Guild Wars 2

Right, as the thread created by Jon Peters was closed (expected) can we please have a continued and more importantly civil discussion regarding this matter?
The discussion is not based on the old FOV threads but based only on what Jon Peters wrote regarding FOV – This thread is for those who wish to discuss the reasons why Arenanet should allow the players to choose their own FOV.

Below is Jon Peters initial post:

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

Below is my last (edited) post from the closed thread:

Regarding the statement that an increased FOV will affect performance so much that it’s one of the reasons why it won’t be implemented:

Core i5 @ 4.3GHz & 670GTX (More or less maxed out settings):

1920×1200 – 60 FOV: 73 FPS @ Arah Entrance
1920×1200 – 90 FOV: 67 FPS @ Arah Entrance

FoV values are calculated, it’s late and I’m not going to bother with that in this post.
73/67 = ~1.09 -> 9% FPS decrease

I don’t play PvP – I play Exploration Dungeons, 9% FPS decrease does not bother me.

The FoV was obtained using a high resolution monitor, not using any exploits.
Camera was zoomed out as much as possible.

They don’t care that you can run it, they care about losing their min spec people. Why FOV can’t be a slider I don’t know.

Post based on working with companies that care about altering software based around min spec users.

Dibrom.6408:

They don’t care that you can run it, they care about losing their min spec people. Why FOV can’t be a slider I don’t know.

Post based on working with companies that care about altering software based around min spec users.

minimum requirements can’t run much of the game even at 60FoV. Increasing FoV to 90 isn’t going to change anything there. My PC is fairly low end, core2duo @2.7ghz with a gtx550ti. I get absolutely no performance drop from running at a higher FoV that I don’t already get at low FoV.

maybe they are trying to say that if you can see more then the person who cant especially in pvp you have an advantage over them. like when you can see people to the side of you without having to turn and look that it wouldnt be fair to the person who cant see whats on the side of them without having to turn. but i do agree it would be nice to have.

Addressing the idea that we should bear with a console-tier FOV “for art’s sake” (paraphrasing) is absurd. I can only assume that the majority of players spend the bulk of their play time staring at low-rez ground textures, rather than many of the graphically impressive things that the environmental artists have created.

Fixes for low FOV in PC games is usually one of the first things to come from the modding community, and with good reason. Citing it (low FOV) as industry standard when higher FOV options are among the most requested additions to PC games, and most complained about omissions when they’re absent boggles the mind.

SoulTrain.2157:

maybe they are trying to say that if you can see more then the person who cant especially in pvp you have an advantage over them. like when you can see people to the side of you without having to turn and look that it wouldnt be fair to the person who cant see whats on the side of them without having to turn. but i do agree it would be nice to have.

But people with triple-monitor setups already have this advantage. Adding an FoV slider would only improve the situation by giving everyone this option.

I understand their reasons from their perspective. It reminds me a bit of how apple does business. You kinda have to experience their product(s) the way they want you to, and you don’t get a lot of say in it other than that. It just kinda stinks for all the players who really want this option.

Biggest difference here is that by-and-large we all aren’t apple fans or apple consumers. We’ve been subscribing to a completely different school of thought in the PC Gaming world for several decades, and ANet’s stance goes against what we know from prior experience.

SoulTrain.2157:

maybe they are trying to say that if you can see more then the person who cant especially in pvp you have an advantage over them. like when you can see people to the side of you without having to turn and look that it wouldnt be fair to the person who cant see whats on the side of them without having to turn. but i do agree it would be nice to have.

He said exactly that. What he failed to mention (or even acknowledge) is that three monitor setups already do benifit from a wider FoV, a feature promoted by Anet. Not only that, it has barely a performance decrease. This makes the “unfair” argument completely moot, because it already is, to all of us refused the option to increase our FoV to match 3 monitor setup players.

Coming from a developer, he clearly already understands this, making his last point dishearteningly disingenuous.

Hickeroar.9734:

I understand their reasons from their perspective. It reminds me a bit of how apple does business. You kinda have to experience their product(s) the way they want you to, and you don’t get a lot of say in it other than that. It just kinda stinks for all the players who really want this option.

And that’s precisely why I don’t buy Apple products. (well, that and the absurd cost.) If I don’t like something about the product you’ve sold me, I should be able to change it freely as long as it does not affect other users of the product.

bwillb.2165:

minimum requirements can’t run much of the game even at 60FoV. Increasing FoV to 90 isn’t going to change anything there. My PC is fairly low end, core2duo @2.7ghz with a gtx550ti. I get absolutely no performance drop from running at a higher FoV that I don’t already get at low FoV.

Say that when you have an integrated card. Changing to 90 would make a hard to run game unplayable. Every time you raise the min specs you lose a customer base.

(For reference I’m one of those overclocked high end snobs)

DethLocke.6170:

SoulTrain.2157:

maybe they are trying to say that if you can see more then the person who cant especially in pvp you have an advantage over them. like when you can see people to the side of you without having to turn and look that it wouldnt be fair to the person who cant see whats on the side of them without having to turn. but i do agree it would be nice to have.

He said exactly that. What he failed to mention (or even acknowledge) is that three monitor setups already do benifit from a wider FoV, a feature promoted by Anet. Not only that, it has barely a performance decrease. This makes the “unfair” argument completely moot, because it already is, to all of us refused the option to increase our FoV to match 3 monitor setup players.

Coming from a developer, he clearly already understands this, making his last point dishearteningly disingenuous.

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

The FOV also doesn’t change on the primary display, only on the peripheral displays. The FOV change is also quite dramatic and increases from center to the widest angle.

http://i.imgur.com/MgVlz.jpg an example of it, no bezel correction yet in that one.
http://i.imgur.com/vJk4E.jpg a GW2 shot, again…most of the FOV changes are on the peripheral.

Dibrom.6408:

bwillb.2165:

minimum requirements can’t run much of the game even at 60FoV. Increasing FoV to 90 isn’t going to change anything there. My PC is fairly low end, core2duo @2.7ghz with a gtx550ti. I get absolutely no performance drop from running at a higher FoV that I don’t already get at low FoV.

Say that when you have an integrated card. Changing to 90 would make a hard to run game unplayable. Every time you raise the min specs you lose a customer base.

(For reference I’m one of those overclocked high end snobs)

I’d hazard a guess that if you had an integrated graphics solution, the game would already be unplayable no matter what the FoV is.

SoulTrain.2157:

maybe they are trying to say that if you can see more then the person who cant especially in pvp you have an advantage over them. like when you can see people to the side of you without having to turn and look that it wouldnt be fair to the person who cant see whats on the side of them without having to turn. but i do agree it would be nice to have.

That argument doesn’t work because people with 3 monitors already play the game with a higher FOV than everyone else. If they truly wanted it to be “fair” they would give us an FOV slider.

Tradewind.6913:

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

Oh yes, it absolutely can decrease performance when you significantly increase the resolution. But that comes from increasing the resolution, not from increasing the FoV.

Grab that GW2 camera tool that was posted in the other thread. decrease your FoV to, say, 45. You most likely didn’t see much performance increase. But if you were to, say, go from 1080p to 720p, you’d get a large performance increase.

Was just pointing it out because the person I quoted said the performance cost was negligible. When in actuality it’s about a 30-40% drop.

Dibrom.6408:

Changing to 90 would make a hard to run game unplayable. Every time you raise the min specs you lose a customer base.

Why would you want to forcibly change the FoV for everyone? Why not instead introduce options so players can choose? If I understand your point correctly, should all high quality/appearance options be removed from the game then as well?

Didn’t the developers of “The Darkness II” try the ‘for arts sake’ argument to justify not giving FOV options ?
Didn’t they also get called out for it ?
Didn’t they then patch in FOV options ?

Then there was Borderlands 1. Which was so messed up that you had to bind your walk key to set the correct FOV with every step. Major outcry there.
Borderlands 2 however was much better in those technical issues.

Has any PC game been allowed to get away with forcing the wrong FOV upon us ?
Why did ANET think this would be any different ?

Tradewind.6913:

Was just pointing it out because the person I quoted said the performance cost was negligible. When in actuality it’s about a 30-40% drop.

The performance cost is negligible if you keep the same total screen resolution / pixel density. This statement was made in response to the Arenanet dev saying that just increasing FoV would create a significant performance issue.

That’s not what the poster said, but whatever not a big deal.

Dibrom.6408:

bwillb.2165:

minimum requirements can’t run much of the game even at 60FoV. Increasing FoV to 90 isn’t going to change anything there. My PC is fairly low end, core2duo @2.7ghz with a gtx550ti. I get absolutely no performance drop from running at a higher FoV that I don’t already get at low FoV.

Say that when you have an integrated card. Changing to 90 would make a hard to run game unplayable. Every time you raise the min specs you lose a customer base.

There is no single FOV that will work for everyone, meaning there is no solution that can work other than letting us change the FOV. Once we can change the FOV, the default doesn’t matter for us. So keep the default where it is now and nothing should change for the low end people.

Lets take two hypothetical games:
– The stupid default. They have a stupidly low FOV of only 10. But they also let you set the FOV to whatever you like.
– The better default. Their default FOV is much better than the first game, around 75 or so. However, they don’t allow you to change it.

Which game has handled FOV better ?

Snoring:
Obviously “The Stupid Default” is the better choice. Anyone who disagrees hasn’t played a game with a default FOV they didn’t like.

The obvious example to this is Dead Space. CRAZY low FOV, and a complete inability to change it. Gave me motion sickness every time, so I never finished the game. That’s a disaster for a company trying to sell an MMO. When people quit the game, they have the potential to lose a noticeable amount of income over it.

Dibrom.6408:

bwillb.2165:

minimum requirements can’t run much of the game even at 60FoV. Increasing FoV to 90 isn’t going to change anything there. My PC is fairly low end, core2duo @2.7ghz with a gtx550ti. I get absolutely no performance drop from running at a higher FoV that I don’t already get at low FoV.

Say that when you have an integrated card. Changing to 90 would make a hard to run game unplayable. Every time you raise the min specs you lose a customer base.

(For reference I’m one of those overclocked high end snobs)

I do have an integrated card (intel HD3000; it isn’t even DirectX 11 hardware compatible). I play on terrible systems (and have done so for years). Lets clear some things up that I see popping up.

1. We are able to play and even enjoy the game with a FPS that you’d deem unplayable. I’ve raided and done pvp on computers that averaged 10 fps through it and still completed the content (on a number of games). You may think that dropping from 15 fps to 12 fps (which is probably costing you at least 10 fps) is a deal-breaker. It’s not.
2. In addition, the performance impact being touted is grossly exaggerated. I run windowed mode that is stretched just so I can have a more reasonable FoV. I’ve done Claw of Jormag a large number of times. The performance hit is so negligible that it’s laughable.
3. When you purchase a game that receives updates when you have min specs, you expect to lose the ability to play. When I was first playing WoW (this was the classic version), I barely scraped by the requirements. When BC was announced, I knew there was no way I’d be able to play without a system upgrade. It’s my problem, I’m not blaming them for actually staying current with technology.
4. Optionality is a good thing. I can’t enable shadows without taking a hit, does that mean to take them out of the game? No. Simply having the option does introduce a little overhead, but that doesn’t justify ruining things for others. There is no reason not to have a slider, even if we can’t use it. The only way to justify it is the “pvp advantage.”
5. The advantage in PvP is negligible. Even if they gave you 180 degree vision, I wouldn’t care about the disadvantage. On bare bone systems, you expect and can easily go three tenths of a second without even seeing a new frame. Trust me, that massive amount of time is so much worse, I wouldn’t even notice the FOV difference. Min spec players are used to being “outmanned” in pvp because our system can’t hack it. If you try to take pvp too seriously and play on min reqs, you’ll quit the game regardless of a FOV advantage. There is no way to compete against hard core pvpers. There is a reason no one shows up to a game tournament with a minimum spec system. Again, it’s my fault. I recognize that.

TLDR: I, a min spec player, support the change. There is no reason a min spec player should be the reason not to have a FOV slider.

In addition, the performance impact being touted is grossly exaggerated. I run windowed mode that is stretched just so I can have a more reasonable FoV. I’ve done Claw of Jormag a large number of times. The performance hit is so negligible that it’s laughable.

I get like 5fps on that fight thanks to the sheer number of people that show up… Do you actually get more than 1 or 2 on an integrated gpu?

Why are people slamming me as some sort of FOV nazi?
I suggested sliders in the second post of this thread.

@bwillb.2165 (Since quote’s not working)
It’s not.

@Nepumuk.6071
I’m not defending Anet’s decision, I’m providing a rationale for it. Take that anger out on Jon Peters.

@Snoring Sleepwalker.9073
Go into a design meeting. The topics of ones I’ve been around usually are [paraphrased]:
“How can we make things simple? Our users are pretty stupid”
“That’s a lot of work for our programmers, could we do this instead?”
“It works as is, let’s not waste resources changing it when [excuse]”

@Dosvidaniya.3260
1. I do deem your FPS unplayable. I bet money so does Anet. You’re not going to convince suits (Jon Peters? I dunno) otherwise.
2. You’re breaching some arbitrary FPS number someone at Anet set.
3. While you are correct about losing the ability to play, I don’t think Anet wants to lose that ability a month within their launch.
4. See my universal software meeting above
5. The “advantage” excuse is exactly that, an excuse. If they believed that it would hurt their E-Sporting they would have locked the FOV and not made it so easily changed in windowed mode.

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

This is due to the huge hop in resolution. The extra fov gives maybe a 5-10% hit, if that. Everything else is the graphics card trying to draw them pixels. I know what I’m talking about here, I keep having slowdowns on my 30" screen in the more graphically demanding games, because

I get like 5fps on that fight thanks to the sheer number of people that show up… Do you actually get more than 1 or 2 on an integrated gpu?

He’s probably getting practically the same amount of FPS as everywhere else, because the game is CPU bottlenecked. HD3000 is standard in i5/i7 afaik.

I get terribad performance on my HD6950, because I have an old core2duo, even though it’s overclocked by almost 50%. My friend has great performance on his old HD4870, because he has an i7. My GPU runs at 20% in wvw, his runs at 100%. I drop down to like 15 fps, he runs at 30-40+. GPU makes much less difference. In non-wvw content we both run at a steady 60 fps vsync.

We’ve been subscribing to a completely different school of thought in the PC Gaming world for several decades, and ANet’s stance goes against what we know from prior experience.

What I just can’t take is that they’re trying to shove console style fov (hi there, mass effect :argh:) down our throats in a PC game.

The “advantage” excuse is exactly that, an excuse. If they believed that it would hurt their E-Sporting they would have locked the FOV and not made it so easily changed in windowed mode.

I have a 30" screen, and I’m correctly positioned 60 cm (2 feet) away from it. All the corners of my screen are deep in peripheral vision. If FoV would be a balance issue, this is it. I can’t see as much on my screen as someone on a 13" laptop, because they have all the details nicely clumped together. 13" screens are OP. FoV is OP. Give us more FoV on large screens. Or something, I dunno.

This is how ridiculous the “pvp advantage”/“for the art” claim is. Different setups have different requirements/behaviours.

Ed: And yes, the game is actually a bit less annoying on my 13" laptop. If only the performance in wine wasn’t so appalling, I’d probably play on my laptop. 60cm from 13" feels just right in this game. Le sigh.

Truga.5897:

He’s probably getting practically the same amount of FPS as everywhere else, because the game is CPU bottlenecked. HD3000 is standard in i5/i7 afaik.

i3 (M370 @ 2.40GHz – Arandale to be specific). I usually get about 7 fps there.

Dibrom.6408:

Why are people slamming me as some sort of FOV nazi?
I suggested sliders in the second post of this thread.

@Dosvidaniya.3260
1. I do deem your FPS unplayable. I bet money so does Anet. You’re not going to convince suits (Jon Peters? I dunno) otherwise.
2. You’re breaching some arbitrary FPS number someone at Anet set.
3. While you are correct about losing the ability to play, I don’t think Anet wants to lose that ability a month within their launch.
4. See my universal software meeting above
5. The “advantage” excuse is exactly that, an excuse. If they believed that it would hurt their E-Sporting they would have locked the FOV and not made it so easily changed in windowed mode.

I don’t think they are slamming you; or I hope they aren’t. You provided a logical reason as to ANet’s logic. Counter arguments ensued.

I just posted in an attempt to explain some stuff about low end users. The biggest is that arbitrary break points just don’t work with low end users. As an example, Bwillb asked about the claw of Jormag. Honestly, that lag that really upsets others usually means I get more done because I’m so used to it. Low end users get used to it or they get out. We’re so far below reasonable breakpoint placement that it is pointless to use us as justification. (And this is on systems that actually fall into min specs; in no way do I violate the min).

Yeah, I can understand that they wouldn’t want to leave us out in the cold one month out, but that assumes they could and would actually patch the game already. If they gave me a month warning right now that I couldn’t play anymore, I’d totally understand. It’s really not reasonable as a low end user to expect more than 3 months without getting the first major patch in an MMO. At that point, all is fair. As soon as they announce it, I’d probably upgrade my PC (like a 99.9% chance) because I know this thing is old and not a gaming PC.

Also Dib, this is less to you and more to ANet. I know you want the slider and are a logical, reasonable person. I just wanted to let ANet know that low end users really aren’t a reason while letting people learn a little bit about low end users.

On an i3, at least half of that FPS drop is probably still due to the CPU, rather than the GPU. So yeah, i3 might be pushing it for big events. :P

I remember when I started quake 2. I’d play with my fps capped to 28 (because the game ran better that way, no idea why), but the p75 with no accelerated graphics could barely manage 25 at best, and that’s at 320×240. In a game like quake, that’s… yeah. Most would call it “unplayable”. I owned like a boss anyway. You simply get used to it, to the point that people just won’t know and think you’re just the next person that’s owning them. Now that I have a job and all that fluff in my life, I’d just get a new PC, but back then, I just got used to it. It’s easy, you don’t even have to try, you just play the thing and it happens after a couple weeks. People don’t know about it, because they usually never experience it, or just buy a better PC quickly.

It’s very hard to actually have a civil discussion on this topic when the reasons for not providing us with a proper FoV options are so laughable.

Not to mention the fanboys that know next to nothing about the subject trying to take potshots at everyone and providing reasons that are beyond their knowledge.

I’ll still try though.

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.

I feel the need to mention that no one here has ever tried to FORCE a FoV change on the entire player-base. We want an option to increase FoV to a point where playing the game does not cause discomforts, things like feeling claustrophobic, eye strains/fatigue, and of course the big one, nausea or motion sickness.

Again, we want OPTIONS, not just another enforced FoV.

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

If you could just elaborate on this please?
People would like to know what you are talking about here?
Are there specific engine limitations that you absolutely can not overcome, or what?

As for the performance.

This is why the FoV should be an option. People who want to have their FoV high can chose the option and see if the performance decrease justifies the benefits.

Furthermore you have to realize that for many people who have an issue with FoV are those people who will flat out QUIT the game because of it. The issues I described are not some minor pain in the kitten the are game-breaking factors. No one wants to play a game that makes them nauseous after 30 mins.

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

Ok Im sorry, but this by far the thing that infuriates me to no end!

The art does NOT suffer, especially not due to the fish eye effect!

Why do people always think of the FoV as though we all want to run around with FoV set to 200? It’s absolutely ridiculous. We want a decent FoV slider, somewhere in the 60-90 range.

The fish eye effect is not something that the PLAYER (you know, the guy that will be looking at all that fancy art) is going to notice. That is because the fish eye part that will be on the edges of the screen will be in the players peripheral vision, thus making the playing experience similar to real life. For those who don’t know, the humans also have a “fish eye” but no one notices it, just like no one will notice it while playing.

I AGAIN feel compelled to mention that the fish eye effect is not going to be so incredibly dramatic as people are trying to characterize it.

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

This is an area that we can agree to disagree I guess, but I honestly can’t see why allowing a player to have a high FoV will suddenly make the gameplay unbalanced, and makes positional awareness less necessary?

Seriously I don’t even get that argument!

That like saying that if I want a better scope on my rifle in a shooter game I am making the use of a rifle less necessary.

The importance of positional awareness will NOT change, the higher FoV will just simply allow people to have a BETTER positional awareness.

Just because I will be playing with a higher FoV does not mean that all of the sudden I don’t need to be dodging those attacks or getting out of that AoE spell. All it means is that I will have a better sight of my surroundings, therefore allowing me to make a more informed and better decision on how to position myself.

Also it’s kinda hard to take this reason seriously when ANET officially supports an increased FoV for people with triple monitors and those who can just simply make a custom resolution with a wider aspect ratio. In both of those instances the FoV is increased. So how can we possibly take their word seriously when they are contradicting themselves in such a huge way?

I would also like to close out with this.

There are many ways to increase your FoV in this game.
Using a widescreen hack.
Changing your resolution to a wider aspect ratio.
Playing in windowed mode and resizing the game to a wider aspect ratio.
Playing the game with 3 monitors.
Fighting a boss like the Shadow Behemoth or one of the dragon lieutenants.

So with all of these ways to play the game with an increased FoV, I find it HARD to believe that this is nothing more than a “It’s my way or the high way” response from the developers. Their excuses are laughable, and they are trying to sound reasonable and get their fanboys/girls to rally for the defense.

I’m sorry ANET, but you are WRONG on this one! You can check my comment history, I have been defending this game and ANET on many things, but I can not defend you guys on this one. You are wrong, and there is no shame to admit that! Haters are gonna hate, and you will suffer criticisms on your thick-headiness on this issue, But I feel that you will gain a lot more respect and support from the community who will BENEFIT from this.

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

Maybe if you are running on a rig more than 2 years old, in which case you wouldnt be running this game too well anyway. In addition, multiple mods already do this just fine!! AND, its already in the game! Any dragon or big boss fight will increase your FOV anyway! This one is just a blatant lie IMO

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

IMO this is also bull. If you put the game into windowed mode and pull it down, the game looks just as good if not better with this kind of FOV stretch. The fisheye isnt even noticeable until you get up past 105. Again, let the players decide!

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

Assuming this one is based from a PvP perspective, in the mean time with the current FoV settings team fights are a mess of particle effects, and in addition to that thieves and warriors can come in and gank people out of nowhere because we cannot SEE them entering the battle. Its not a disadvantage if you give the option to EVERYONE.

Ill end by saying that honestly, I just lost all respect for Jon on this one. Blatantly ignoring something requested by a majority of the playerbase and then making up lies to cover for it is just crossing the line.

Another video ANet should watch.

Dibrom.6408:

Why are people slamming me as some sort of FOV nazi?
I suggested sliders in the second post of this thread.

I’ve lost track of who has made what arguments, and I have a habit of skipping over the posts I agree with. But I have seen plenty of people say that an idea is bad because some people won’t like it forced on them when the initial idea was always optional. So when I see someone making a similar argument, I respond to it, because I don’t want the idea of the idea being mandatory to take off.

@Snoring Sleepwalker.9073
Go into a design meeting. The topics of ones I’ve been around usually are [paraphrased]:
“How can we make things simple? Our users are pretty stupid”
“That’s a lot of work for our programmers, could we do this instead?”
“It works as is, let’s not waste resources changing it when [excuse]”

I see that the third topic suggested there also assumes stupid users. As does the “game x does it just like we do” ANET tried to use in the locked thread.
Come to think of it, so does ANET’s post on the FOV issue. Had they said nothing, this issue would have been left quietly simmering. By making that post, using arguments we have seen before regarding bad console ports (see the posts in this thread talking about The Darkness), they ignited this anger.

The performance argument does not work for these reasons:

1. It should be the players choice. If they want the game to run better, they can lower the fov.

The argument that comes out of this is that then the people with the better systems, and hence the higher fov, will have an advantage.

But this advantage is meaningless. The people with the better systems will have a higher frame rate, which is more valuable than a higher fov, they already have an advantage, you can’t take that advantage away from them.

Counter-strike, an extremely competetive PC game, arguably the best pc FPS of all time, had a fov slider. CS:S has a fov slider.

As far as I am aware, SC2 also has different fovs depending on the resolution chosen, but I cannot confirm this.

The 2nd argument A-net gave is because of the art suffering. Again, it’s the players choice. Doing the windowed and squashing it vertically trick, the game looks fine. Again, the people with the low end computers are already suffering from really bad textures.

The 3rd argument is rather silly. Again, the counter-argument is “counter-strike”

Their reply angers me. I do not think I can play this game anymore with such a low FOV. I love this game, it is one of the best games I have played, but the FOV just sickens me, literally.

Snoring Sleepwalker.9073:

they ignited this anger.

I was just gonna bump these topics every now and then, but with the amount of ignorance in the dev’s post, I’m not going to stop until I either quit the game (not any time soon) or we get a fov slider, no matter how many posts the devs make, excusing themselves from this mess they’ve just pulled themselves into.

As has been pointed out in the video I posted above; this issue is quite possibly more important than colour blindness options. No, I’m not saying that dev time for that should go into this, I’m saying this is equally or more important than that, as it affects more people (including colour blind ones), and as such should also be given enough attention.

It’s one slider ANet. You already have the capability to do it, people have already proven that larger fov works fine (see: window stretching, boss events, even hacks for kitten’s sake). One slider and the whole problem goes away, just like a whole problem went away with the colour blind tickbox.

Also, I know a colourblind person. She says that low fov is worse than not having colour blind options. That, IMO, says quite a bit about this whole thing.

Edit: Also, people on reddit have been saying they’ve had successful refunds after requesting them, and specifying the reason as being unable to play the game without feeling sick due to FoV.

Wait…

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

No, the gameplay suffers at the moment because we can’t see anything.

This is the same reason blizzard used in warcraft 3/starcraft 2 to force people into an extreme zoom mode while playing (try playing those games on a huge screen). Something about “having the player position the camera correctly so that’s an acquired skill too”. Sorry, but that’s just playing the UI. I’m pretty sure I saw a “play the game, not the UI” in one of ANet’s blogs this year. Seeing this excuse come up has me confused now.

I would find Dev on the GW2 team whom has a good knowledge of photography and ask him this question:

“If you were going on a holiday to do some landscape photography, and you had a choice of 2 lenses, 24mm (ff equiv) or 50mm, which one would you pick?”

Obviously the wide angle one, as it generally gives a better impression of your surroundings. Another reason to have a wide angle FOV, so that you can see more of the game. Walking round Timberline falls I was just thinking to myself the whole time “This would be great if I could actually see it all at once without spinning my camera round”.

By the way, I don’t think camera zoom changes the fov. It just moves the camera. I think.

ref.8196:

I would find Dev on the GW2 team whom has a good knowledge of photography

I think it’s safe to say that this scenario does not exist, else we wouldn’t have been in this situation to begin with.

Truga.5897:

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

This is due to the huge hop in resolution. The extra fov gives maybe a 5-10% hit, if that. Everything else is the graphics card trying to draw them pixels. I know what I’m talking about here, I keep having slowdowns on my 30" screen in the more graphically demanding games, because

Yes I am aware of that….person I was replying to said that people with “3 screens have an advantage” and that the performance cost is minimal. Which is inaccurate.

Tradewind.6913:

Truga.5897:

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

This is due to the huge hop in resolution. The extra fov gives maybe a 5-10% hit, if that. Everything else is the graphics card trying to draw them pixels. I know what I’m talking about here, I keep having slowdowns on my 30" screen in the more graphically demanding games, because

Yes I am aware of that….person I was replying to said that people with “3 screens have an advantage” and that the performance cost is minimal. Which is inaccurate.

Well to be fair, the person running a triple monitor setup will receive a substantial FPS decrease, but that’s only due to rendering x3 more pixels.

However, to prove the FPS hit is not so dramatic with an increased FoV is very simple, and you don’t even have to use any third party software.

Just simply go to any world boss in which the FoV is increased, and see the performance.

The FPS decrease is minimal with an increased FoV, and considering that the fact that we want an OPTION to increase FoV, not X FoV forced down everyones throat, that just simply renders their argument against a FoV slider null and void.

Tradewind.6913:

Truga.5897:

As someone with a 3 monitor setup, 3x BenQ XL2420T’s on a GTX 690…there is a significant performance difference at 5760×1080 vs 1920×1080 without altering the quality. Just felt that needed to be clarified.

This is due to the huge hop in resolution. The extra fov gives maybe a 5-10% hit, if that. Everything else is the graphics card trying to draw them pixels. I know what I’m talking about here, I keep having slowdowns on my 30" screen in the more graphically demanding games, because

Yes I am aware of that….person I was replying to said that people with “3 screens have an advantage” and that the performance cost is minimal. Which is inaccurate.

It’s not inaccurate, it’s just not specific. You can have a super-wide setup without increasing the pixel density by decreasing the vertical resolution instead of (or in addition to) increasing the horizontal resolution.. There’s two points being made:
1. People with three-screen setups can get the same advantage that an FoV slider would give. (He doesn’t specifically mention this part, but: the same thing can be achieved with just squashing your window vertically or using a wider monitor)
2. increasing the FoV does not decrease performance.
Both of these are accurate points.

I just think it’s a shame I couldn’t enjoy any of the pretty landscapes while levelling because they wouldn’t really fit on the screen.

Ok, so its time I dump my thoughts on this too. (since I finally managed to log into these forums).
Guild Wars 2 still has many issues, about balance, bugs, etc. But none of those bother me as much as the FoV does. Firstly I was not sure, why I am getting headaches and dizziness while playing GW2 since the PC games I play since I got bigger screen (few years ago) do not have such a kitten FoV.
Than a friend pointed out that is the FoV that is low. I went lurking on internet to learn what is the effect of low FOV and why is affecting me.

So this is what I learned. Most of the people these days have screens that cover more than 90 degree of their field of vision while sitting in front of the pc, so corners of the screen is already in the peripheral vision. That is why a 60-75 degree FOV on such screen is unnatural and your brain gets confused. Its ok for consoles, since the TV is so far away it will not cover the 60 of your vision. I also learned that this is all common knowledge, and are the basics of 3d gaming. Tv = 60 degree, PC when screens were smaller FOV similar to TV was ok-ish, but nowadays 95 is usually the setting that fits most people.

That is also why distorted image due to increased FOV is not noticeable on pc (if you set the FOV correctly, usually 95 on pc games, but a slider is always better). Because the distortion is in our peripheral vision, and our vision there is limited, we do not see the details, but we detect motion (helps awareness).

I was hoping this is something that developers were looking into it, since at least for me, is a huge issue. Seeing many topics about it, got my hopes up. But then the Jon’s response happened….
Seriously!??? That kind of a response I would expect from a random marketing guy caught off-guard with a question he knew nothing about. And not from a “game systems designer”. This is not a personal attack or anything, I just cannot comprehend such ignorance.

performance suffers – valid point but rather have 2FPS less than feel dizzy all the time, also many other settings affect performance waaay more, but are not as important as NOT GETTING DIZZY.
Art suffers because of texture tiling – Has no idea what is he talking about, or a random excuse.
Gameplay suffers because positional awareness becomes less necessary – Has no idea what is he talking about, or a random excuse.

Again I am no expert on this, but this info on FoV is easy to find, and easy to verify. Go into any game that you can set the FoV, and fiddle with it. And the thing that surprises me the most, is that FOV in gw2 is NOT fixed, even if reading JS response it looks like it is. GW2 has some-kind of “minimum FOV”. For example if you put the game windowed and reduce the vertical size, you will notice that although vertical FOV will stay the same, the lateral will increase. Not to even mention, the instances where FOV changes because of boss fight……

Anyway there are already legit workarounds to fix this yourself, but are or annoying or expensive:
1) windowed mode: play windowed resize the gw2 window to fit in your 60 degree vision. Because the “minimum FOV” mentioned above, is enough to just shrink the window vertically, so only the height of the window falls into your 60 degree(or whatever you feel comfortable with 60-75) field of vision.
2.) buy a smaller monitor, or go further away from the monitor ……
3.)those multiple monitor setups, providing you are far enough so the height of monitor falls into your 60 degree FOV.

So someone please explain it to me. Why any of this solutions are better, and “easier” and less confusing for users than a FOV slider with a “lower performance warning” and a limit to let say 100 degree fov (if they really are concerned about pvp advantage as stated by JS) but they clearly are not since the FOV does gets increased if you “stretch” the resolution. Actually since this game is PC, MAC ONLY (not a crappy console port), a fixed 90-95 would be fine too.

At least I can play normally gw2 since now I play windowed and I do not suffer the dizziness any more, but is annoying as hell when accidentally clicking on desktop outside the window since there is no mouse “capture” to prevent getting mouse outside the window.And obviously it kills the immersion. So is not that bad. But the JS’s response really angered me…

TLDR: angry at JS ignorant reply on a serious issue. But if you are getting dizzy as me, just play windowed.

Edit: http://xkcd.com/1080/large/

ref.8196:

Wait…

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

No, the gameplay suffers at the moment because we can’t see anything.

I agree with this completely.
At the moment I’m having a hard time playing the game in fullscreen 1920×1200 but I’m rather forced to play the game in windowed mode with reduced window height to actually see the world, and honestly it looks so much better.
I love the art & visual style of GW2, it’s a huge shame that you can’t experience with a limited FOV of around 60-65.

I think this: New GW2 hardware suggestion
Would fix all the problems while mantling the the FOV unchanged.

It’s probably good that they do not think this is a problem. This means that I cannot play the game any longer, which is good for me, as I have studies to concentrate on.

I’m currently playing with a custom 1920×500 resolution, shown in a sample attached screenshot. There’s another screenshot at 1920×1080 for comparison, taken at the same place with the same camera zoom.

I keep wondering why this is allowed, while playing the game at the proper 1920×1080 resolution with the same FoV is not. It’s forcing players without access to a 3-monitors setup to do one of:
- Putting up with a bezel in the middle of the screen to use a 2 monitors setup.
- Play the game with black borders above and below it, or in a similarly resized window, to gain a higher FoV.
- Play the game as intended while accepting the disadvantage of having lower FoV.

Since some people are simply NEVER satisfied without proof, I would like to present proof for why the 3rd argument is absolutely bogus.

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

Here are some screen shots with custom resolutions that I made using my Nvidia control panel, and ANYONE can do this. This is not a hack and its not an exploit, this is just simply a different resolution setting.

This is the FoV you get with regular 1920×1080/16:9 resolution
http://imageshack.us/a/img694/3038/gw008wu.jpg

This is the FoV you get with custom 1920×945/16:7.875 resolution
http://imageshack.us/a/img825/522/gw007xa.jpg

This is the FoV you get with custom 1920×810/16:6.75 resolution
http://imageshack.us/a/img5/8414/gw006x.jpg

Hey guys, look at all the competitive advantage one could have with a simple custom resolution?

JonPeters: “…positional awareness becomes less necessary in a game where combat is greatly designed around positioning.” https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Camera-and-FOV-field-of-view/first

Larger FoV foes not make positional awareness less necessary, it makes it easier to have positional awareness because the player does not need pan the view so much in order to achieve positional awareness.

All of his comments are really a bunch of bs that anyone who has been playing games for a reasonable amount of time can see through.

1. Performance does not suffer greater then any other visual option or increased resolution setting. You lose about 5fps or so at 90 FOV. Most other games allow it, it’s just a load of bs. I guess we should just limit resolutions and extra graphical settings as well.

2. You see more art, you have less tunnel vision, everything actually improves (up to a level). I agree about the fisheye at extreme levels, but most people want anywhere from 90-100 FOV in a slider, nothing extreme.

3. lol. To me this is the worst one. First off, limiting field of view does not increase need for situational awareness, that’s a load of bs. It really sounds like Jon has never played a competitive FPS before. Situational awareness is not getting tunnel vision and knowing what to do in a given situation based on your surroundings. Having to move the terrible camera around more because the FoV has nothing to do with situational awareness.

This is further proven by pretty much every competitive FPS at e-sport levels since the beginning of time. Each of them allow you to edit FoV and are way more competitive then sPvP in this game. I played TF2 in ESEA for 1.5 years, no one uses default 75 FoV. Situational awareness is huge in those games, it has nothing to do with limiting your vision to unreasonable levels.

Also, the fact that you can increase FoV in a variety of ways, both allowed and 3rd party, further proves that this point is a bunch of bs.

Really, the whole post is them just treating us like idiots.