A wider point of view, The Title Fight

The two game most FPS gamers were keeping eyes on were Battlefield3 and Modern Warfare3. A lot of us were wondering if BF3 would make the same impact as its predecessor. Battlefield2 was the first game to use the modern combat setting but it was Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare that made it popular. Since then the market has been bombarded with a CoD every year. Pointing the way for rival shooters through sheer success. But as the novelty wears off, a lot of gamers are getting tired of the formula. Though the quality and production values of the series are what makes it such a hit every time. The reward-a-minute treadmill might have something to do with it too, and so might the stiff online competition. The gameplay is fast, often rage inducing and frustrating. But when things go your way, it's an ideal way to blow off some steam after a day's work. I should know. The game has to cope with diminishing returns however.

When games like Crysis2 and Homefront tried to copy the formula, some of us got a case of desperation because you couldn't buy a AAA shooter without getting a good dose of Call Of Duty with it. This fear persisted all the way through the development of Battlefield3. Even though most of us who played Battlefield2 knew that series had a lot more going for it. But more importantly, it had different things going for it. From the direction the Bad Company games were going, more console focused, we had little reason to be overly hopeful. But Battlefield3 turned out as an incredible step forward from Bad Company. And while it incorporates a few select innovations from CoD, the game turned out something else. A game with a very high skill cap, not only does a player need to know what role to play at what time, he needs to know it on foot, in tanks or in the skies. And he has to be a team player. This alone isn't the novelty though, but the way the game was made and the way it plays are. The pixel perfect user interface alone makes it stand out compared to the bulky font and laggy mouse found in the MW3 interface. The entire layer of post processing, and colour separation in BF3 also apply to the interface. When I first saw it in the beta I had the wide eyed look of a child who discovers that his new toy not only looks shiny, but also transforms into a robot. It looked so very expensive.

MW3 sticks to its guns. It isn't a spoiler to say that MW3 is "like MW2 but newer". A mark of the stagnation of Call Of Duty, which is just as well because the sub-series has now come to a close. Right on time for the end of the Xbox360. Does this mean that CoD is beaten by default? Not really. And I wager Activision doesn't see it that way either. Queue Black Ops 2 for November 2012 as the swan song of the CoD series as we know it. Another sign of decline could be measured in its players. I'm not saying we should crack open their skulls to examine the dopamine levels but instead look at their dedication. CoD4 was played for two years. And if you're a competitive player, you still do after 4 years. MW2 was actively played for 1 year and wasn't even that good. Black Ops was hot for about 3 months and now MW3 already seems on it's way out after only 1 month. It's hard to tell if it is because MW3 is considered to be slightly less good than BlOps was or if the formula has run its course, regardless of MW3's quality. Battlefield, with its new engine, bigger scope, more interesting shooting mechanic, seems the title to beat now. But still, it seems a very frail reign if we base this claim on sales.

Truth be told, CoD and Battlefield aren't that similar conceptually. They share the modern combat setting. Both have a team deathmatch and the M16, Americans and Russians. But they also share the mudslinging ad campaigns. To the untrained eye, both are advertising the same game! They aren't, but the perception is still there. Neither companies are informing otherwise because they actually are rivals. Both would want the public to buy their game, and not the other. If we go on customer loyalty, Call of Duty takes the lion share. As console popularity has given it the biggest audience. BF vets are almost always on PC, where the series by and large stayed, and are a minority.

As predicted earlier, Call Of Duty remains the more popular of the two. And as long as there's another dollar left, a company will keep making its product. Even to its own detriment. I'm not sure Activision has the audacity to carry the franchise into the future on the same tech though. Which in turn means that Activision will have to procure a new next gen engine to power their franchise for the next generation of consoles if they do. They will, Call Of Duty is a very important money maker for Activision.
This dependency is where Activision may have a problem.

Not a typical PC publisher, Activision has yet to show off a next generation engine or a game using one. Others did, EA has the Frostbite2 engine from DICE. Bathesda has the Rage Engine from ID. THQ has a few projects, Nexuis & Homefront2, using Cryengine3. And no doubt EPIC is working on a next generation iteration of Unreal Engine 3. Unfortunately I was only moderately impressed with the Good Samaritan Trailer they showed at GDC 2011. But we have yet to see a game using it.

Out of all these mentioned next generation engines, Frostbite2 has seen the most actual use thus far. Need For Speed: The Run used it, and rumour has it Dragon Age 3 will use it too. It's no stretch to say that the next generation of Mass Effect, Medal of Honor and Dead Space games will use it too. Just a few weeks ago, Bioware has already confirmed it is using Frostbite for the upcoming C&C Generals2. And then there's Respawn. The original CoD developers, now with EA, who are poised to fill the void that CoD will presumably leave in the next generation if it fails to reinvent itself.
Maybe the future for CoD as we know it today, lies with a free to play model, not unlike TF2 or Battlefield Heroes. A hardcore shooter running through a browser isn't new either. It could be an opportunity to bundle the entire Modern Warfare series onto one unified platform. With all maps, all weapons and a selection of balanced perks. Optimizations could even be made to create a Pro Mod to promote professional play.
Since the specifications to run CoD have become far below those of the standard PC, it can live quite a few years longer in this form, using the same engine, generating revenue through micro transactions or subscriptions. Away from the bleeding edge of technology, where expectations are more tempered. A key ingredient may be the social aspect of CoD. The basic framework is already in place: Call Of Duty Elite. The community site where player's multiplayer stats are shown on profile pages. People can watch video content, participate in community activities, start community groups, etc. Activision has delayed, or aborted according to some sources, the PC release of CoD Elite because they are worried PC gamers will mess with the statistics.
My inner cynic would rather think this story is hogwash because when was this company ever worried about PC gamers or what they did with the game? History has shown that Infinity Ward didn't care in the least about what the (PC) community did. Glitches, exploits and hackers in MW2 didn't push the developer into any sort of action. I'm also not inclined to think IW has had a change of heart, after the stellar job Treyarch did in supporting Black Ops, because the proof is in the pudding. MW3 has no Dedicated servers and no accessible in-game console. The buggy release version and no CoD Elite only add insult to injury. To further tarnish IW's image, this just happened. My guess is it will go unresolved. PS3 users have my condolences.
An argument that comes up time and time again is piracy - by now the oldest cliché in the book. In the case of Activision it's mind boggling considering what its other half, Blizzard, has been doing on PC for years. If a game runs through a (web)client with a bunch of server side operations, its useless to pirate. MMO's can't really be pirated.

DICE is halfway there with BF3 as the game launches from the web browser. Plus Battlelog is available for all platforms. And it's great. So great in fact that I'd wish other EA published games, such as Crysis2, Battlefield Heroes, Mass Effect3 MP, Medal of Honor and the upcoming C&C: generals 2 would use it. The statistics it tracks are useful, the internet browser server browser, yes you read that right, is the quickest thing and the social interaction is just logical considering the time we live in.
It almost goes without saying that BF3 is a pureblood PC shooter. It's very customisable: FoV, dedicated servers, a long list of tweak able variables. A PC gamer marvels at the mere sight of it all. Rendered in a brand new engine that pushes our hard earned computer hardware. Meaning, of course, that the graphics look absolutely stunning. Just look at this clip from FRANKIEonPCin1080p.

I'm tempted to write a good review on it, I really am. But those are so hard to do, and might even be superfluous considering the game speaks for itself. I recommend it as it is, in my opinion, superior to MW3 in every meaningful way, as a serious FPS.

And With that I'll leave you with some BF3 entertainment by BirgirPall. Enjoy, and have fun.

A wider point of view, The Aftermath

As far as gaming goes though, 2011 has been an important year for first person shooters. There were some ambitious titles this year, many debuts. Most of them poised to capture the hearts and minds of the same public. Now at the end of the year, at last, we can look back as the dust settles. As I type this I am aware that I'm writing this from the one perspective, that of the PC gamer. I also realize there were more interesting shooters this year then mentioned here. But I wanted to keep the scope of this post limited to those games aiming squarely at Call Of Duty. For some these are competitive games and PC still remains the home of that. Console gamers should look to PC as well, because the tech that's present now will be what dictates the hardware of the next consoles. This is especially important now, because the next wave shouldn't be too long out.
Talking about hardware almost always means talking about graphics. But I shouldn't sell PC gaming short, it's not all about graphics. The social aspect of gaming shouldn't go unnoticed. More and more people are playing games. Pulled in by their friends, or simply because everyone else is doing it.
It won't be long before we find it hard to imagine the social aspect absent from gaming. For a good long while now Steam, Xbox Live and PSN have been familiar names to gamers, yet these platforms are still evolving. Becoming more social oriented instead of being just a digital marketplace. Facebook is the norm to follow. This year was also important because it marks the point at which console ports seem to look really dated. This is generally a bad thing, making developers push their tech if they want to keep selling on PC. It only takes one, because if the competition does...
So how did the other contenders to the throne fare? I'll give you the rundown of what I remembered.

Homefront turned out a little Battlefield-clone that could. Or at least wanted. At first glance, gameplay looked like a cross between the fast paced action of Call Of Duty and the scope of Battlefield Bad Company. Multiplayer was about that, if you could handle the way it played. Inertia and loose screws are two words I could use to describe the experience. None of them are overly negative, but it took some getting used to. Not nearly as fluent as CoD, but still fast. Not nearly as deep as Battlefield but not shallow either. The PC version of the game got some extra attention and it showed as this was by far the superior version. Just looking at the archaic options screen that looked as dense as an excel sheet made me smile. But that's where the praise stops for most people. Homefront got outclassed by the competition in every way. I also make a deliberate point not to mention the campaign mode. It set the scene for Homefront, let's leave it at that.
The Homefront franchise is not done though. THQ wants its militairy shooter. After all, they've been doing very well recently with their other titles such as Darksiders, Saints Row and all things Warhammer 40k. To everyone's surprise Crytek will be making Homefront 2. Originator Kaos studios was put out of business.

Crytek also had its own seminal shooter this year. Showing the prowess of the Cryengine3. At the time of the release of Crysis2 is was quite clear that real time computer graphics had taken the next step. This first engine that was ready to enter the next generation was still on current consoles. But it was until the engine started showing some muscle on DX11 tech that we saw we were dealing with an engine for tomorrow. My quad core PC with a single gtx460 had to bow out but the screenshots thrown around the web spoke volumes. Crytek had made another engine for tomorrow's systems.
The game itself was very good indeed, the gameplay mechanics deviated drastically from the standard run and gun found elsewhere. Instead you'd run, gun, cloak, super-jump, shield up and gun some more. Unfortunately the game was run like a console game, even the MP part was done by a console developer: Crytek UK, formerly Free Radical Design. Known from Timesplitters and more recently, bot to mention notoriously, Haze. As a result the MP was well done but FRD was clueless when hackers started taking over as soon as the game went live. Pirates could play MP unhindered. Bringing with them the ire of all honest Crysis fans that made the franchise what it was. Steps were taken, but by then the game was bleeding active players.
The single player campaign was quite good. I'd rate it higher than both Battlefield 3 and MW3's campaings. Sure it was a lot more linear than Crysis1, but it still had set pieces which one could tackle whichever way you wanted. The story was a lot better and held a few interesting twists.

Brink didn't need a new engine. Brink took another, more artsy direction. The look of the shooter game with the hooligans was well established. The caricatures in this game wield caricatures of real guns. Too bad then, the gameplay wasn't quite the caricature of what Team Fortress has to offer. The concept of the game was painfully limited. Multiplayer matches were essentially a series of objective-oriented team challenges. Where one side would have to stop the advance of the other. These story missions got very old very fast though and that's what killed the game for me. The missions were well made but once everybody figured out the maps, every match would play out more or less in the same way. Needless to say, things got boring. I still feel extra, more open, game modes such as team death match, domination and payload could have saved this game.

After my disappointment with Brink, I was hesitant to give Bathesda more money for Rage. So I am holding off until Rage gets a hefty discount, or steam has a sale on it. Rage was well received by the press. And people seemed to like it well enough. The PC version wasn't very good at first - the techniques used by Carmack were more fit for consoles. This brought out the usual pitchfork mob of disgruntled PC gamers. Carmack sold out. Carmack lost his mind. Carmack has left us. Carmack made amends. He then stated that the PC should propably have been the lead platform for the game, and will be for future ID projects. PC problems were fixed within a few patches though, so in the end it all came together. The big upside to Rage is that Bathesda now has a established next generation engine. The engine is very powerful as it is, making Rage run at 60fps on current consoles is no small feat. Though it remains to be seen if it will be used in the future. The next big FPS from Bathesda will be Prey2, and that looks fantastic even though it still run on the old Doom3 engine.

Once, in a Steam review of the game I wrote the following:

Simply put, TF2 has become the best shooter of all time. It has proven its staying power for years now: the timeless art style, the classic gameplay, the support from one of the best developers. The micro-transaction based free to play model is a sign of things to come, as TF2 is the herald of a new age in computer gaming.

And I feel I was pretty much right. Even though I wrote it in a hurry in exchange for an event achievement. TF2 went free to play this year. Boldly going where no big mainstream shooter dared go. Valve was rewarded in a huge way for their calculated gamble. The game even surpassed Counter Strike, which had been on top for years, as the most played Steam game.
Income from TF2 now comes solely from microtransactions from the in-game store. Once a player buys an item, he'll activate the random drop roulette that exists within the game. Which gives him even more, craftable and tradable items.
By making the game free, Valve has effectively invited everyone to the in-games store that has already made them, and the in-store item creators, a fortune. With this Valve has changed its initial stance on character customization. They had always put character silhouette first, to improve the recognizability of the various classes. Don't take out the pitchforks just yet, because this means we can expect more solid titles from Valve because of this. Dressing up your own characters is fun but this doesn't say anything about how fun the game is to play. The answer is very. But by all means try the game out for yourself. It's free. Despite being really old in gaming terms, TF2 is still getting a ton of attention from its creators, almost as if it was an MMO. There's something new almost every month. Valve isn't resting on their laurels either. Soon Counter Strike: Global Offensive will storm Steam, and the world as the next e-sport. Next to DOTA2. Another e-sports game. They don't seem to concerned about what happens in the world of FPS, keeping Counter Strike in a league of its own. Much like that other e-sports titan, Starcraft from Blizzard.
Duking it out for the mass market though, are EA and Activision. The title fight! In the next post.

A wider point of view, the inverted Y-axis.

My first foray into PC gaming was called "Falcon" on an Amstrad 8086. It wasn't really a game as such but a combat flight simulator. At the time, and at the mere age of 7, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Being so young a pilot, some of the flying had to be done for me. So taking off was done on auto-pilot. So was navigating, engaging and landing. All I mostly did in between was steer the plane with the joystick. Whenever things got a bit too hot for comfort, I would press the "a"-button and the game would take care of business.
A while later I got a new PC, a 386, and was given MS Flight Simulator by a relative. Soon hours would be spend in a Cessna zipping around the Detroit city skyline, making a game out of flying between the skyscrapers at breakneck speeds without crashing. This time though, all of the flying was done by me. The sim had an auto pilot but it was too complex for me to configure.
Another PC upgrade to a 486 brought with it another flight sim: Falcon 3. This is the game that would seal my fate: I was going to be a military pilot. Because the sim trained the player to be one. I got the game in the deluxe edition, which added an F-18 and a MIG 29 sim using the same engine. It had a very thick booklet on how F-16s work. It had a booklet about how the air force works. It had a booklet about how weapon systems work. I doubt anything like it could be printed today without looking like a wikileaks publication and being treated like one. The box containing all the books and CDs was a treasure trove to my eyes and felt like it too - I could barely lift it. Hope and destiny carried most of the weigth all the way to my father. The treasure cost accordingly. But my father was somewhat of a flight buff himself and he must have seen a great pilot through my trembling arms and the tears welling up in my eyes. So he bought it for me. In short, yes, the game sealed my fate. As a PC gamer.

Later, my flying carreer came up to speed when I also got Chuck Yeager's Air Combat, and when Pentium came around, expanded with EF2OOO and even later with F22 Air Dominance Fighter from the same company. Flight sims were my thing and I strove to know everything about air combat and fighter jets.
I knew all about navigating airspace using pitch, yaw and banking. And I would use them to great effect in barrelroll, Immelmann, Split-S, and cobra turn manoeuvres. I was in perfect control.

Control is what this post is really about. Control is crucial.
When one plays flight sims one controls aeroplanes like this: push forward on the stick to move the nose downwards, pull back on the stick to pull the nose upwards.
Translated to mouse controls means that pushing the mouse forward, which is perceived as an upward motion when you look at the mouse from the top down, results into the nose going down - not up. This reverse effect along the Y-axis is what lends inverted controls its name. The mechanics of a plane make the controls inverted by their very nature. Knowing about these makes inversion very logical.

You should watch the following clip if you want more info.

After the flight sims came the shooters. Doom revolutionised gaming and introduced the first person shooter genre in a big way. In those early days mice weren't as common as you might think, it was the joystick that accompanied every gaming PC. Gaming in those days was mainly done in arcades the PCs were trying to emulate. Not to mention mouse support in software was almost as rare as the hardware.

Doom was no exeption and was played mainly with just the keyboard, in the game there was no actual use for looking up or down. Aiming was done only on the rotation of the player and shooting would result in a hit regardless of the targets height, as long as the shot was neatly lined up.
When online gaming finally swooped me up I got into playing Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. The game was often showcased as the game to play while using a force feedback joystick. Of course, I had to make do with the stick I already had. Through the power of imagination the flightstick became the handle of a lightsaber. But it wasn't very long before I realized there might be a better way. The gunplay was too slow to be competitive, because with a stick you need to steer your aim. So I switched to a mouse, which offered the needed speed and precision.
Ever since, I have been pulling back on the mouse to point the camera upwards in the virtual space of a shooter. Just like I always had with the stick and still was in the new flightsims.

Some of you will like a mechanical explanation, so I'll give it a shot. Just to make the point even clearer. More proof, I hope, that inverting the Y-axis has a working, logical explanation. You're steering the virtual camera as if it was your virtual head. A real life comparison would be if you would replace the mouse with the top of your virtual soldier's head and you were pulling his head backwards to make him look up. I threw together an animation to show just what I'm mean:

In contrast the non inverted control works as if one is pointing the cursor in a 2D environment like windows. If one was to translate this to a 3D space you'd be pointing towards your target on a 2D pane or a windshield. The emphasis is on the pointing. As in a lightgun game or a shooter on the Wii or PS Move. Perhaps this control scheme comes more natural if you have a background with these.
Simply put, you're steering the virtual camera by pointing towards targets.

As it stands today games offer both control schemes, and if the people designing them are capable this will remain to be the case. But gamers shouldn't take the abuse of uneducated people calling them crazy for inverting the Y-axis. The fact that this is happening at all, where it used to be common practice to invert, is a sign of the times. And that many, mostly younger gamers, have no connection to how things used to be. Or in other words, are unincumbered by old ways. Either way, one shouldn't remain ignorant about why the option is there in the first place. But in the rare case of games that feature fighter jets with uninverted controls, we're dealing with a decision informed by either popular opinion or by ignorance that degrades both every game maker in the industry and the intelligence of the players. And that would be truly crazy. As crazy to me as having a car go left when steering right.

 

Money Games

Belgium is a sporting nation with many national sports. Such as football: the international sport. And the ever popular Cycling: the other international sport.
It also used to be Judo. A Belgian once even won an Olympic medal. But since said person retired, Judo was never mentioned again. International appeal is where it's at with the big sports because you're nobody if not a world leader.
I should mention Tennis as another somewhat national sport because of our tireless duo racket-whipping the world's backside. But both are on their way out and this may spell the end for a few tennis clubs too many.
As it goes, the afflicted sport will have representatives lobbying for government support, punctuated by the threat that no new talent shall be found or trained, and our national image bruised, unless certain financial demands are met. The government, faced with the dire prospects of additional international embarrassment will then pull funds from education and reallocate them to sports.

Education is a field we Belgians still manage to lead in, so why would funds be needed? As long as creationism stays off the agenda, were good to go. Unfortunately, too many young students become religious adults, so there might be a spanner in the works. An expensive search campaign for said spanner was researched, planned, organised and subsequently scrapped due to budget cuts.

"Brawn over brains" has become the national motto. I wish I was kidding. The solution for the current financial crisis given by liberal democrat Dirk van Mechelen during election time was:
"We must work harder and harder, and I know because I used to be a butcher's son when I was young".
The line was delivered with the poised jaw conviction of Caesar crossing the Rubicon. To further clarify his point he said nothing, but let the grave rebuttal sink in during the long, long seconds of silence in which the camera paused the image on his fierce gaze.
I wonder if he managed to convince single mothers working two jobs to pay for food and bills. And I wondered at the time that if we were told the missing inner monologue about the butcher argument, it might have made at least some sense.

Money is always a problem. Even in sports. You can't get good at something without putting in the hours, and time is money.
In order for a sport to get subsidized we must first answer the question: what is a sport? We have appointed a minister to spend 8 hours a day to mull over this conundrum and come up with the list.


The current appointee is Philippe Muyters. And after careful thought and consideration he has dismissed, among others, Chess, Darts and Billiards. The reason being "because there is no physical effort (involved)". The words inside the brackets were not present due to more budget cuts, but I added them for clarity.
He went on to say that "A sports-person must stimulate his physical development, upkeep or improve his condition. None of these condition are present with mental sports."
I do wonder how Sir Raymond Ceulemans reacted to this news. He was the World Champion of Carom Billiards 35 times and was awarded "Belgian sportsman of the year" in 1978. He even had an international nickname "Mr. 100".

Some of his shots look like magic:



During his long reign, Carom Billiards probably was a National Sport too. But even during Sir Ceulemans lifetime, the sport would cease to be that. Because of the lack of required muscle mass and sweat output?
The physical argument puzzled me because shooting Clay Pigeons still is a sport.

The reason Shooting Clay pigeons is still considered a sport by the minister is tradition. In my mind, this alone exposes the ministers intentions with the designation because shooting Clay Pigeons has no traditions as a sport. Though perhaps it does as a rich mans hunting game. Perhaps the ministers fancies himself in a tweed suit? I also find it hard to think of a sport as traditional when its main tools are firearms. Compared to Chess, Shooting Clay Pigeons is a toddler wielding a plastic pistol loaded with a suction cup dart.
Maybe the minister's reason for respecting the art of The Shooting Of The Mock Bird is because it has the potential to put a meal on the table in a way playing Chess or Billiards does not. Those bring nothing to the table. They're not subsidised.
However it may be, the former and latter definitions wielded by the elected official are inconsistent.
In political speak, inconsistency is often named a dynamic response to demanding situations, or adapting to new situational circumstances, or tactical adjustment to stimulate a positive response. I'm sure Mr. Muyters has a fair arsenal of this kind of verbal buckshot. Which he wears like a bandoleer of blanks: Looking tough at first but looking more ineffectual with each subsequent shot.

For those wondering, my interest in this debate is from a gamers perspective and the thing called e-sports. I'm sure Mr. Muyters has his reservations about all things e because of their minimal physical component. Which is a gross and offensive simplification. Say you're a programmer, your job is "pressing buttons on a keyboard". But let's stay on topic.
I was wondering if games like Starcraft, Street Fighter, Call of Duty or Counter Strike could ever be recognised as a sport. I can attest to the fact those take a lot of effort to play competitively. One must have strategy, communication, lightning reflexes, nerves of steel and solid concentration. All those flow from good physical condition. And you have to use your brain.
If clay pigeons can be a sport, perhaps there's hope for Shooters like Call Of Duty or Counter Strike. Starcraft may be out of luck, because the strategy component makes it so akin to Chess, even if it's action packed and players need to perform about 250 to 300 actions per minute.
I do wonder how Mr. Minister would view computer games. Pressing buttons like madmen. Not seeing any structure in the actions. Probably the way he sees foreign languages, "Hey look, they're speaking Ooga-Booga, surely this is a sign of barbarism".

So we probably won't see anything like this around here anytime soon:



Or even this:



But as with chess, so with e-sports. In that they don't require brawn, but finesse and clear thinking. Which brings me to the one thing Mr. Muyters probably has forgotten. While talking up physical condition and training he seemingly fails to notice that the brain is a physical organ situated in the corpus humanum. And can be trained just as well as muscle. Or should I say, has to be trained.

Perhaps the minister still clings to the belief that the mind and the brain are two separate things. A theory, that of the soul, invented more than 2000 years ago to try and explain the gap between body and mind.
Because the mind is a projection of the brain. In my mind, or should I say brain, the following rule is true: the better the brain, the clearer the mind. And brains are more important than brawn. This is another rule: big brains are able to accomplish much more than big muscle, and in much more then just sports. And that's where our country should make the difference. We need to develop our big brains because that's what were good at.
And anyway, if I told you about Muscles from Brussels, one man already comes to mind. So why still try? We could still take a shot at e-sports though.

I do believe that we should keep our bodies fit and healthy though, a healthy mind comes from a healthy brain comes from a healthy body. An idea that should be taught from a young age.
And that's where Mr. Muyters has missed the point as well. At this point I would like point out that he's also the minister of Finances, Work and Planning. Plus he's got an economic background. A field he's probably better suited for.
So imagine what his economist eyes beheld when he was delivered, on the 10th of June this year, the report that in 13 years our top sporting schools had only delivered 2 top-tier handball players. What a gigantic waste of our resources! Logically, the sport has since been scrapped from the curriculum. Along with Judo, a former national sport, and long distance running, because our small country's lack of long distances.
With the budget cuts made to schools, the minister has crossed the border of the acceptable. If there's anything schools need it's more funding. The result of schools isn't just top tier sports-people but educated people. And that's what we can't have enough of. If we have enough of them maybe they'll even find their way to parliament.
And anyway, if you're a patron to the arts you can't be too concerned with return on investment. You just have to hope the artist you're funding that somewhere down the line, but don't count on it, because it's rare. It's the reason why patrons of the arts are rare. One just accepts that the money is gone, but the mind is at ease because the money has gone to a generally good cause, and not to say, an expensive mistress.
Speaking of arts, perhaps Mr. Muyters wants to take aim at the art schools because of the minimal amount of world renowned artists our country is producing? What a clever idea, if you can't sell it, why have culture at all?

I'm sure Mr. Muyters congratulates him on his big brains for being a minister. Perhaps hard to justify because it requires about the least physical activity in the nation's range of professions. I could call it hypocrisy, but I'm not sure about his after-hours activities. Maybe he has a second job as a longshoreman. Though more likely he goes to the firing range, where he shoots clay pigeons. Scoffing at his aide for his performance "Why did you load blanks instead of buckshot? Weren't you thinking?"

A wider point of view, part two.

In part one I talked at length about current games and their console and PC features. One of which is an often ignored option that has been irking me to no end: A configurable Field Of View (FoV) variable. A limited FoV is usually a telling sign of consolitis, a term the online PC community uses to denote a game that is marred by its console origins. Yet I have not explained just why it's such a big deal. Why the fuss over adjustable features? And what makes the FoV so important?

An example might clarify what I'm talking about. If you want to fully notice the difference between the following clips, watch the peripheral vision, size of opponents, sense of speed and turning speed. The effect is clearly visible when you look at the onscreen size and position of the AK47. This first clip is Black Ops at its standard 65 FoV:



This second clip is Black Ops at its maximum allowed FoV of 80. Which still considered on the low side by most PC gamers who'd want the scale to go as far as 90:



The differences are subtle, yet make a world of difference while playing. CoD might not be the best example of this because the gap between min and max FoV isn't that big. The engine is quite performant and so the standard FoV is still quite wide compared to other games.
But does it make a difference? Of course it does. Compare the render area with this picture in picture image images courtesy of the GamingAU.net Forums). In the picture is a screenshot of Bad Company 2, the numbers on the shot is the used FoV. 55 Is what the console uses, 85 is typically around what a PC gamer would use on a 16:10 monitor.



The difference in number of assets that are displayed on-screen is clearly visible. More on screen logically means the computer will need more system resources to display them. Also note that the 55 FoV screen is zoomed in, enlarging objects in depth. The shot with 85 FoV is less zoomed in, but objects in the distance appear smaller on screen.
There's an additional concern with the zoomed-in view. If we were to apply 3D vision to it, the effect would be less pronounced. If you've ever looked through binoculars and moved from left to right, you'll know that depth perception is minimized. This means that any game with a very narrow FoV will gain little from 3D effects, and might even get in the way of gameplay because it is so unnatural, at least on PC.
If the viewing angle gets to big though, the image will become noticeably warped, like watching through a fisheye lens. What's more, if more image is squeezed into the view port of the monitor, objects in depth will get pushed even further away, making them smaller and, as a side effect, harder to aim at in a shooter. Debunking the claim that increasing the FoV would be some sort of visual cheat, just because you get to "see more". Players need to find a workable medium, one that looks and feels comfortable.

PC gamers demand adjustable FoV because, unlike their console playing brethren, they're sitting quite close to the screen. A low FoV makes you look around constantly in order to take in your environment. Combine this with the screen distance, a lack of peripheral vision and one can easily get motion sick.
What's more, a larger FoV is more immersive because our natural FoV is quite large as well. So it is best to match the natural FoV with the one in the game. The further you sit from the screen, the smaller it can get without appearing unnatural. But when watching a screen up close, as is the case with a PC, it needs to be quite wide. To drive the point home: if your eyes were the screen, logically, you'd want to have the full natural FoV which about 180 degrees. Fun fact, a large FoV also greatly increases the sense of speed.

So why don't console games provide a bigger FoV? The low FoV on consoles could be there for a number of reasons. As I mentioned before, one is that the player sits a distance away from the TV, his "window" into the virtual world. Making a smaller FoV appear more natural. We'll ignore the naturalistic appearance of a pair of arms more than a meter away for now. One argument against this then is: why don't they incorporate a FoV slider and give players a choice. I can imagine some console gamers are sitting quite close to the screen too.
Perhaps console devs simply can't. And that really narrows down the number of design choices.
Linked to system resources, a low FoV can also be due to the limited horsepower of the consoles. Rendering less makes a console render faster. Here is where we get to the crux of this topic. This highlights what infuriates PC gamers so much about badly ported shooters: inferior hardware dictating and limiting the way a game plays on potentially superior PC hardware.

In the past PC's have always been used for immersive applications that greatly benefit from wide viewing angles. A good example are flight simulators where, even in the early days, multiple screens would be used to simulate a real cockpit in which the pilot could watch not only in front but also to the sides. This was even more useful when piloting a fighter, where dogfights would take place in 3D space. By which I mean a fighter pilot has to keep track of his targets all around him, back, front, left, right, up and down. Watching rigidly ahead would narrow his spatial awareness to less than 1/6 of what it should ideally be. If the used foV is around 90 degrees.
We could quite easily change the context to shooters, where a soldier needs to keep track of his targets in a 3D environment. Perhaps not so much under and above him, but certainly in front, to the left and right and to the back.

With all this in mind. Let's watch the following youtube movie. The commentator, the esteemed El Presador, doesn't have an inkling about how a game engine works technically, but what he's saying from his gamer background is pertinent. And that's what really matters. The game is Killzone 3.



If you enjoyed that, there's more on topic El Presador on Killzone 3.

Killzone 3 is a prime example. A low FoV is its main persisting problem, as it has been present since the first Killzone. And its bad controls are always what people complained about however the "sluggish controls" are wrongly attributed to the controls. The game looks sluggish because the view is so zoomed in. It can make people nauseous. It makes the environment harder to navigate which in turn makes people run into walls. That's also what happened in the video.
I assume Guerilla squeezed the PS3 for performance, making the game look good, by squeezing the FoV. Render less to make it render faster. And despite the sacrifices the game doesn't run any faster than 30fps. Meaning that a TV running at 60hz will display every frame in the game twice, where it would display any given frame only once at 60fps. Twice the frame rate makes a game feel more responsive.




Because engines have gotten harder to run on consoles, the FoV has become more narrow. And in many cases can be blamed for the sluggish or unresponsiveness in console shooters. Which makes all of them fail to topple Call Of Duty. It has the lightest engine, the widest, most natural, FoV, the highest frame rate and the most responsive controls on the market. Does this mean it is untouchable? On the current consoles it probably does. But I for one feel that the age of Call Of Duty is coming to an end. The new engines dazzle players with their effects, physics, realism and immersion. The visual fidelity of Cryengine 3 and Frostbite 3 will raise the standard in a way that Call Of Duty players will expect the same quality from their favorite game. Unfortunately though, if Call Of Duty has to upgrade its engine, it will also have to leave behind its 60fps and 65 degrees FoV in favor of 30fps and 55 or less FoV. With the same sacrifices on gameplay in favor of visuals, it would get attributed the same dubious award of looking great, but playing like garbage. Current console hardware only goes so far.

For PC players though, this tipping point is a sweet release from the shackles of console hardware. We're seeing it with Battlefield 3 already, where PC is the leading platform. PC hardware does have the power to run a 64 player battlefield game at 60fps with a 80+ FoV. Which is bound to get the goad of at least some ardent console players who'll have to admit that the PC platform is leaping miles ahead in both gameplay, scope and graphics. The consoles will only be getting a limited version of the very same game. Again, Battlefield 3 will have to use DX9 technology on consoles leaving out all the realism gained with DX11.




Ultimately, it's hard to point fingers. I guess the lead artist or lead gameplay designer of these games are responsible for allowing it. Even though they might not even be aware of the issue. Not knowing about the legacy of shooters or technical limitations. Perhaps they simply have to comply with the lead programmer that the game just doesn't run fast enough with these kind of high-end visuals.
Maybe it's the fault of their customers, supporting bad practice with their money. Though they are even less aware of the issues. And are at a loss about what some other, often PC players, are raving on about. Why are they getting so upset? They only know that this game doesn't feel as good as Call Of Duty but can't quite put their finger on as to why. So they play it for a week and go back to their beloved franchise with the crisp controls and the responsive frame rate. Even though they wished the other game would take them somewhere else.
Then, the newest trailer of Battlefield 3 stuns them into a new dream. The lighting looks amazing! And look at the soft shadows! Will it run at 60fps? But of course it won't. Even Josh Olin, Treyach community manager, hinted at that smirking all the way from his gold plated throne. Disappointed once again console players will go back to Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3, while DICE wonders why only the PC crowd keeps cheering them on. And EA, learning too little, will break their heads over how they could possibly reclaim the FPS crown from Activision once more. Funny that, how this cycle repeats itself.