Field of view games

Field of view, or FOV, is one such important element that impacts our gameplay. But what does FOV do in video games and why should we care? So read on and learn all there is to know about this essential video game setting! Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content. Contents 1 What is a good field of view for games? John Har. Unfortunately, since most console games outsell the PC version, PC gamers end up putting up with a field of view that was designed with limited console hardware in mind even if their PC is more than capable of running it.

Field of View comparison from Far Cry 3. The first screenshot was taken using the default FoV setting of After cranking the FoV there was simply no going back. A widescreen is supposed to fit more information on a screen, not less.

If someone had told me that was going to be the future of gaming 10 years ago I would have labelled them insane. Rather than taking advantage of a screen that can more closely mimic our real life eye sight developers have gone completely backwards in the name of pretty graphics and fancy shading effects. Your screen is supposed to represent what your character in game can see within reason. If you walked around the streets wearing magnification goggles it would feel unnatural.

The exact same thing happens when playing a game with a low field of view. They may not feel as immersed in the world as they could be with a larger field of view, especially in games in set in an open environment such as Skyrim, Far Cry or Battlefield. In competitive multiplayer it limits players in a negative way. A great example of the frustration can be felt in Halo 3. In Halo 3 your field of view is quite limited and the game features quite a lot of close quarters combat. To make matters worse the player jump height is quite high so in many close quarters battles a player would just jump during an encounter and disappear entirely from the other players screen for a significant amount of time.

It was a mechanic that was just anti-fun and looked quite ridiculous from a spectator point of view. Most FPS games are designed to be as realistic as possible to an extent of course and within the rules of the games universe.

Things like only being able to sprint short distances before becoming tired and gun recoil are evidence that game developers want the first person shooter experience to be authentic, so why would they limit your in-game FoV to less than half of your vision in real life? There are some cases when game developers may opt to reduce a games field of view for artistic reasons.

For example, a horror game may reduce the field of view to give the player a sense of fear, claustrophobia, limited peripheral vision, etc. For most games this simply is not the case. Some people may actually experience motion sickness from playing games with a low field of view This may be further impacted by a low frame rate as well, another trick game developers often use to increase graphics.

When your field of view is small it means player movements and looking around have more effect on the camera movement. Things like head bobbing from running become a lot more noticeable and jerky camera movements are more common. On top of this your brain expects to have peripheral vision to make sense of the surrounding environment which you no longer have.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What field of view should I choose in a first person shooter? Ask Question. Asked 11 years, 5 months ago. Active 7 years, 2 months ago. Viewed 54k times. What effect does this have on aiming? Improve this question.

Oak Tamara Wijsman Tamara Wijsman Is there any reason the default isn't good enough? But I wonder if it's a good idea to see as wide as possible If this question ends up being to subjective, I will delete it and continue to use the maximum FOV. I actually think the answer en1gmatic has given is a very objective answer: it's due to Fitt's law that it will become harder to aim, since the targets become smaller more objects on the same amount of pixels , so it doesn't have to be subjective.