Post-Beta thoughts: how Destiny can reach its full potential (Destiny)

by electricpirate , Tuesday, July 29, 2014, 08:03 (3769 days ago) @ narcogen

C. Field of View

Destiny's FoV is about 72 degrees horizontally. That's hardly higher than Halo 3, which many people have criticized for being a bit lacking in peripheral vision. For how low it is, simply looking around and moving feels better than I would have expected, but the view restrictions can be felt when things get messy.

An increase to 80-90 degrees would be welcome (as demonstrated by the near-unanimous praise in the shift in FoV from Halo 3 to ODST).

I think this is a case where what people want (or say they want) isn't always best. Of course I'd like 360 degree wraparound vision, but this wouldn't be good for the game. I'm also betting there's some performance impact of doing this, especially on the older platforms.

Also, ODST did not have any multiplayer included except Firefight, and this may also be a factor. The wider the FOV, the harder it is to sneak up on somebody from the side or behind.

FOV doesn't seem to hurt performance too much in my experience. If you think about how a GPU rasterizes a scene, resolution is far more important. (Basically a GPU samples what color a pixel should look like based on what's in it's path, and handles movement of vertexes and things like that. If you change the FOV you aren't changing the resolution, just the size of everything within that resolution)

Destiny may have some heavy duty polygon culling offscreen it might make some difference, but at a higher FOV you are probably going to be getting more LOD (level of detail) switching to the point where it's more of a wash.

(so yea, it's an effect, but most likely, a small one and something bungie could work around if they wanted to).

As for gameplay, Reach was 90 right? so It's not just MP. I think the other issue is how jarring it is to go from a wide FOV into ADS. COD uses a heavy handed auto aim solution to make that less jarring. I actually wouldn't mind a big jarring jump, Destiny does a good job of making ADS a decision in a fight, rather than mechanical busywork, and the resolution jump would probably emphasize that more.

As for flanking, as said, I think going ADS and map design have more to do with getting flanking into destiny. I personally feel like outflanking is more important in Destiny than in Halo, and more common.

Narrow FOV tends to make people motion sick also, so I'm a big fan of upping it.