- If it had to be an FPS game, then look at Far Cry games where gunplay is polished to such a degree that you get endorphins just by firing. I'm not a fan of mixing RPG skills with the inability to aim, despite what VD says about it. If you want to mix RPG in, add something on top, but don't break the first rules of the FPS genre, where my aim is as good as I fucking aim. I had this problem with VTMB too, and many critics at the time, but that was literally the only problem with VTMB. Not so in FNV.
Oh god this endless complaint again. Why is it so hard to understand stat-based aiming? Same thing in Alpha Protocol and Deus Ex, critics and idiots freak the fuck out because they can't handle the concept. Far Cry is an FPS with RPG elements, not an RPG with FPS elements, like New Vegas. That's why they're different. Also it takes barely any leveling at all in New Vegas before you're head-shotting like a master, so it just comes off as whining. At least with Deus Ex it took half the game probably to get good crosshairs.
Oh yeah let's defend shit gameplay elements because it's an RPG and stats should govern your skills lol.
I love Deus Ex and Bloodlines, but the exaggeratedly huge crosshairs weren't strong points of these games, quite the contrary. It was even quite silly in Deus Ex how a supposedly trained special agent couldn't hit the broad side of a barn at low guns skill, with weapons that any jackoff from the street could shoot reasonably well even if he had never held a gun before. Even Morrowind's "if the dice roll fails you miss" combat system was better than the ridiculously exaggerated crosshair expansions in DX and VtM:B.
There are other ways to make stats influence your effectiveness with guns, which would be more interesting and fun gameplay-wise than just making your bullets go anywhere except where you're pointing the gun.
In modern games with ironsight modes especially you can effectively implement a higher degree of weapon sway. Your gun would still shoot as accurately as it does based on its own properties - pistols having more spread than rifles, for example, but it would be solely dependant on the gun's own properties, not on your skill. But when aiming, you'd have to manually correct your aim more than if your skill is high.
In a game with ironsight mode, you can also remove the crosshair for aiming from the hip, making low skill hipshots very inaccurate. At higher skill levels, you can add a crosshair for hipshots. Boom, MASSIVE difference in accuracy between low and high skill!
You can also alter other things not related to accuracy. Reloading speed, for example, or chance of fumbling during a reload (like when reloading a bolt-action rifle bullet by bullet rather than with a stripper clip - oops, low skill character just dropped a bullet instead of putting it in the chamber). Reloading a magazine could take 5 full seconds for a low skill character, and just one second for a high skill character. Massive difference right there!
Same with things like cocking the bolt in a bolt-action rifle or using the pump-action of a shotgun. An amateur will be slow and clumsy, an expert will be quick and efficient, effectively increasing the potential rate of fire as your skill increases.
With SMGs and other automatic and even semi-automatic weapons you can modify the recoil based on the character's weapon skill (or on the character's strength stat), influencing whether you can hold a gun steady during sustained fire or not.
There are
so many ways of having stats and skills influence the handling of firearms in first person RPGs that don't involve making crosshairs so massive, using them at low skill isn't fun at all. "It's an RPG so stats should matter" is not an excuse for shit gameplay elements, but instead should be an inspiration to come up with good ways to make the stats count.