Greentext

Quite literally this very observation/argument has been going on since the original CS, and critiques along these lines have more or less led to mods/games like Insurgency, Project Reality/Squad, Red Orchestra 1/2 and many other less well known mods.

Basically, the conclusion was... you actually can make viable games out of more realistic versions of firearms, and a lot of people (though nowhere near as many) find them enjoyable.

You can keep a sniper rifle massively damaging but also gameplay negate this massive damage by further emulating other real world drawbacks of a sniper rifle: its actually quite difficult / essentially impossible both in the real and in a game to basically quickdraw and quick scope a sniper rifle after hopping around a corner if you emulate the process of sighting a scoped rifle and punishing or limiting some of the unrealistic physical capabilities of the fps player's avatar.

You could make the reloading process more involved or time consuming for the player, or design other game mechanics that allow for and incentivize firing from a supported position such as prone, or using a bipod or a window sill or ledge.

This approach does work, but creates a different kind of gameplay. More complicated, Less rewarding to those with pure tactile control mechanism proficiency and less tactical awareness.

Anyway, ita funny to see this still going on. Maybe try out some milsims or tactical squad based shooters of yore, or some of the games/mods I mentioned if you wanna see how those games feel.

I would like to think that at this point the 'CS gameplay /is/ realistic' crowd has finally given up and realized they actually just like old school fps combat with realistic looking settings and weapons, but not actually realistic gameplay mechanics.

Note: None of this is to say that any of these kinds of gameplay are inherently better or worse, but it would be nice if gamers were even kind of capable of actually accurately describing the games they enjoy without saying obviously false things about how they work or function.