I am so sick of seeing the same dated viewpoint in all new FPS games. It’s been 20 years plus and only a few games get it right. The ArmA series is first to mind.
I always feel like the character has arms for ears.
Forza 4 or so has head tracking in conjunction with the Kinect, I was expecting big things there for fps’s but nothing so far.
It’s a bit more complicated…let me try and give you some examples
The player has a much smaller field of view upon the world than a real person in the character’s situation would.
the game must somehow display objects that are below the character’s head as higher than they really are for the player to get a better understanding of their relative position. Indeed, when you look straight in reality, there’s a whole range that is outside of the standard 75-90 degrees FOV in games, where you can waive your arms with your eyes able to see them, whereas in a game you can’t. In a game, what happens in front of you must be displayed.
This is done by lowering the camera a bit with respect to its realistic position about the eyes.
The problem really is that while it’s technically possible to put the camera bang in the middle of the face between the eyes it will frustrate you as a player simply because you won’t actually see the weapons the way you think you would.
Also the fact that the tried and tested camera view of FPS’s just works. Maybe it’s because we grew up playing FPS’s this way.
The Arma method of having your head move separately from your arms is more realistic, but also more clunky and not really suitable for fast paced shooting. So it works in a mil-sim but would be very frustrating in something like Quake Champions or even COD.
Very few games actually use a unified FPV / 3PV rig; the way other players see you vs what your FP model looks like is totally different. The FP rig basically has its eyes at chest level and looks like a freaking mutant.
Here’s an interesting look at rig setup, animation, and head stabilization, just to give you an idea of the challenges.
I found the control decent for ArmA, you could opt to have head independant or fixed depending on your combat situation.
When hip firing you can see the gun at the lowered position then clicking ads would bring the gun up to traditional fps view, double click pulls the gun sight to characters eye.
I agree it wont work for areena shooters but stuff like Fallout, the Outerworlds and various others it would.
I think Arma made me a realistic viewpoint snob tbh haha