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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

Narrow FoV ruins me. Even after all these years, Far Cry 2 on PC was one of the worst video game experiences ever for me because it had FoV tuned for couch gaming. IIRC I was able to somewhat fix it with a console command to adjust the FoV, but actions like sprinting which forced the FoV to something even narrower than default would undo that.

And for me motion sickness isn't felt in my stomach, it's in my head. The headaches get quite painful, so I very much appreciate games that give me an FoV slider with a reasonably large maximum. I'd rather not need to take meclizine to comfortably play a game.

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Motion sickness in Far Cry is why I stopped playing first person or any 3D games. It has taken about 20 years before I seriously tried again and figured out that with higher frame rates and wide enough FoV I could actually play them again.

Interesting, I thought having a too large FOV would result in motion sickness. Which is why when running you might reduce it, to compensate for the faster movement. I guess to clarify, you're mostly talking about PC gaming where you're sitting close to the screen, or is this something you also experience with console games?

In VR, one method of reducing motion sickness is covering the edges of the screen during movement to reduce motion sickness (a temporary tunnel vision effect), essentially reducing the FoV. I suppose playing in windowed mode would be similar :P

Games often widen the FoV when sprinting (or boosting or whatever verb applies) because the stuff at the edge of your screen really zooms by and makes it look like you're going faster.

What probably happened in Far Cry was they had some stupid narrow FoV like 65 degrees and bump it up wider when sprinting, then when you stop sprinting it goes back to 65 which overrides the wider angle that parent commenter had set.

I'm the same way: low FoV gives me terrible headaches, like I'm walking around with binoculars strapped to my face. I can go up to 180° very comfortably in minecraft on the other hand. I think the main reason is that the lower the FoV, the faster the image moves when you rotate. If you imagine a comically small 10° for illustration, you will go through 9 full screen wipes if you turn 90°, but if you have 180° of FoV it is only a single ½ wipe.

Higher FoV just inherently feels less disorientating to me as well, being able to see all your surroundings makes the virtual space feel more cohesive and real, instead of a series of disconnected whirling imagery.

> I guess to clarify, you're mostly talking about PC gaming where you're sitting close to the screen, or is this something you also experience with console games?

For me, it doesn't matter how far I am from the screen. If the camera is too far from the character in first person or too close in third person (Darksiders is impossible, Metal Gear 5 is fine), I can't play it.

Also, screen shake, head bob, and small FOV are impossible.

Overwatch has a weird default perspective that took me a while to adjust to. I wonder if changing from the default (103 degree) FoV would have helped? Though reduced FoV means that you won't see as much on screen without looking around.

fov is 99% of motion sickness for me too. thanks to all the games that allow fov adjustment, even if it is indirectly like in a config file.

Isn't that because of the missing head bob?

Head bob would make it worse in these cases where the FoV is too narrow for the viewing distance

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