So, I've been playing a lot of Far Cry 4 these last couple of days, and I really like it. And like I often do with big open world games, I've spent most of my time just wandering around messing around with stuff. In doing so, I've gotten into a lot of scuffles with the various animals in the game. But it (and another thread on Giant Bomb) got me thinking about something.

The way the game models how the animals interact with each other, and the environment isn't very realistic. I mean, on a small scale, a wolf attacking and killing a pig is realistic enough. But on a bigger, ecosystem wide scale, it kinda falls apart. Because you need certain skins to craft into various upgrades, the game can't really allow you to hunt a species to extinction, for example. Never mind the part where modeling an entire ecosystem within this big world would be going a lot farther than is needed to make the world seem realistic, and probably be really hard to keep track of/run.

But, it did get me thinking. Are there any games that realistically model ecosystems? Like, a game where if you wipe out one species, lets say wolves, it then has populations of the animals they feed upon increase in size. It seems like the kind of thing that either hasn't ever happened because it would be too demanding for older games to do it, or there's some extremely obscure game that did it in the mid 90s.

Related question: Would something like this actually improve a game? There would have to be something in place to make it important to the player, otherwise it'd just be window dressing. It'd still be interesting to see something along these lines in Far Cry 5, if it could be made important to the game as a whole.

I can only think of one game that has realistic ecosystems, Dwarf Fortress.

It's not really a realistically modeled ecosystem, but FF9 came to mind for me. I think if Quina eats too many frogs, reproduction in that particular marsh slows down or something.

This is the first thing I thought of, but I don't think it fits exactly. Because of the current limits on how far you can send your dwarves (only the embark site) you can't really hunt anything, you can just kill whatever happens to wander by your fortress. It might be different in adventure mode, I don't really play that, but I don't think it is.

Do any of the Monster Hunter games do something like this? Or do the animals just respawn whenever you come back to the map? I think it could be interesting in a game like that, could make you think about how much you are hunting one specific animal/type of animal instead of just killing everything you see. I think it could make an interesting game, but then again I think you could make an interesting game out of just about anything if you did it right.

Tokyo Jungle

Monster Hunter is another game I thought of when thinking of how a dynamic ecosystem can affect a game. I was thinking that having a larger ecosystem that the player can impact in the Village (offline) mode could be potentially interesting. Like, for instance, if you hunt all the deer one day, it incites a particular carnivorous monster that feeds on them to patrol the area the next day since food is scarce. Or by hunting all the fish in the area, the giant bird will have nothing to eat and will be weaker/have no source of stamina regen when you hunt them.

But to answer your question, no, hunting monsters doesn't really have an impact on anything but what you're wearing. Much of the game is sorta like Phantasy Star Online, where you group up in a hub area and do/repeat missions, but there is an offline mode where you hunt monsters around a village. As it was in the most recent MH game released outside Japan, you basically follow these "Monster Forecasts" that tell you if herbivores are breeding in the area or if there's a swarm of bugs, and that'll let you know what kind of monsters and loot you'll find if you leave the village. It's completely random and what you decide to hunt one day doesn't influence the state of the monsters in the area in the future.

I recall you being able to wipe out the existence of Buffalo in Red Dead Redemption (and a more infamous species in Undead Nightmare), but the other wildlife did not operate under the same rules.

@sunbrozak: If I remember correctly, the buffalo only stayed wiped out until the next time you quit out and reloaded into the game. IE, they reset every time you continue playing.

@mooseymcman: I definitely remember the buffalo getting wiped out. I'd shoot a couple every now and then because I needed the skins or the money or something. Eventually one day I loaded it up and realized that for the third day in a row there were only 5 buffalo left in the herd. I finished them off and they didn't return again.

@mosespippy: Huh!

From the way things sound about MGSV (Gameplay mechanic spoilers): It seems like various wildlife will have a daily schedule like guards, as opposed to mgs3 where animals would just stand there, but I doubt you can drive a species to extinction.

I feel like the concept of depletable ecosystems is rather difficult to depict in most games today as not only does the destruction of a resource permanently seem like a unintuitive design choice but the consequences are long term and harder to grasp.

feels like molyneux should figure in this thread somewhere.

Didn't stalker had some cool realistic wildlife ecosystem modeling? like they would move in packs and hunt each other, I remember reading something about that when that game came out, never played it though.

I'm not sure if it went as far as actually modeling the population and being able to exterminate a species or anything like that, it was probably just behavioral stuff.

@mosespippy: @mooseymcman: In fact there was an achievement for doing so.

http://www.xboxachievements.com/game/red-dead-redemption/achievement/40043-Manifest-Destiny.html

@mooseymcman: I would love to see more realistic models for games. The only reason I could think of that they don't do this, is because it might take too much effort to create the necessary behaviours for however many wildlife species might be in the game. On a side note, I'd also like to see more realistically placed vegetation (I'm an environmental scientist) as well.

For a game to use a realistic ecosystem model, I agree that it can't always be for "window dressing" and so a game like FarCry is probably the perfect example to use it in, though I don't think it's necessary to have the system go as far as increasing/decreasing population sizes.

I do really think a game series like the Elder Scrolls would also benefit from something like this too as the series is always striving to build a realistic world for the player to explore in. Just my two cents.

I think that may pass my personal line for realism vs fun. It would be cool to see, but I really feel like it would have big potential to make the game massively boring. People already hated that outposts didn't respawn and made the world seem empty.

@overnow: I agree man, at the end of the day I want my games to be fun and ultra realism is usually not the way to achieve that.

If you wanted to increase wilderness realism to its next logical step you'd spend hours wandering around the world and see no wildlife at all.

Didn't Ultima Online do something like that? I recall reading that players had hunted a certain type of creature in which dragons had preyed on to extinction. And that resulted in the dragons encroaching into the areas near towns because they needed a new food source.

Functional ecosystems such as a predator/herbivore relationship is complex interaction require lost of modeling to properly represent, then if you add a uncontrollable element ie. the player character would even the most blanched model go tits up in a matter of seconds.

I remember seeing a quote from Far Cry 2's developers stating that they couldn't add predators because they would eat all the herbivores, then die of hunger. But they probably just had problems with animating lions...

Far Cry 3/4 systems are interesting but they spawn in animals when you aren't looking, is really a need to simulate what the player cant see in a fps?

I do remember several games boasting to have such systems but for the life of me I can’t remember the names for them. All I can say for Far cry 4 is that the biggest killer I've come across so far are the random car drives in the world, they have killed me several times and they seem to have no qualms about killing NPC's and animals alike.

Didn't I hear about how if you kill enough animals in Dragon Age: Inquisition, that species might become extinct?

Been a while since I played it, but I remember Final Fantasy Xii's bestiary being hierarchically constructed in a rudimentary way consistent with an ecosystem (predators, prey, flora etc).

I don't think it featured species extinction though.

There's an old Star Wars game called Gungan Frontier where you tried to create a functioning ecosystem of starwars animals and plants. I haven't played it in a very very long time but I remember it being quite fun.

I found this youtube video of it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OtvessRypo

@duluoz: Oh, nice, it's basically sim earth: star wars edition?

Completely different type of game then open world shooters, obviously, but I'd kill a person for a good modern sim earth.

Isn't No Man's Sky trying to model an ecosystem? Not sure how complex or far it is trying to go though.

I'm not sure if it exactly counts, because its a sim game but..

Jurassic Park:Operation Genesis had a mode where you can make your own Isla Sorna (island from the second movie/book) where dinosaurs are allowed to roam freely in their environment. Dinosaurs didn't have the ability to breed (sadly) so the ecosystem was superficial considering it was you, as the player, creating the dinosaurs..but they will kill each other, die of old age, disease, disasters ect..
So the dinosaurs could cause their own extinction.

I really hope with the release of Jurassic World next year we get a new great Jurassic Park game

I think the main problem with modeling an ecosystem is getting the cycles right. How long does each species take to reproduce? A generation cycle takes years in most cases. Or how fast does the plant life grow? It depends on the weather and soil conditions, and most games don't even have a yearly weather cycle in place. They just have rain, sun or clouds at random intervals.

It'll probably takes a couple generations for actions to have a noticeable effect. So the course of the game would need to take place over a decade or more. Most games take place over a couple of days to a couple weeks, or they follow a civilization over centuries. There aren't many games in the middle there.

I remember the bestiary in game being split up by area, but I think the one in the guide might have been split up by type, or at the very least, espers, hunts, bosses and rare creatures were split out from the areas section.

The game also had an area that would change from wetlands to drylands depending on if the in game clock had an even or odd number of hours. They had different species, terrain and weather depending on which season it was. You could tell the season from the neighbouring areas by looking at the sky.

You're right I forgotten about that!

Its not exactly a "realistic ecosystem" but Lighting Returns:Final Fantasy XIII has a system where each enemy in the game has a set number of times it can spawn when there is one left that creature turns into a more powerful version of that enemy that you can then kill to complete a quest and get a specific reward for eliminating the creature.

I think the game does a decent job of modeling the general behavior of the animals. Things like elephants drinking water and spraying it on themselves, dholes hunting in groups and chasing after deer, etc. It's cool to see.