Guild Wars 2

Actua.7521:

Skyrim were two recent releases that were sickening with their default FOV settings.

First thing I did when I got skyrim was set the FoV to 90…

Someone on Reddit posted comparison screenshots that show that increasing your window’s width isn’t really solving the problem because the vertical FoV stays the same.

However, if you decrease the width, you can suddenly see stuff in front of you. Look how much more natural and less staring-at-ground-y the view in the 1:1 screenshot is. Of course, you won’t see things to your left and right.

We need a FoV slider now.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/116r5y/the_lack_of_camera_options_is_really_making/c6jsw3o

Brynna Stormclaw.9621:

With all these threads, I’m beginning to wonder of we are being acknowledged.

Anet – with all due respect I think it is time one of your staff has addressed this issue.
I realise you have a lot going on, but I would think something that affects the physical well-being of your customers would be a pretty high priority.

They already created a thread and locked it. Arena Net does not care if people are getting sick, they care more about their “art” and how we see their “art” (or the lack of art I see with the current FoV)

’I’ve seen a lot of topics on this both here and externally so let me try and address it. The current FOV is going to stay because increasing it, while having some benefits for some players, has too many drawbacks".

1) performance suffers greatly because of how things are built and view distances.

2) art suffers because of texture tiling, LOD problems and just general stretching from the fisheye effect.

3) gameplay suffers because positional awareness becomes less necessary in a game where combat is greatly designed around positioning.

There is a a serious camera problem, however, which is making some players nauseous. We believe a large number of these cases are not FOV related but rather due to bugs in camera smoothing. Because of this we are expediting a quick fix to this issue that is currently in testing and should see the light of day in the next build we do.

Jon" Taken from tread “Camera and FOV (field of view)”

So Arena Net knows about the issue they clearly don’t care and say its from mouse smoothing issues.

I have no problems turning my camera to the left or right with my widescreen monitor, but when I move my camera up and down… It just looks wrong. Especially when going to top-down view. It seems like the camera position changes as you move the camera up. In top-down view if you zoom in/out you can see the camera position moving, quite a bit too. This is slightly perplexing. I’m sure Anet knew of this though and will hopefully fix asap, just as they did with the smoothing.

Also, using the excuse that things would look stretched with a higher FoV is 100% cat. Utter complete nonsense. Use a proper FoV and it will only make the art look better. I’m serious. Like, really serious. (Or as serious as Anet is with it making it suffer. —oh wait…)
I’m not sure how gameplay would suffer if you can already zoom out a fair distance.
How about performance? I don’t think 5~ fps here and there counts as “greatly”, not to mention you could always tune it down if you’re experiencing a “great” fps drop.

Okay, here’s an idea:

When you set a higher FoV, your maximum zoom distance reduces accordingly. This should fix any balance and performance issues, since if adjusted properly you should be seeing just as much with any settings.

PS. Really looking forward to getting first-person view so I can finally start taking proper screenshots.

PPS. Adding to the idea: make FoV slider only affect 1st-person view, if not 3rd person.

“The secret world has a great camera and FoV, and its been praised for it alot of times.”

Too bad the rest of the game was turdmuffins coupled with a monthly fee.

We absolutely need a fov slider!

With a FoV slider and a vertical offset slider (to move the camera up, and move our character closer to the bottom of the screen), maybe:

a) We will finally be able to see the buildings, trees, mountains and (gasp!) the sky. All things that the game artists spent a lot of time creating and which we can’t see because the camera height and reduced FoV force us to look at the ground all the time (compressing all the action into a narrow band while wasting half my screen space showing me the ground behind my player).

b) We won’t have to keep looking at the top of the screen (where out enemies are) and then at the very bottom, to see the range indicators. Then back to the top, then back to the bottom. It’s just horrible un-ergonomic design. Widening the FoV and raising the camera would let us have the enemies near the middle of the screen, which would reduce eye strain from looking up and down all the time.

c) Our own character wouldn’t keep blocking our view when we try to look up.

The game engine can already change the FoV (and already does it in boss fights and some vistas), there are external tools to change it, and people with multiple monitors (a configuration supported by Arena Net) already get a much bigger horizontal FoV (which is really what matters for PvP). So the arguments of “performance impact”, “engine limitations” or “gameplay impact” are complete BS.

I get a feeling that there was some argument inside Arena Net where some developers wanted a wider FoV and someone higher up decided to impose his decision, and is now sticking to that decision despite the negative player feedback.

This is a basic health and ergonomics issue, and it’s costing you players. Virtually every other 3D game has a FoV slider (or a choice of different “cameras”, with different FoV), and GW2 should have had it there at release.

I have quit playing gw2 until they implement a way to adjust the FoV, its unplayable for me. I really hope they implement a way to change it.

While the fix to mouse smoothing helped somewhat with the camera jerkiness, I still can’t play this game with the default fov, it’s just too narrow and gives me a headache. I really want to play the game, but if they don’t enable a fov slider I may have to get a refund, cause I don’t feel like getting banned for using a 3rd party tool.

I don’t know if this is the appropriate thread, but when I’m inside narrow passages or corridors the camera angle is extremely awkward, esp in places with narrow ceiling, like dungeons.. it zooms in so close that i cant see what im attacking..

Having to deal with my own set of severe vestibular issues, the fact that AreaNet doesn’t seem to want to budge on this situation is very troubling. Guild Wars 2 is perhaps the only PC game that I can think of that makes me truly sick when I play it (Skyrim did initially until I Googled about it and of course there are those fast paced FPS that always make me sick).

Aside from seeing what these “holiday” events are I don’t think I’m going to be touching Guild Wars 2 until AreaNet offers us a way to adjust the FoV. To put it simply: I have no interest in your art if it makes me sick.

(supressing quotes I made to make my opinion more obvious)

For each argument against the “zoomed out” FoV above there’s obvious ones in favour. ANet should let players themselves sort the compromise out.

1) Player’s can easily decrease other performance settings to compensate or to own tolerance levels of lack of performance.

2) Cropping vs Distortion: take your pick! (“distorted” art vs no art at all)
And to call it distorted at 90 degrees field of view is an exageration, it is equivalent to a 20mm lens which is recurrently used in architecture photography to great positive effect – where straight lines abound and distortion is more sensible. And to mention this argument in regards to a mostly “organic” world is just not suitable.

3) … and that by, one supposes, unbalancing PvP. Wider FoV would only make it easier to those which would adopt it indeed. On the other side is the requirement to keep constantly adjusting camera direction, making all players suffer. But all players would have access to changing it, turning it into a false issue in terms of balance, while forcing a gratuitious effort on the way. But if we widen the issue to PvE, then the issue is totally uncaled for.

Please ANet, lift my restraining order already.

Fact:
We can get nice vertical fov when making the window square or thinner, but with low horizontal fov and unused screen space on the sides.
Fact:
We can get nice horizontal fov when making the window very wide and squished, but with low vertical fov and unused screen space above and below.

So there seems to be no problem with either high vertical fov or a high horizontal fov.
Why can’t we get BOTH a high vertical fov and a high horizontal fov on a full screen?

I completely agree with motion sickness/dizziness on this game. I’ve gamed for years and GW2 and Arkham City are the only games I’ve ever had problems with. I really really liked and disliked Arkham City for its camera control and perspectives. I’ve switched to playing GW2 on my 50" plasma and keep it zoomed all the way out and it’s a bit better.

Camera angles, FOV, and jitter are all issues needing enhancement. I especially notice the effect when up against a wall to jump or in close combat and the camera jitters and flails about. Wow, it’s SO not good for me. I maintain 50fps and tried syncing it to the tv. If anyone has any recommendation for graphics slider options and ticked boxes, please post them.

I’d also like Z axis control of the camera. How this was left out, I have no idea……

KyleQuest.4639:

I’d also like Z axis control of the camera. How this was left out, I have no idea……

Also something I would loe to see a physical slider for ^^

Its amazing how fast this thread drops off the front page, and yet agin amazing how much more pressing of a concern other “it dont make u sick so we can fix those!” issues are, compared to something that, by summing it up:
1. Makes people not feel sick while playing.
2. Lets us apreciate the beauty of the game. (Not a single person can say that seeing more is gonna make them enjoy the game less…)
and
3. All of the above + infinite loop….until its adressed and fixed.

Nexrex.8273:

Its amazing how fast this thread drops off the front page, and yet agin amazing how much more pressing of a concern other “it dont make u sick so we can fix those!” issues are, compared to something that, by summing it up:
1. Makes people not feel sick while playing.
2. Lets us apreciate the beauty of the game. (Not a single person can say that seeing more is gonna make them enjoy the game less…)
and
3. All of the above + infinite loop….until its adressed and fixed.

~2 hours is enough to drop from first page and it’s a big game + many people have no clue what FoV is. :P

That’s because a mixup of terms If you have a fixed focus in order to get a broader view you have to move the camera backward – this is, however, a bad idea because there are already anough issues with the cam bumping into objects

The other way to get a better FoV is to use a different focus – lke you do with a zoom lens on a camera. The camera does not move but you go from wide angle to zoom view.

And that’s the feature I guess people want implemented – not a physical movement of the camera but a zoom function like on a camera – i.e. by changing focal length or whatever that is in English.

Every time I play this game I feel like I miss the scenery. I don’t realise where I am or that I just walked past some amazing looking scenery because like everyone says, Im mostly seeing my own characters back. I read their official response about how they care too much about their artwork to not let us change the FOV. The thing is that I rarely see their artwork anyway!

Nexrex.8273:

Its amazing how fast this thread drops off the front page,

Would you rather this thread was filled up with constant content-less posts that exist only to bump it ?

Because that’s the only way to keep it on the front page.

I really hope ArenaNet will reconsider and include an FOV slider. I have been playing in windowed mode with the window narrowed to get a better perspective, but it’s so far from ideal to have my side vision truncated. Plus, I keep accidentally closing the window.
:(

Panning fast in a game tends to make your brain think that you are sitting in the middle of a merry-go-round, and that is exactly what it feels like when I play first person shooters. I can literally play GW2 10 hours straight without flinching. But playing Borderlands 2 for 20 minutes leaves me nauseated.

The only way I could play Borderlands 2 with my friend is to try panning slower. If you can. It might be kinda hard to do in a fast paced WvW match or PvP (especially considering the aspect ratio of the game). It helps me some in FPS that I play with my friends, holding the motion-sickness feeling at bay for a little while.

http://imgur.com/a/i8sY6

I think it’s obvious how bad the default is….

Please, devs. I am a huge fan of this games landscape design and overall look. Every second i play Guild Wars 2 i am sad not being able to enjoy the scenery as a whole, instead watching at an almost plain looking, not in-depth-going picture. Give it a try and let the players decide if they want higher FoV numbers or not. Surprise us and give away hugs in form of a FoV-Slider. For everyone.

Update from the AMA that happened over at Reddit recently:

“ArenaNetBraeden, ArenaNet Programmer
We’ve heard players loud and clear on this one. But we’re not prepared to answer yet because we just convened a team to investigate, on Monday in fact, and we want to give them time to investigate. For example, there may be a bug affecting FoV calculations in widescreen resolutions. We want to know what’s a bug and what’s by design before we change the design.”

So finally we get an answer! Hopefully they get things sorted fast