenade - I have no problem with the way it works in-game.
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