First person perspective improvements?

Wouldn't it be cool if more games did this?

Plenty already do. See Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light, mods for Fallout: New Vegas, the STALKER series (gas masks are so Russian!), and dozens of others. It is cool, I guess. I don't know if it is an improvement. I can't see for SQUAT in real-life without my glasses. I'm not sure that counts as groundbreaking gameplay: Play as a near-sighted geezer who's glasses fall off his head when he looks down! Thrill at the bluriness of it all!

Wouldn't it be cool? I give it a resounding "Eh." Would this improve modern first-person perspective games? I would say "Nope."

EDIT: The original post was edited to add about 1,000,000 other things, making my reply seem like I ignored everything but the "Wouldn't it be cool" part. I'm not this glib in reality.

I don't think removing motion blur would be an improvement. Motion blur is not a purely cinematic effect, It is not just a result from limitations, or "eye candy" it is used to help your brain see motion better. In real life, the brain has a lot more input, from your inner ear and muscle feedback among other things, which is lacking when you just are presented with a series of still images on a screen in 30-60 frames per second.

If you add motion blur to those still images, the brain has an easier time "stiching it together", and can reduce motion sickness and makes it easier to see how objects move and make the motions feel more fluid.

I wear glasses too, although I don't need them all the time. I was talking more about having the glasses be visible in your field of vision if you are playing as a character that wears them. The game wouldn't be switching between blurriness and crisp focus all the time, the player adjusting them would be just more of a cinematic thing reserved for single player games/modes. I would say at the very most it might blur the view for a split second while the character does the animation. Also, you obviously wouldn't want the character to be doing this every 30 seconds.

Olof: I guess your experience differs from mine, but motion blur in games just gives me headaches. If I turn it off parts of my view are blurry based on what I am focusing on anyway so for me motion blur seems like adding more of what I already have.

Something else I didn't remember, but I've thought before:

You should definitely be able to see your feet, legs, etc. when looking down. I remember watching the pre-release interviews for Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway back in the day where they had you being able to do this, and this was actually the way that you checked how many grenades and magazines that you had left if you opted to turn off the HUD for a more realistic experience (something I did in the two preceding it... no suppression indicators, health, crosshair, etc.. made the game much more fun). Again, none of this is going to take a mediocre game and make it life-altering or anything but, at least to me, they seem like they would provide a better experience. When I was in high school and some in college more subtle kind of features like this would get me a lot more excited than they do now.. I've got much more, realistic? expectations of games these days and realize that a lot of features only provide a small amount of improvment for a small amount of time before you/people in general just get used to them.

3) Six degrees of freedom:
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This is in games like ARMA, flight sims, and vehicles in games like Battlefield, but wouldn't it be more immersive if this was present in more games.
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I think the primary issue with that is a lack of easy to use controls that players can make use of intuitively. Most realism-sims have very difficult to master control schemes - gameplay should be difficult to master, but not controls ("Achievement unlocked! You managed to turn your head slightly.")

Holding a key while using other keys that are held down gets confusing in the midst of battle. If it was one of the shoulder-mounted trigger keys? Maybe. But if it's one of the A, B, X, Y keys? That'd be hard. Especially since you have to remove your thumb from the joystick to reach those.

With the increasing likelihood that VR devices like the Occulus Rift will become mainstream, this will become natural and commonplace in games. To move forward, strafe, or turn around, continue to use your joysticks. To rotate your head, you can actually just rotate your head in real life.

Speaking of strafing - strafing is unrealistic if it's anything more than a single sidestep or two (same with running backwards - one or two steps? Fine. Running backwards continuously? Not really.). But it's easy for players to do, tactically important, and fun, so games should continue to allow it.

However, just to be safe, you turn around every so often to make sure nobody is following you. With 4 degrees of freedom, you have to stop running, and turn to the left or the right and backpedal.

I can pull that off semi-easily with existing controls. Imagine I'm using the arrow keys: Holding the up arrow, I begin to hold the right arrow key to start turning around, then I swap my middle finger from the up arrow to the down arrow, so half-way through the turn I'm running backwards instead of running forward.

I continue moving in one general direction, while flipping around 180 to run backwards while facing my enemies. It takes a few attempts to get it right, but it's pretty easy to learn.

Wouldn't it be cool if more games did this? What if the Half-Life games had had Gordon Freeman's glasses in the field of vision like this:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/10/01/article-0-154A31EE000005DC-185_634x423.jpg

I'm wearing glasses. I don't want to look through my own glasses, look past my nose, look into my monitor (ignoring all the stuff around the monitor), then look through the HUD, then look through another pair of glasses. I want to remove visual clutter, not add it.

I wouldn't mind if the game started with them there each time you boot up the game, but then as you played they faded out gradually over the next five minutes.

One 'Pro' these would have though, is a visual indicator of whether you can currently control your character or not. If all cutscenes happened in third person (or better yet, if there were no cutscenes and every event happened 'in-game' with you never losing control of your character), then every time you see the glasses, you intuitively know that you can move the character again.

Some games do this by using letterboxing for cutscenes, so the change in aspect ration cues to player instead.

I do in-general think games should try darkening the edges of the screen around what you are seeing, but I don't think I'd like more visual clutter.

Metroid Prime was interesting the first time I saw it (especially when looking up and seeing raindrops fall on your visor), but I don't think that that's the direction every first-person game should go.

Overall, props for thinking this kind of things through. I enjoy thinking about these design elements, and have mentally thought through most of them in the past. Most designers probably do. Heck, most gamers probably do. But it's important that it does get thought about and re-analyzed.

I agree about the motion blur. That will likely solve itself though - just like with HDR bloom, when the designers got a new tool they way overused it. Motion blur, reflections, and color bleeding will be overused (and bloom will continue to be overused) for at least a few more years before it looses it's 'newness' and designers reign it in and relegate it to where it's supposed to be: As subtle barely-visible polish that doesn't attract attention but adds quality to the overall whole.

Being able to see your legs? That kind of thing I feel would make more sense when we have full on head-tracking through VR devices. Until then, it feels very... uncanny valley-esqe, where your brain tells you that you didn't move your head and that you aren't really looking at your legs, but you are also pretending (via immersion) that you are looking at your legs, and it just kinda feels weird. Not really-distractingly-weird, just kinda-subtly-in-the-background weird, as two separate lines of conflicting thought have to resolve themselves.

Ultimately, the goal of games isn't to be realistic. It's to be entertaining (including entertainment through hair-ripping difficulty) and immersive. Realism can help us reach better immersion, but only if we don't run into the Uncanny Valley, the Pisa Effect, and other such problems. We need to be able to jump the Uncanny Valley, without straying too far down into it.

The Pisa Effect, I can't find a link to. Named after the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the idea is that even though some things are possible in real life, they are so odd to our senses that if you see it in a game you can't help but think that it's "unrealistic", even though it is. So designers have to tone down some things, because it breaks immersion instead of adding to it.

Ever walk around in real life and see something where you think, "That can't be real!", or "That looks like it's from a videogame.". If the same thing occurs inside a game, it reminds you that you're in a game, and breaks immersion.

You want to preserve immersion in games far more than you want to preserve 'realism'. Reality is weird.

I wear glasses too, although I don't need them all the time. I was talking more about having the glasses be visible in your field of vision if you are playing as a character that wears them. The game wouldn't be switching between blurriness and crisp focus all the time, the player adjusting them would be just more of a cinematic thing reserved for single player games/modes. I would say at the very most it might blur the view for a split second while the character does the animation. Also, you obviously wouldn't want the character to be doing this every 30 seconds.

Again, some games already do this. Please look up the Fallout: New Vegas mod that adds glasses (that can get dirty or cracked) to see how much fun this idea isn't.

You edited your original post to add a bunch of other topics. I'm not sure what you really want to discuss here. None of these things are "improvements" -- they are simply components of some games.

Games should not be hyper-realistic. If they were players would complain that they don't shoot like elite snipers, they can't carry 100 kilos without breakin' a sweat, and that walking speed is PAINFULLY slow.

An improvement on many modern FPP games would be to add some element of fun. Or deisgn creativity. Yes, I'm looking at you CoD: Ghosts.

Maybe if you there was an option in the gameplay settings to turn this kind of thing on or off? [In reference to view obstructions like glasses] I can definitely understand where you are coming from though looking through glasses, at a monitor with a bezel and then through a pair of virtual glasses haha.

Metroid Prime was interesting the first time I saw it (especially when looking up and seeing raindrops fall on your visor), but I don't think that that's the direction every first-person game should go.

I agree. That's what Metroid Prime was *about*, in a sense: being inside that helmet, using its functions, upgrading it, etc. There were a ton of little details to remind you that you were seeing the world through a visor (like seeing Samus's face reflected whenever the lighting conditions are right).

But if a game *isn't* about that, that same level of helmet fetishism would get in the way of whatever the game *is* about.

Metroid Prime was interesting the first time I saw it (especially when looking up and seeing raindrops fall on your visor), but I don't think that that's the direction every first-person game should go.

I agree. That's what Metroid Prime was *about*, in a sense: being inside that helmet, using its functions, upgrading it, etc. There were a ton of little details to remind you that you were seeing the world through a visor (like seeing Samus's face reflected whenever the lighting conditions are right).

But if a game *isn't* about that, that same level of helmet fetishism would get in the way of whatever the game *is* about.

Yeah I guess that is the distinction here. If the game is about making you see the world through the character's eyes, then it is good. If the first person view is simply a camera-like view into the world then no, it wouldn't make sense. I guess my understanding is that the entire point of a first person perspective is to try and make the player feel like they *are* the character, seeing what they see, etc.

I do not having anything to say against these but ai feel none of these would ever be part of the mvp of a game nor would they directly impact fun factor so i am left considering them as suggestions to improve immersion.
In a game that lists immersion as a key component, I am not sure that having the UI wobbling (causing dizziness) would be on the top of my list of features to implement.

Overall I feel you are looking at the added value without considering the drawbacks and cost. There is probably a bigger reason than I can think of why these are not often around, but in general, critical features often involve one of the 3 Cs (camera controls character).

The six degrees of freedom will be more mainstream as new input is implemented. The mouse is slowly being replaced by AR headsets for example, which provide 3d motion which would tremendously help with that.

I guess my understanding is that the entire point of a first person perspective is to try and make the player feel like they *are* the character, seeing what they see, etc.

I guess I can see that. It's a matter of perspective and focus though! I feel the main draw of a first-person camera is to put me into the world, not my eyes into the character.

This varies from person to person. I know two artists/writers very well, and the three of us are all very creative people who chat about our design ideas and works for each others' opinions.

I realized that alot of our differences in creative ideas come down to what our "primary focus" is.

One of them holds story as the primary focus, and the world is merely the setting for the story, and the characters are the vehicle for the story. Don't get me wrong, her worlds and characters are very awesome and aren't shortchanged at all - but the characters and world are tools to tell the story.

The other artist/writer holds her characters as the primary focus. She creates worlds and writes stories to explore those characters. The world and story becomes the tool to explore the characters.

And I am always world-focused. I create stories and characters to flush out and explore my worlds. I try to make interesting stories and interesting characters, but they are the lens through which my world can be explored.

Now just because these three focuses are our primary creative inspirations, it actually, oddly, isn't very noticeable in our works (unless you really are trying to analyze them). I read my story-focused friend's work because I enjoy the world she created. Just like I read Tolkien for the world, whereas others read Tolkien for the characters, and still others read Tolkien for the plot. A good work should be enjoyable to readers coming with any of those three perspectives.

[Edit:] Even in games like Halflife, I feel Gordon Freeman is a vehicle for *me* to personally enter the world. Despite all the characters talking to 'Gordon', and frequently mentioning his name (I think the frequent name-drop might actually be a poor design choice on Valve's part), the reason why the character is a silent protagonist (and why there are no cutscenes where you lose control) is so it can be *you* and so *you* aren't ever forced to speak aloud or do something that you didn't actually speak, and so *you* aren't forced to hear a voice that isn't actually yours. (And no third-person camera moments especially so you are never "out of body").

I would like to argue that motion blur (in very moderated amounts) is healthy for immersion. Camera motion blur makes some people sick, but when used extremely sparsely (imho, HL2 series, Portal and TF2 have the perfect amount of camera motion blur) it only shows when turning your character very fast, making the dramatic movement less jarring instead. As for object motion blur, it is very important and our brains do not filter it out. Observe cars, birds, trains or even people passing you by and you'll notice that they are slightly blurred. I feel that this effect is more important that camera motion blur, and amplifies the feeling of speed significantly.

I do a couple of very simple things to improve immersion in FP views. The main idea is to give the player a feeling of weight, achieved by having a small acceleration period when you start walking, and the opposite when stopping, combined with a very slight head (not HUD) bob that acts differently depending on how you move. I think FEAR does this, Dishonored is also a good but slightly exaggerated example. Don't forget that sound effects play a large role in maintaining immersion.

In regards to the reply above mine, i really like Halo: Reach's motion blur. When you're in a shootout and you're all moving around like crazy (jumping mostly, gotta love that Halo jump) in PvP it really helps make things feel epic and fast paced. In regards to the reply above the reply above me, I probably spend most of my time focusing on story and characters. I can't say one more than the other because I like to tell a good story, but I make it a point to really have people know the effect everything that is happening in it affects the characters and how their different personalities and background change how each one might feel about the events that take place.