As mentioned in my previous entries, I'm not much of a console gamer. I'm slowly coming around to the idea, but having been bought up with computers, I still find a lot of things about these friendly little boxes that just don't click with me.
The first and most obvious thing is the joypad. I'm absolutely useless at accurately controlling games with my thumbs. Most of my non-gaming friends can beat me at Mario Tennis, Smash Bros., Donkey Konga and Super Monkey Ball. They'd have a harder time beating me at Soul Calibur 2 or Mario Kart, but that's only because I've put a lot of single-player hours in on them.
Those same friends stand no chance against me at Quake or UT. However, they'd more than likely kick my ass in, say, Metroid Prime: Echoes and Halo 2 for instance. Joypads just don't "feel" right for playing FPS games to me. That's not really the point of this entry, because the joypad vs keyboard/mouse argument is fully played out these days. What I'm trying to get across here is that no matter how amazing games look on the next-gen systems, I'm always going to feel reserved about getting into them, simply because I have to use a joypad to play them.
That's another reason that I like the premise of the Wii's controller so much. That thing is going to make console FPSs accessible to me for the first time, just as Metroid Prime: Hunters has done on the DS, with the touchpad freelook. When I look at Gears of War, it makes me a little sad inside, because I know that nothing like that will ever appear on a Nintendo system. I'm feeling a little alienated already.
And I'm starting to worry that the trend toward cross-platform development is alienating me from the PC games that I love. And so I get to the real point of this entry. Field of View.
The Field of View of a first person shooter, measured in degrees, has always been close to ninety degrees in PC games. Quake, UT, Half-LIfe - the three FPSs that have set the standard for a damn good shooter have always shared the same default field of view of ninety degrees.
When I played in Quake clans, we used to set our FOV to a hundred or maybe a hundred and twenty degrees, creating a fish-eye like effect. It was a little extreme, but it meant that we could see more to our left and right than our opponents could, and it gave us a slight edge, just like human peripheral vision.
Times are changing. Unfortunately, having a higher FOV setting means that the player can see more, and thusly more power is needed to render the extra scenery we're seeing. And the same goes for the reverse - lower the FOV and less needs to be rendered, saving vital frames per second.
And consoles need all the frames per second they can get. I first noticed a trend in console games using a lower FOV when the Halo conversion came to PC. I couldn't play it at first, the seventy-five degree field of view just felt claustraphobic and plain wrong. I persevered, but my enjoyment was severely reduced by this crazy consolish perpective I was given.
The same problem has reared its ugly head twice in more recent times. I'm looking at you, Oblivion and SiN: Emergence.
Both of these games have a default FOV of seventy-five degrees. UGH. I was disgusted to see it when I first booted up Oblivion. It just stank of console port. Coupled with the dumbed-down UI, getting started with Oblivion was a hard pill to swallow. I eventually found a way to change the FOV in Oblivion, but it reset back to default every time I entered conversation with an NPC, due to the face-zoom effect. Not nice.
I nearly didn't bother with SiN once I found the FOV problem. I noticed it the very second I took control of Blade. Fortunately, setting the FOV to ninety in SiN was relatively easy, but I had to enable cheats to do it (sv_cheats 1, fov 90). It felt dirty.
So here's my plea to developers of first person games. I know that you can't make money anymore unless you release on console as well as PC, but please remember us old-school PC hardcore and give us the option to change the FOV without breaking other aspects of the game. Or if you don't want us to be able to change it, at least make it ninety degrees as default.
And while you're there, stop dumbing down our user interfaces. I know that I could plug a joypad into my PC and play your first-person perspective game, but I wont.
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