- Health reason: it can look wrong for the players. A too low FoV can give some people headaches or nausea, since what they see isn't what they should be able to see. I don't know the exact reason that happens but it happens to some.
- Aesthetic reason: OK, I don't think "aesthetic" is the right word, but essentially you may be fine and not get anything health related from low FoV, yet it may still look wrong. At the very least, it would mean you need to turn around a lot more, since you can't actually see a lot in front of you.
- Competitive/balance reason: what Blizzard are concerned with. It's pretty simple - the people with a higher FoV can, by definition, see more in front of themselves. Which means, they have an advantage over the rest.
With this logic, doesn't mean the player with the best computer, will be better?
Because FOV isn't the only benefit. If you have a sh*tty card, it is logical to not play better than others.
Not necessarily but yes - Blizzard are addressing the FoV problem by capping it. This way, everybody gets the same, and a better system isn't going to give you an advantage (FoV-wise).
As for straight up playing better (non-FoV-wise) - it depends. First of all, that's talking multiplayer games only, since it's made to be accessible to more people - SP doesn't need to be.
Eye candy, by itself, doesn't give you any advantage - having it, when it hinders your performance, would give you a disadvantage. However, most of the times you'll be able to dial down the graphic options, to get a smoother experience. Having the game look a bit uglier does not give you a disadvantage, either, so, in a lot of cases, better PC doesn't really mean they get better gameplay.
There are SOME occasions when power does help but it tends to be fringe cases. Here are some examples:
- graphic options do not make the experience much smoother - this means that even if played on minimum, some people with weaker PCs would have problems. Not much that can be done there, it'd be the developers' fault for not making it accessible enough. And that should be one of their goals, since a multiplayer game should be played by as many people possible to keep it alive. Sure, they aren't supposed to cover every single PC out there - there would be minimum specs that must be covered, but the devs should choose something reasonable.
- some eye candy, does help.
Going back to Warcraft 3 here: a lot of people turned down some of the eye candy because 1. it wasn't needed 2. it could hinder the performance. One of these options was "Unit shadows" - it just gave the units...well, shadows. Under them. They weren't really anything - just a blob of dark under the unit (it assumed the sun was always highest in the sky). It didn't do anything, it didn't even look cool, since it was just a blob, not an actual shadow. However, in DotA: Allstars, the Phantom Assassin hero's ability Blur made her more transparent - at maximum level, she was completely invisible. That's not the in-game invisibility effect which gets broken on attack - she was completely see through all the time (but she'd show up on the minimap and can be targeted as normal). Having Unit shadows on then was actually essential, since she still had a shadow and you could find her using that.[/footnote]
In that case, it's the developer's fault[footnote]in this particular one - it'd be the person who developed the power and the one who accepted it[/footnote] for having a gameplay mechanic which interacts with graphics options.
- even if the game tends to run fine, some situations where they become highly demanding can be engineered - another straight example:
]There was a build known as "The Lagamancer" - as the name suggests, it was a necromancer build. It was pretty simple in fact - level up all skills that allow you to raise more minions - that's 20 skeletons, 20 skeleton mages, 20 revived monsters, and 1 golem. However, that alone wasn't enough to trigger the true name of the build - the second condition is to enter an area where the players were already fighting. Since the addition of 61 monsters and 1 player slowed down the game for most other people while they loaded that information, it introduced a lag of a second or two (maybe more, depending on the PC) which could just be enough to get you killed. Some Lagamancers played just for trolling others in this way - most notably (since it was the easiest to pull off), they'd enter games with cow runs.
The fault in these situations, doesn't really lie in anybody in particular - sure, maybe the developers, but it's an easy to overlook - it tends to require rather specific set of requirements. It should be up to them to try and remedy it, of course.
- game is straight up not done correctly in some manner. Example time
Until this was fixed, there was a really annoying problem. It was pretty simple: the game didn't pre-load assets for monsters. Because of this, it would actually load them when the monster gets into view...however, they'd get loaded from the hard drive and it has to be done at the instant you notice the monster. This lead to situations where you could dash forward in order to do something and the game freezes for a second or two because a new type of monster entered into view. And you'd end up dead. People with SSDs had an easier time, since loading the data from the SSD was faster. Some people succeeded in hacking D3 into running from a flash drive - if you were using USB 3, it alleviated some of the asset loading time.
Definitely developer fault in that case. The fix, in this case, was shockingly[footnote]/sarcasm[/footnote] to do what the other games did and load stuff before the level.
---
Well, there could be some more examples but these are the biggest I can remember off the top of my head. Again, these tend to be fringe cases, so aside from them, a better PC shouldn't give you an advantage in a multiplayer game.
Why are there only like three people in this thread that know what FOV is and don't get their panties in a twist?
Anyway, this is the source, as found on reddit. Very reputable, for sure.
I would put some emphasis on "currently" and "Aiming preferences, viewmodels, dizziness, nausea - these are all factors we considered when designing the current FOV and will remain sensitive and very open to as testing continues."
So to clarify - the FOV of Overwatch is under development and subject to change based on feedback. So stop yer doomsaying and go complain about something else. I'm sure EA or Ubisoft have done something stupid recently.
I'll judge the game when it actually is available for play, not theoryplaying and rumor-milling and pre-release bashing. If you don't like the concept of the game I understand, but its hard to make any real judgments on anything you have no possible way of experiencing yourself at the moment. I've got a feeling it'll be a decent game, maybe not the most awesomely perfect game ever made and no one will ever beat this game in 100 years of development cycles, Citizen Kane of PvP team based FPS combat, but it also won't be the Slaughtering Grounds level of awfulness.
Of course asking any gaming community to reserve judgments for when the game is available and playable and, wait for it, in a genre one actually likes and would want to play is tantamount to a mortal sin. The person requesting such insane things like reasonable discourse and fact-based, evidence gathering, experience must be some kind of idiot, right?
That said, Blizzard has a long and storied history of getting their games mercilessly mocked by PC Gamers during the development process and then selling eleventy billion copies at launch, so I'm pretty sure they'll come out of it just fine.
Yeeeah with the exception of Diablo 3 who eventually ironed out it's many many pairs of pants. This trend happens alot, so I'm staying quiet here. I'll be judging internally but I'm not putting letter to the internet.
90 fov is the bare minimum that's acceptable for FPS. CS:GO is the most competitive game that runs it, under criticism and with no response from the developers(as far as I know).
Now we have to play at a certain aspect ratio to get an advantage
- Health reason: it can look wrong for the players. A too low FoV can give some people headaches or nausea, since what they see isn't what they should be able to see. I don't know the exact reason that happens but it happens to some.
It's motion sickness ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness ). It falls in the category of motion seen but not felt. In video games can be called simulator sickness.
Videogame-Related Motion Sickness
Videogame-Related Motion Sickness, or VRMS, is a condition where a person exhibits symptoms similar to motion sickness caused by playing video games.
The symptoms are often described as quite similar to that of motion sickness, and can range from headache, drowsiness, nausea, dizziness, vomiting and sweating. Research done at the University of Minnesota had students play Halo for less than an hour, and found that up to 50 percent felt sick afterwards.
In a study conducted by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in a report published May 1995 titled "Technical Report 1027 - Simulator Sickness in Virtual Environments", out of 742 pilot exposures from 11 military flight simulators, "approximately half of the pilots (334) reported post-effects of some kind: 250 (34%) reported that symptoms dissipated in less than one hour, 44 (6%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than four hours, and 28 (4%) reported that symptoms lasted longer than six hours. There were also four (1%) reported cases of spontaneously occurring flashbacks."
The phenomenon was well known in popular culture before it was known as simulation sickness. In the 1983 comedy film Joysticks, the manager of a local video arcade says, "The reason why I never play any of these games, well, they make me physically ill. I mean, every time I look in one of the screens, they make me dizzy."
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