Poll: Poll: What's your preferred FOV?

[doggie135]

It's Shooter Season 2011 (and not just according to Yahtzee), so I felt it appropriate to ask all you Escapists a question whose subject generally induces frustration for me. Why developers seldom seem to add an FOV option in their shooters is beyond me. For me, the Field-of-view can make or break a shooter (a genre I'm not too fond of to begin with).

It would appear most First-person-shooters these days embrace the FOV of 55-60 degrees. Valve break the trend (as usual!) with an option of varying it from 75 to 90, yet almost every brown, gritty, cover-based shooter available on the market, that Yahtzee takes great pleasure in shredding with witty criticism, refuses to.

Bioshock, one of my favourite games of all time, was a game I rented on console a long time ago and hated for its narrow FOV in widescreen. Now I have it on PC with a (later added in patch) widescreen-FOV option, and I lavish the function.

So, what's your preferred Field-of-view, do you play in Widescreen (16:9), Standard (4:3), or something else (like 16:10), and does the problem prove game-breaking to you too?
(I prefer to play in Widescreen with an FOV of 90, and can't stand a field-of-view less than 70)


Here's a comparison picture I found
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v427/griff_90/15312cc7.gif

 

[skywolfblue]

I get really annoyed with tunnel-vision, narrow FoV FPSs.

Real life vision has a huuge FoV, I don't understand why a lot of game developers like to cramp it up so much.

 

[ramboman88]

lol, I love it how most topics either super inflate, or are wastelands...

In all honesty, I prefer to have a natural view on things, so my preferred FoV would depend on how big the screen is and how far away from it I am. So if I'm in front of a screen that spans 60 degrees from my eyes, I'm picking that.

Higher FoV's usually make me nauseous, so I usually aim for smaller ones.

 

[HassEsser]

Higher lets you see more, but kinda eliminates some immersion, while lower does the exact opposite. The way I see it, the squarer the screen, the higher FOV you need, but if you got like 5 screens going side-by-side (in, say, Deus Ex: HR), then you'll probably want a really low FOV because you'll naturally be able to see everything around you anyway. If you've seen that vid with the 5 screens and HR, then you know what I'm talking about.

All that aside, I prefer an FOV of 90

 

[Commissar Sae]

Guess it depends on the game. A more claustrophobic shooter probably benefits from a smaller FOV, since the likelyhood of someone flanking you isn't that high. However i think somewhere in the middle range of 75-90 works best for most shooters.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't usually mess with the default too much unless it is truly awful. Somewhere between 75-90 usually works.

 

[Phlakes]

180 QUAKE PRO BITCHES

Except not really. I usually go with 90 so it's not too zoomed out but I don't feel like I'm looking through a slit in a box.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Honestly I don't give a flying fuck. I think other people don't either considering that this is the first time I've ever heard anyone complaining about it despite spending so much time on the whaaa-scapist Escapist where people are quiet fond of bitching voiceing their opinions.

 

[The .50 Caliber Cow]

The wider the better. I usually don't care too much.

 

[YouShouldDeleteThisAccount]

120, A good balance between being not too distorted and not narrow. The standard for multiplayer quake enthusiasts everywhere.

Anything less makes me feel like I have a character who's tunnel blind.

 

[viranimus]

Nothing less than 200 stretched across 3 screens in wrap around configuration to create faux peripheral vision. Now if only we could get more proper support for it that would be awesome.

 

[Nickompoop]

I usually stick with a narrower FOV since wider angles look really weird and distorted near the sides of the image as you move. It just catapults me out of the game.

 

[LastHour1]

Around 90-105. Anything less feels like I'm looking at the game through a telescope. So zoomed in, I can't see anything. Borderlands suffered from this. Turned the FOV to 100 and it's perfect.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The wider the better....right?

A human's FOV is greater than 180 degrees so as close to real vision as possible. This is why I don't like FPSs because you can't see much of anything on your sides. 3rd-person shooters are much better if done right. The only reason there's so many FPSs is because they are so much easier to make; 1st-person camera is much easier to do than 3rd-person and there's less animations on the character.

 

[spartan231490]

As a console gamer, I don't really have a preference. I wish games had more, but I feel like an option is pointless. The people who choose wider fov will have a huge advantage, so just about everyone will choose it. i don't know much about that stuff, but I suspect that console fov is so small because of processing issues.