First person. I tolerate it in slower-paced games that are more about stealth or puzzles such as Dishonored and Portal, but even there I can’t help but grumble to myself. Would it have killed them to add in a third person option? Especially when both series sprinkle in some light platforming too. Don’t anybody dare try and cite Mirror’s Edge to me! And here I feel the use of all caps is entirely justified: PLATFORMING IN FIRST PERSON IS INCREDIBLY STUPID!
‘Oh well, you know, it works better than you’d think…’ is what every apologist ends up saying to some degree or other. You know what would make it work better? If it wasn’t in bloody first person! And then, to add insult to the injury, they really put the effort in to making Faith’s art design amazing… and then we only see her in cut scenes. Oh yes. Well done, you guys. Well. Done. You. I can’t really express slow, sarcastic applause in the written word in an elegant manner. But that is exactly what the game deserved.
Sorry, the whole concept just reduces me to an incomprehensible blancmange of white hot rage and expletives. And it still remains as one of the great lies perpetrated by developers that somehow first person is more ‘immersive’. ‘Oh yes, we wanted it to be in first person so that you could have immersion in our finely crafted world – as if you really there’.
No! No, no, no, no, noooo! It is actually less immersive. You have no peripheral vision in first person so you have to swing the camera around madly to see what the bloody hell is going on! In myself this causes needless and undesired levels of stress, panic and anxiety, so a first person shooter is something I will pass by. No shooting Nazis in Wolfenstein for me. Not unless you give me a third person option.
And now we have two role-playing games outright refusing to provide a third person mode (like Elder Scrolls and modern Fallout). Which means we can’t connect with our character anywhere near as much. Which makes total sense as now we create our own entirely unique characters and only ever see them in the inventory screen! Yay!
As opposed being lumbered with a thoroughly unlikeable and unfunny swaggering thug in Witcher 3. Yay… makes total sense. The Outer Worlds is going the same route too and I just… despair. Why? Why do they think this is a sensible idea? It’s not! It just, grr and aaaargh! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!
DMR
