FOV Balance

[Seahonk]

A FoV slider is a must if we want people to be able to play without getting sick, but how can different FoVs be balanced? In CSGO you know where the danger can come from at a given moment, so peripheral vision is unimportant and the meta encourages you to play with a 4:3 resolution stretched to widescreen to make your target larger. (Essentially a narrow FoV in a game with no slider.) In most other FPS you need to see as much as possible, so the balance is tilted in favor of those who don't mind a fisheye effect.
In either case even without an explicit option for "competitive settings" the player with the uglier settings has an edge.

Is there any avoiding this? Can a careful balance of aim difficulty and threat of being flanked eliminate the incentive to play with an extreme FoV? Or is there nothing to be done? Maybe there's some other solution?

Do playtesters have any experience here? Have you adjusted your FOV to look funny but give you an edge?

[ChoiSeunghyun]

In tribes the FOV trade off was essentially-

High FOV:
more game awareness from being able to see more things
targets are comparatively smaller than low fov

Low FOV:
easier to hit targets as they appear larger
less game awareness

In CS:GO there's lots of good comp players who use lots of different resolutions.

ScreaM uses 800x600 but a player like F0rest uses a lot higher resolution if I recall correctly, something above 1600x900

But to answer your question, I haven't played around with it in telos so idk.

[Grandy]

As @ChoiSeunghyun outlines, there's always a payoff. AoT does allow for long-range trades as well as close quarter brawls so the situations you face change quite frequently.

For me personally, I can't play permanently on low FoV, and for a number of reasons - the first of which being that I find the "tunnel vision" you get from low FoV quite disorientating. I enjoy going fast too much and the low FoV makes it harder to gain speed inside the asteroid... disoriented + speed = fail.
As for the second reason, see the first reason.

[JustinPierce]

I think @ChoiSeunghyun covered it pretty well.

FOV is also about comfort. If you're farther away from your monitor (or have a smaller monitor), a lower FOV is going to feel more natural -- this is partly why most console games have low FOV (TVs are generally farther away). When up close, a higher FOV will feel more comfortable as it simulates peripheral vision. For some people, having a bad FOV value for their setup can cause nausea and/or headaches. With how disorienting zero g can be, it's probably extra important that I let people use a setting that is comfortable for them.

Further explanation here:

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