The perspective shift can be exaggerated, apparently with good results; so you might be able to move your head down by a few degrees to see your feet very briefly while still comfortably watching the screen.

This seems to have potential for being much more sympathetic to a console environment (ie, living room rather than desktop) than our beloved FPS mouse control. I believe it would do a lot more for immersion than stereo does – but you’d still need some sort of head wear.

jumping/ducking/using-/-activating…. all things that should be on shoulder/trigger/thumbstick-press-downs.

you shouldn’t have to stop looking around (ESPECIALLY when it takes so LONG to look around with most gamepad FPS control schemes) to trigger any of those actions.

i can’t play most FPS games on a console because most have the stupid defaults that have become standard for some mindboggling reason. while defaults have improved over the years, the standard FPS gamepad controls reminds me A LITTLE of all the whacky defaults the earliest (wolfenstein 3d, doom era) FPS games used to use.

and the fact that you can’t assign any action to any input is a mortal sin. these companies pour YEARS of effort into these games, but can’t be bothered with a day or 2 of making proper controller customization?!
one of the damn easiest tasks there IS in the coding world!

so their years of effort are totally wasted on people like me who can’t/won’t tolerate idiotic controls.
if only ONE coder had spent a day or 2 more.
*shakes head*

@Kentamanos: Hmm, I’ve never tried ginger. When I’m travelling, I use ‘sea bands’ – those elasticated wrist bands which apply force to a pressure point on your wrist. Yeah I know, sounds dumb, but they really work. I discovered them a decade ago after having travel sickness for years and not wanting to take pills anymore – I was super-skeptical but they really help; they don’t remove the sickness entirely, but they make it better and you also recover quicker on reaching solid ground (15 mins instead of several hours).

Funny I never get motion sickness in FPS’s though, Mirror’s Edge excluded.

They say ginger is really good for it and I have found that “ginger beer” helps with it when I really want to play a game for some reason (*cough* Portal *cough*). If you’re not familiar with ginger beer, it’s like ginger ale on steroids (spicy and will clear the sinuses), and contains no alcohol.

About the loss of depth perception with wider FOV: This would be able to solve by some stereo technique right? I am not too keen on wearing those cardboard-plastic-glasses though.

We’ll just have to wait and see if someone starts a thread about this in the forums…

That’s because you can feel your feet, plus actually you can see the ground below you even when you’re looking forward, because your peripheral field of view is a lot wider than an LCD viewport. In a FPS you really don’t have a direct correlation between where you feet are and the edge of a platform unless you angle the view down, or play enough that you can program the offset from the bottom of the viewport to where your feet actually are into your head.

A wider FOV is one option, but it would also reduce depth perception which would have other consequences. Another option that I thought of was to make the view automatically ‘drift’ down a little when you near the edge of a building, a bit like how other FPS’s sometimes automatically align the view with sloping floors. But again this has a downside in that if you were looking to catch a rail to swing on, you might lose sight of that as your view drifted so you could see the approaching edge.

As I say, a third person view would resolve most of these problems, but it would then remove the USP of this game. I respect the stance they’ve taken – to really see whether it could be done as an FPS, and they’ve proved that it can, and it plays surprisingly well, but I have to say that despite the excellent work, on a pure gameplay basis (rather than a ‘pushing the envelope’ basis) the FPS view just doesn’t work as well for a platforming mechanic, and the free running in Assassin’s Creed while less revolutionary, was more playable.

[)amien

I thought the controls were a little awkward also, but hopefully they would be nicer after having used them for a while? At any rate, my guess as to why they didn’t use the face buttons is that they wanted you to be able to use the right stick to look around at the same time as crouching/jumping.