Stuart Black, the creative director of Bodycount, is a guy who speaks his mind; if he’s passionate about something, you’re going to hear about it. While extolling the virtues of Bodycount at a demo on Tuesday, he mentioned the game’s field of vision — the actual “viewing area” that the game renders on the screen — as something that goes a long way toward making it a better shooter. Obviously, if a game is in widescreen, it should show you more on the sides, but some games don’t; Black brought up the original BioShock and its sequel, noting that both games launched with faux-widescreen FOVs.
This eventually led him to Killzone 2, a game that he lambasted for having a “particularly poor” FOV: “They had a very tight field of view, [and] the environments were scaled very tightly to you — you had to spend a lot of time looking around.” A reduced FOV is an issue because when you see less of the battlefield, you have to move the right stick farther to keep track of your enemies.
But Black didn’t stop at calling out Guerrilla Games — he disparaged the DualShock 3/Sixaxis controller as well, bad-mouthing the analog sticks’ precision (or lack thereof):
And particularly on the PS3, where that right stick is very loose, you have to work really hard to [get] a good feel on that. You don’t want to have to spend a lot of time looking around, and they didn’t do a good job with that right stick in Killzone 2. That’s one [game] where I’ll say, ‘That was a bit poo, really.’
Ouch. And Black didn’t even bring up the whole Sev-is-a-midget thing. Sounds like somebody’s going to be hearing from the Sony Defense Force pretty soon…
There are plenty more juicy tidbits from my interview with Black, so keep reading Destructoid.
