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[Radix]

I think players can, will, and should be expected to explore the boundaries of a game, and that's why they sometimes need to be protected from their own tendency to ruin an experience for themselves. It's also why I get annoyed when players are penalized for "abusing" some bug in an online game; that's a bullshit 'morality' excuse for the developers fucking up that you can't apply to people acting within a game world where typical morals seldom apply.

As a designer you should be able to trust yourself to provide the play experience that you want to create, but that only applies when you can trust yourself. The more cooks that are involved, the less that applies, and for big things a console or modding support or whatever is a kind of self-correcting feature.

[powly]

Let me start off with a seemingly-unrelated confession: I love speedruns. Seeing how fast a game can be played through mostly makes me feel very -ish. If you haven't seen, for a great example, the HL1 and HL2 speedruns, go check them out. Quake is also recommended as it was the first game ever to be speedran. The fastest runs are pure win.

And now to relate it to this thread: in my humble opinion console is for the ones who can't play the game (well, if used purely for the purpose of playing around after the game is cleared, it can be quite fun. But make a story mode good enough and it's not necessary) If you want to break the game, find some glitches. There's no need to cheat in the game and most games do let you go OOB if you desire to do so, it might not be very easy but still quite plausible ('okay, I'll jump into that corner and then throw a grenade just in front of me to push me inside the walls')

That said, I don't think you should take away the freedom to some obvious modifications like different keys. Also, if it fits the game or is relevant at all, some UI modification possibilities are always a good thing - just letting the user change the HUD colors or the crosshair prevents the "gosh, I hate that detail" -situation. The FOV question is a bit hard to me but mostly if you just put it high enough, like the 70-90 area, you shouldn't be in too much trouble. Or it could be adjustable for single player but not multiplayer (due to the 'OMG, I SEE MOAR THAN U!' -guys)

[weasello]

I think the FOV argument boils down to "realism." Nobody would fault an artistic game that gives you an FOV of 2 degrees, or a robotic puke-inducing 360 degree FOV robot-vision. Nobody criticized Privateer for the default spaceship viewport being "unrealistic" (it WAS too small, but you could upgrade to "better" ships later in the game). Many cockpit games like flight sims have serious restrictions.

Almost all of the FOV-complainers are FPS players. The standard argument seems to be "I can see X degrees with my eyes, so when I'm playing through the eyes of a character I should be able to see X degrees as well." Though the argument may be flawed in several ways, it remains a valid point.

So the question then becomes,

"Is realistic more fun and a better gaming experience for the player?"

The answer to that is probably "Depends on the design of the game." A lot of times realism isn't fun (if you get hit by one bullet you should be debilitated; two or three bullets you are dead -- WHEEEE). My first hand experience with this is making a 'realistic' platforming game with proper person-moving physics; it was horrible, un-fun, and the final release had gravity-defying feats and double-jumping.

If I know the FOV is going to be "only" 20 degrees, I'm going to make sure my art fits in that; it's going to affect my level design; it makes things like ambushes easier. Allowing someone to crank that out to 270 degrees with an INI edit *will* ruin the game. It's suddenly impossible for a monster to sneak up behind you. Of course it's an extreme example, but extrapolate that down to your argument range- 50 to 100 degrees or so.

But the answer varies from game to game. I suppose you could further say the whole problem was "The levels and gaming experience wasn't balanced to an FOV I'm not comfortable with", which CANNOT be fixed with an INI edit (It's a band-aid that doesn't heal the internal bleeding).

tl;dr:

Only the game designers know how they want you to experience the game. If they are smart, they will design it to be enjoyable to 51%+ of their audience. If you aren't in that 51%+, oh well I guess? You can always take comfort that you are a unique snowflake, or that the developer made a mistake.

Edit: POST NUMBER TWO:

Re: Modding and such - I love buying a lego kit and building the suggested devices, and I like buying a frisbee and throwing it to my friends. However, the longevity of those products comes out of modability - I only ever build the suggested Lego item once, and I use my golf clubs to beat up children at the playground. It's this ability to experience fun *the way I want to* that takes a _great_ product to an _amazing_ product.

[Gnarf]

I think the FOV argument boils down to "realism."

It doesn't. The people complaining want an adjustable FOV, not a realistic one.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i agree with moi: players have the right to play however they want, and developers in turn have the right to make a game that has to be played their way and can't easily be modded or customized

[EmThree]

You should

[saluk]

Games are different from books and movies, I don't think it's right to compare to them. The oldest games really are an expression more of the people playing them than the people making them - modern games are very much a give and take between designer and player. A game that can really ONLY be played in the way the designer intended is extremely limited. I think of games like adventure games, which have somewhat died out, and the popularity of multiplayer, where the gameplay is significantly varied through the random crap other players pull off.

Why are PC (especially fps) gamers upset? That's pretty simple. They were hooked on one drug, but now all that is available is a lesser drug. Withdrawal sets in.

Imagine this. For many years, the automobiles we drive keep getting safer, more features, better sound systems, better AC, GPS systems, better mileage (ok maybe not all the time on that one), etc. Then, the car companies start selling more cars in a another market. Maybe they are selling to a new country where the people there have more recently learned to drive. These people are ecstatic at now being able to get around much easier, for the longest time they have had to walk everywhere. It's a revelation. They don't care about features - they can freaking drive! The world gets smaller for them, they can experience new things, it's brilliant.

The thing is, they have been starved for so long, they just can't get enough. They don't care how much the cars cost, they buy them. They have never heard of AC: they will melt and not mind one bit. Maybe it is a cold country, they wouldn't ever use AC if their cars had it. The car makers realize that in this new country of people suddenly buying cars, they can charge much more, for less features than they can in the other places they have been selling. They start to focus on this country instead of their old one. ALl of their factories are retrofitted to put out cars with the sensibilities of the new country, and they shut down all of their air conditioning manufactories to make room for more volume of featureless cars.

They start selling these stripped down cars in the old markets too. People are mad. Their old cars aren't doing it for them anymore, because cars wear out, but they dont want to give up driving - driving is too valuable for them. So even though the new line of cars being sold to them is worse than the old line (except for maybe a futuristic exterior, possibly better performance etc), they still buy them. They may even learn to like the new cars and forget about all their old features. They will get used to rolling down windows instead of turning on AC. But there will be a lot of them who don't like it. A lot of them who will complain.

Now, games aren't cars, and aren't nearly as valuable, or as much of a necessity. It's a lot easier to buy a console than it would be in the imaginary scenario to move to the other colder country where you wouldn't need AC. I think a lot of gamers feel more entitled than they should. But developers/publishers are treating pc users as second-class gamers, and have been for a while. They make so much less from this segment, maybe they are entitled to treat them that way. Piracy issues are much bigger on pc than on consoles. Maybe the car companies got irritated with everyone fixing up their old cars and still driving them instead of buying new models.

But still, if you are treated in this way, and have been a pc gamer for a long time, and feel like you have invested a lot in this hobby, buying and not pirating, making mods for doom, etc; of course you aren't going to be happy that a lot of that is going away. If there were still enough high caliber games that provided what the customers want, I don't think they would mind. But the appearance is that there are NO games really providing for them anymore. No specific company is entitled to make that game for them, sure. But when NO one is, it's very disheartening. PC FPS = teh doomed, so to speak. It's going the way of the point-and-click adventure game, although thanks to guys like Telltale that is having a bit of a resurgence. Not much of one, but it's hanging on!

The issue doesn't apply so much when you go outside of fps. The fps culture is so strong and until now has been so focused on multiplayer, clans, modding, etc, that we are facing a serious culture shock. PC FPS culture basically formed around doom, quake, etc; and it almost came to be that if there was no level editor in a game, it was literally missing a feature, and no one would care about it. Console fps, basically spinning off of halo, is more about getting a bunch of people in a room and making fun of each other, using the game (playing it as intended) as a springboard. There are similarities between the two worlds, but significant differences as well.

Personally, I'm not much into multiplayer, so I don't really mind about this kind of thing much I love playing single player mods, but if they don't exist for a specific game, I will still play through it once the way it was meant to. If there are mods, I will play them. The mouse smoothing in borderlands did irritate me, I turned it off. If I hadn't found out I could, I don't think it would have changed too much. Being able to change it DID improve the experience - I think it's pretty idiotic for developers to leave out a fix that takes 2 seconds to change, especially when the pc version is delayed vs the console version - but not being able to wouldn't make me want to boycott an otherwise good game.

Depending on what we are talking about, (which feature etc) I don't think developers should try to hard to prevent things. Having an ini to store certain settings is a good idea - as a developer it lets you test to find the right setting for a value, and it lets users customize it a little bit. If developers only want money, I don't think it makes much difference, but if they want customers to be happy? I think they should go out of their way a little bit. Respect your audience. It's not cool to just say, "no, we don't want you to customize controls, because we know better than you what controls would be right for you"

FOV is not quite the same, but it would not have hurt them PR wise to allow this to be changed. It may have been too much work to change it, but this is not the reasoning they give. I can understand "we can't take the time to make sure the experience on pc is the best it can be", if only barely (it's potentially changing one line of code or one value in a data file somewhere), but in this case, "It's not balanced for that" sounds like a cop-out to me.

I have rambled too long. To sum up: games are NOT just a communication from developer to player. Gaming is very unique in that gamers really get out of the game something of themselves as well (at least most games). Everyone has different playstyles. One game cannot suit every single players tastes. With little effort, some things can be done to allow each player to enjoy a game more than they would, widening the audience. In indie games it is less expected, people do expect that of games that cost millions of dollars. Part of this expectation is that it was possible with games that costed thousands of dollars, so why does more money = (perceived) less game? But, ultimately, developers do have final say of what is allowed in their game and what is not. If they can sell, I guess that proves they were right?

[Corsair]

If a player wants to play a game a certain way, why try to stop them?

IMO, the only problem is making sure the player doesn't ACCIDENTALLY ruin the game for himself by doing something the developer didn't intend.  But if a player is going into the console and changing the game, it's probably not an accident.  Giving players the freedom to test the limits of the game engine can give a game new life, even after the game has been won.

Take a look at http://www.it-he.org/.  This guy writes amazing "anti-walkthroughs" for games like System Shock, Deus Ex, and Ultima, explaining how to exploit bugs and quirks in the games to kill important characters, get items out of order, and still manage to beat the game.  Clearly, the developer of Deus Ex didn't intend for players to scale walls by making ladders out of explosives - but people have fun doing it, and anyone doing this sort of thing has probably already played through the game the normal way like the developers intended, so there's no reason to stop them.

The same thing is seen in the "sequence breaking" community surrounding games like Metroid.  People who have mastered the game to the point where they can beat it without breaking a sweat can further challenge themselves by trying to do things out of order, use bugs to get to locations meant to be inaccessable, etc.  This practice is so popular that when Nintendo made Metroid: Zero Mission, they purposefully filled it with secret passages designed to let persistent players circumvent the normal progression of the game.

In short, anyone who is even using the console in a game probably knows exactly what they're doing, and wants to play WITH the game, not play the game.  Obviously, in multiplayer games this sort of thing should be disallowed to stop cheating, but otherwise, why try to stop them?  Developers certainly have the right to disable the console if they want to, but players have the right to complain.

[nikki]

@Montoli  :

I believe you use wrong examples;

Simcity is intended as a sandbox "game" toy, So if you want to create a bull's eye out of residential plots, than that's completely the purpose of the software.

The other game is a more lineair story in wich gamedesigner craft an experience that slowly hardens , while the player constantly, hopefully, improves.You can understand that the average guy can really kill all the game in such an experience by modifying field-of-views, parameter tweaks, or any good old cheat code.

Me personally, if thats interesting to you guys think storytellers/gamedesigners shouldn't let mere mortal players mess with their life work. Developers of more broad gameplay type games like simulations, sandboxes and other non-lineair stuff could need this kind of player input, I suppose that's different in each scenario.

[Martin 2BAM]

Vince-IW: We would like you to play the game the way we designed and balanced it.

Wow, what a douchebag.
"If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?"

Giving the ability to change the game adds a lot of value, specially for younger people. I remember wasting hours of my youth learning half-life console commands and making whacky server configurations to play in LAN with friends.
It was a laugh to have negative-friction crowbar wars (you even moved the slightest bit and you never stopped accelerating! until you hit a wall).

It's ok to have a story, but we're talking games here. It's not a movie, interaction with the game should be fun.

For example, the Gish Demo Player vs Player sumo mode is a hell of a lot slower than in the retail version. And I find it funnier because I go like
OH OH NO NO OooooooooooHH YOU FUCKER  !
and in the retail it's too fast and it gets out of control too quick, you can't even laugh at your girlfriend when slowly falling in the pit with you over her head (before she starts BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF YOU, as it happened to me :D)

Changing the gameplay of a well stablished game and not letting the people used to that revert to it is just bad.

[nikki]

I sort of get you nitram,
but isn't half-life DESIGNED as an open ended user-moddable mmo fps 'game' in the first place?
And as such aren't YOU playing the game "the way we (VALVE) designed and balanced it."

[Martin 2BAM]

Hahaha, I was actually talking about HL1 :D, not so mmo at that time.

No, you're not because you're not forced to stick with the rules.
Because (if you know how) you can change the gameplay. Gee, even Garry's mod makes it easier to goof around.
You can play the proper gameplay or cheat.

If a game was like "Ok, we disabled cheats because we want YOU to play as WE want", it would be totalitary.
If I paid the game, I want to be able to skip levels if I got stuck. It's not like I want to be a professional, I just want to play as I see fit

There are a lot of threads about this, also a BBC show I cant remember the name (surely mentioned in this thread but I haven't deeply read it)

[Gnarf]

If a game was like "Ok, we disabled cheats because we want YOU to play as WE want", it would be totalitary.

Halp! I'm being oppressed!

If I paid the game, I want to be able to skip levels if I got stuck. It's not like I want to be a professional, I just want to play as I see fit

Okay, and I really want to not be able to skip levels and so on. I don't even want to have the option. So we like different things, and maybe it is all right for one or two games to be games that I like instead of games that you like...


And changing the FOV has nothing to do with cheating anyway. People change the FOV to their liking in order to play as good as possible. It's mostly a multiplayer thing that the really good players do. It's as much cheating/changing the game as picking a character you're really good with in a fighting game.

It's more like making a board game that doesn't have horses. And then a bunch of morons come along and complain that they would like to have horses in the game. And then the designers say that "No, this game is not meant to be played with horses". And then the morons are all "But we really like horses. In chess there are horses; there should be horses in your game too! Without horses we cannot play the game the way we want to and I don't think you should decide what the game should be like just because you make the game!!"

But obviously it is fine that some games have horses while other games have no horses. It is all right that every once in a while there's a game that is different from another game in one way or another. It's also fine that some people like some game with horses better than some game without horses, and if they want to explain why that is or why they think that the other game would be even better with horses, then that's dandy. But if they just bitch and moan and try to make "games without horses" out to be some morally wrong thing that disrespects their rights as human beings, then that is stupid and retarded.

[Martin 2BAM]

Dude, I don't care if you're masochist and want to suffer, but don't force it upon others.
I mean it as a marketing suggestion, those "morons" are buying your game.

With that attitude, 8/10 of the players will probably drop the game before finishing it, out of frustration, boredom, etc.

Also I never said "make every game customizable", but if you released it and the next version, which is expected to be enhanced instead of degraded, actually fucks everything up and the designers are too self-centered then don't notice it and are stubborn to do anything about it... it's a shame. Because a lot of great games are irreversible modified and end up sucking.

I'm not talking about "You shouldn't let the secondary character die", I'm talking about "The jumping feels stiff and it sucks, last version was better".

Btw: I never use cheats, except after beating the game (to check hidden stuff and such).
But the choice to do so is mine.
Again, if you like shoving players whatever you want, you're better off making a movie.

Regards

[Gnarf]

Dude, I don't care if you're masochist and want to suffer, but don't force it upon others.
I mean it as a marketing suggestion, those "morons" are buying your game.

I'm not talking about marketing. I'm just saying that, hey, I'm a player, and there are some things that I'd rather not even have the option to do. If some other players want one such thing, and think that the developers can please both me and those players by including it, because I can just choose not to use those options, then those players are wrong. Because I do not want to have those choices.

It's not about modding tools or whatever. Adjustable FOV in FPSes is something that people use in order to play better, just as they will map keys, adjust mouse sensitivity and so on. Adjustable FOV is forced upon those that do not want it, same as fixed FOV is forced upon those that do not want that. But no one is forcing anything upon anyone so we can as well just drop that angle.

[Martin 2BAM]

Adjustable FOV is forced upon those that do not want it, same as fixed FOV is forced upon those that do not want that

Are you high? Adjustable / forced: They are opposites  :D

If it's adjustable you can choose to let it fixed. But not the other way around.

[falsion]

Being able to change the FOV is not cheating. FPS games have had that feature for years. It's about the same as changing your crosshair or what side of the screen your guns appear on (for left handed people, or people who prefer to see the other side of the screen that is usually blocked off by the gun model).

Think of it as being more akin to changing the mouse cursor on your OS or resolution. It's not like you are giving yourself infinite ammo or hacking the game to do what it's not supposed to do.

[Gnarf]

Adjustable FOV is forced upon those that do not want it, same as fixed FOV is forced upon those that do not want that

Are you high? Adjustable / forced: They are opposites  :D

If it's adjustable you can choose to let it fixed. But not the other way around.

There's a difference between not adjusting your FOV and making it non-adjustable/fixed. Given that this is, first and foremost, an issue in mutliplayer, it's not even a particularly subtle difference.

[saluk]

It's more like making a board game that doesn't have horses. And then a bunch of morons come along and complain that they would like to have horses in the game. And then the designers say that "No, this game is not meant to be played with horses". And then the morons are all "But we really like horses. In chess there are horses; there should be horses in your game too! Without horses we cannot play the game the way we want to and I don't think you should decide what the game should be like just because you make the game!!"

Ah, board games, which often rely on house rules when the standard rules get boring. If I want to take my horse pieces off of my chess game and add them to your perfectly balanced game(tm), then I can. What about all of the variations of monopoly that people have played over the years? Pretty often, slightly modified rules for a game turn into a spin-off and become official. Or someone else finds a way to sell that idea.

Being able to change the FOV is not cheating. FPS games have had that feature for years. It's about the same as changing your crosshair or what side of the screen your guns appear on (for left handed people, or people who prefer to see the other side of the screen that is usually blocked off by the gun model).

The debatable point here, is that changing the side of the screen your gun is doesn't fundamentally alter your viewpoint, while increasing the FOV does actually let you see more of the level at once. If someone who is good at the game knows how to use the console to put the view at 200, and has learned to be able to play the game with fish-eyes, they are going to be able to spot people coming at them much easier than all of the people who are stuck at 60. It could be thought of as an unfair advantage, because even though you also have the option to go to 200 degrees, most people would not want to play like that because it looks crappy.

The developers' excuse is that they have balanced the levels for the specific viewpoint they chose, which is true to a point, but they ignore the fact that just as people would not want to play in 200 degrees because it looks crappy, a lot of pc gamers are not going to be happy with 60 degrees because it also, to them, looks crappy.

I'd like to see some kind of measurement of how much that extra 30 degrees really helps in multiplayer, I actually think that most player's fov preferences one way or another has more to do with what they are used to than anything related to skill. But the skill case can be made. I've heard that the fov can really have an effect on people who get motion sick. I know there are some games that make my dad sick and some that don't, and the ones that don't tend to have a wider fov.

If some other players want one such thing, and think that the developers can please both me and those players by including it, because I can just choose not to use those options, then those players are wrong. Because I do not want to have those choices.

It sounds more like you don't want other players to have those choices. You are not talking about the choice affecting you directly, like "Hmm, I am going to waste 15 minutes trying to adjust the settings to see what I like, which is 15 minutes wasted", you are more worried about the other players having an unfair advantage on you because they like to tinker with the settings and you don't. But you bring up a very good point - developers are always going to piss someone off no matter what they do. There is no pleasing everyone.

Sales data seems to indicate IW pissed off the right group of people. Either that, or people waited to be really irritated until after forking over their non-refundable cash

[Gnarf]

Ah, board games, which often rely on house rules when the standard rules get boring. If I want to take my horse pieces off of my chess game and add them to your perfectly balanced game(tm), then I can. What about all of the variations of monopoly that people have played over the years? Pretty often, slightly modified rules for a game turn into a spin-off and become official. Or someone else finds a way to sell that idea.

Sure, but I am talking about the standard rules. Adjustable FOV is part of the standard rules of Quake Live and whatever. It is not about modding tools.

If some other players want one such thing, and think that the developers can please both me and those players by including it, because I can just choose not to use those options, then those players are wrong. Because I do not want to have those choices.

It sounds more like you don't want other players to have those choices. You are not talking about the choice affecting you directly, like "Hmm, I am going to waste 15 minutes trying to adjust the settings to see what I like, which is 15 minutes wasted", you are more worried about the other players having an unfair advantage on you because they like to tinker with the settings and you don't.

It would be a fair advantage. But yeah, I don't really want to be at a disadvantage because I ignore one part of the game; I would rather play a game without that part. It's not necessarily a deal breaker or anything, but yeah.

And I don't have anything against FPS games letting me adjust the FOV. And hey, chances are IW is doing something really stupid. But, like, in whichever Forza or Gran Turismo game, I find tuning cars to be dreadfully boring. And of course I can just ignore tuning cars, and that is what I do. But really, I'd like the game better if it didn't let me tune cars. And I'm really glad that TrackMania does not let me tune cars, and I think that if some people start arguing that TrackMania should let people tune their cars, because the people who like tuning cars would like that and people like me can just choose not to tune cars, then those people are full of shit. I don't mind that some people would like to be able to tune cars in TrackMania, but the idea that I would be happy about that just isn't right.

But you bring up a very good point - developers are always going to piss someone off no matter what they do. There is no pleasing everyone.

Yes. And it bugs me when one of the groups start arguing that if you do everything their way, then surely all the people who want something completely different must be happy about it too.

I'd like to see some kind of measurement of how much that extra 30 degrees really helps in multiplayer, I actually think that most player's fov preferences one way or another has more to do with what they are used to than anything related to skill. But the skill case can be made. I've heard that the fov can really have an effect on people who get motion sick. I know there are some games that make my dad sick and some that don't, and the ones that don't tend to have a wider fov.

Some players adjust the FOV depending on their role. Like, using a wider FOV for flag-running than for shooting people in the head. Because when you're running with flags, movement becomes more important and shooting people in the head becomes less important (and a wider FOV makes the heads of your enemies smaller and harder to hit). I'm pretty sure it's not just a matter of what you are used to and like more.