I have to say it: I hate 3D third person view.
Hours of play like that… Mmmh, maybe not.
That makes 90% of AAA titles sort of meh for me.
From a player point of view I hate it because having your character stabbed in the back while you can’t see shit just sucks so much. Alone in the Dark was the first to fully demonstrate that.
Of course a lot of progress has been done since then going from static cameras to dynamic ones but still, it’s always that Third Person View (TPV) that makes some situation totally unfair and not fun at all.
Also as Kotaku was writing a few days ago, it’s really boring to have the back of your character for hours. That’s what you are going to see the most. His/her ass/back. You couldn’t see why there was a lot of bikini-style female characters starting with Lara’s 70s indy-ish shorts? Well now you know.
Hours of work.. Hours of watching pr0n too I guess
Also, that’s why there is a lot of cinematics in these games, so you don’t have this “corridor” view all the time. Problem is, cinematics are no games.
Now from a developer point of view, 3D camera is a bitch. Almost nobody got it right, except Nintendo. 3D camera is an insane mind fuck to code, shape and make it perfect in every kind of situation, everywhere in the game, without creating bugs. Of course there’s no generic way to do it well, it depends entirely on what your game is about. You definitely can say that this is a massive problem.
One of the trick is to do it ala “japanese”: make the camera quite far away so that the player feels a bit of freedom, use as much special effects as you can so that the player forget the camera rigidness in a 3D world and then you have Devil May Cry/God of War/Bayonetta.
It’s really something I hate in single-player games, it’s just too noisy for me. When aesthetic is special I can have it a bit (Madworld, No More Heroes).
In MMOs it’s different. There’s no fast action pace everytime or you don’t have complex task to do like sneaking around a fortress in a realistic way, so it’s less a problem. You’re only watching stats while chatting in a text box anyway.
That’s why I like 2D and First Person View games. In 2D you always know what is going on around you and in FPV you are supposed to know/remember because you have the freedom to look wherever you want.
Computer games allow us to be free like crazy and TPV is way too much fake freedom and a nightmare to produce to be the default game representation.
Damn, it is!
2 replies on “3D freedom my ass”
Thanks, I’ve always HATED this view since I’ve played the first Lara Croft (not far from the beginning so) !
And that’s maybe also why Valve were so strong about the Half Life serie gameplay : first person shoot, with very immersive and cinematographic story without kicking the player out of the interaction.
For games like Batman, Indiana Jones or any licensed products the problem is more economic, you pay a license, so you have to show the character on the screen nearly all the time, in first view it’ll actually be a game around the character’s world without himself. That’s a paradox, true. At least I think that’s how tie men see the thing, I don’t know if it’s really the player’s feeling. Same kind for MMO, player can buy accessories and dress your avatar like a doll, so show it to him, even if it’s not the best gameplay…
I agree.
3D avatars are new for a lot of people it’s still fancy and used in the "showing off" business model of MMOs a lot.
For licenced products of course publishers would rather have you looking at their IPs than immerse you.
It’s really complex to solve this but TPV is limited, that’s for sure.