PC gamers love adjusting field of view sliders, the extent of peripheral vision rendered in the game. Real heads tend to adopt a “higher is better” mentality, with the commonly accepted optimal being a 90-degree angle. So why did the grande dame of Valve of PC gaming saddle us with stinginess, dare I say resembling a console Default 75 degree field of view in Half-Life 2?
“In Half-Life 1 we used a 90-degree field of view, or FOV, which was pretty standard in first-person shooters at the time. However, during the development of Half-Life 2, we were unhappy with this,” explained Valve developer Kerry Davis in a new commentary mode celebrating the 20th anniversary of Half-Life 2. “Since our game is character-driven, we put a lot of effort into detailed facial animations and body, but the 90-degree field of view didn’t allow players to get close enough to fully appreciate this detail.
“So we started experimenting with a narrower field of view and ended up choosing an angle of 75 degrees. This required some adjustments from both us and the players, and also required an additional field of view for the view models, i.e. the player’s weapon held at the bottom of the screen. Their models were originally built for 90 degrees, so at 75 degrees they looked distorted. However, this change achieved what we wanted: to put our characters at the forefront of the game.”
And that makes sense: the amount of effort Valve put into Half-Life 2’s scanned faces and detailed animations is legendary, and it’s a perfectly reasonable claim to make, ridiculing the miniature but vocal population of FOV lunatics compared to the delight of the extensive number of gamers who you won’t consciously notice the difference in close-ups of those expressive Source engine facial animations.
Besides, the tyranny of low field of view had a much more effective hero: console shooters. The logic goes that you’re sitting further away from the TV than the computer monitor, which means the in-game view inherently takes up less of the true field of view, making a smaller field of view theoretically a better fit. This also conveniently means that less of the game world has to be rendered in a given frame, which reduces the load on the console. Fortunately, we live in an era of much more strong settings menus, allowing players to set the field of view as they see fit.
The modern commentary tracks for Half-Life 2 are full of such tidbits. Elsewhere, Valve engineer Jay Stelly explained why the Source engine has that iconic fuchsia checkerboard bug pattern you probably recognize from Garry’s Mod.
