First-person perspective games, particularly shooters, are becoming more and more prominent in this generation of consoles. The underlying idea behind first person shooters is immersion. The idea that YOU are this gun-toting, battle-hardened badass/unassuming guy in the wrong place at the wrong time helps draw you into the game's world. But in my opinion, most developers are leaving out one very important detail in creating this immersion.

Where the hell are my feet?!

For example, I just started playing Bioshock (I know, I'm a little late to the party). I think Bioshock is one of the best games I've ever played, and 2K did a fantastic job with making Rapture so believable. From the creaks and groans of the steel walls to ramblings of the Splicers, the city seems so real, and when I play Bioshock my disbelief is easily suspended. The player is thrown into Bioshock with no backstory about the character, and this helps this helps pull the player into the experience. But when I look down, I can't see my feet. It may seem nitpicky but this detracts from the overall immersion of the game for me.

I'm not a game developer, I don't know too many technical details about creating games, but I know it's possible to let me see my characters feet. I've always been able to see my feet in the Halo games. I can look down as I run and see one big green boot plod in front of the other. I can even see my knees lift up when I jump. Maybe in Bioshock rendering feet proved too much for memory constraints or something. Or maybe the developers intenionally overlook this because the amount of extra effort isn't justified because the player can't successfully play the game if he's always looking at the ground.

Whatever the reason, I know the hardware is capable of it. Look at EA's recent groundbreaking flop, Mirror's Edge. We see all the main character's acrobatics from a first person perspective. We see her arms flail through the air and grab onto a ledge, we see her legs and feet when she slides feet first under a pipe. Even the original Xbox was capable of it. Look at the aforementioned Halo and Chronicles of Riddick. The latter was also a highly immersive game that benefitted from some nice feet rendering.In Fallout 3 the player can press a button and pull out to third person and see the whole character, so the game is obviously rendering the character's legs and feet. But when I look down in first person, where are my feet?

I read that we will be able to see the Big Daddy's feet in Bioshock 2, so maybe more and more games will start to move towards this, since "immersion" is such a big buzzword in the industry right now. I hope one day this blog entry will simply be a relic from a day when there were no feet.Hopefully developers will read this and realize the error of their ways. Their disregard for feet is robbing at least one gamer of the immersion they otherwise work so hard to achieve.While they're at it, developers should show me my arms when I'm climbing up a ladder. I'm tired of magically floating up a ladder accompanied by the plunk of invisible boots on metal ladder rungs.