Random Idea #81: Complaining about Scale in third person POV games

In most games at human-scale, and even car scale to a certain extent, the 3rd POV doesn’t greatly change how large things appear to be. Your avatar is still going to look small when standing next to a large truck. The game “It Takes Two” is a great example of this, since the characters are shrunk to the size of dolls and tossed into the insides of machines and snowglobes. A gear the size of a hand now towers over you. You really feel small and fragile, where any misstep will crush you. The feeling somewhat goes away when you’re plopped next to things your size unless care is put into making what once were tiny imperfections into massive ones. I don’t think this happens much, since otherwise there’s no longer any point to shrinking. See, Toy Story, Lego.

However, I feel like this relationship doesn’t work as easily when you go in the other direction, when your avatar is gigantic for example. We all have memories of being bigger than something, for example our toys. A giant robot the size of skyscrapers fits easily into a fist.

When presented with a camera angle of a giant robot from above, your avatar feels more like an action figure than a hulking colossus, the cars you’re stepping over are less vehicles and more hot wheels. When you want something to look massive on a screen, you typically want to film the object from below, looking up. See, Transformers, Star Wars, King Kong. We aren’t birds, accustomed to viewing the world from above. It makes more sense to put the camera at head height to get the feeling of size across a 2d screen.

Except, you can’t really use that camera angle when trying to control an avatar, it would be impossible to see where you’re going. In 1st POV games, like Titanfall, the effect is lessened since you are surrounded by the giant-ness of the mech, the camera inside the “head”, and a significant portion of the game has you often running around the feet of said mechs. In 3rd POV games, the camera angle you get is barely different than the angle you get from sitting down behind a figurine.

This gets worse the bigger your avatar is, and I feel is a significant problem in warship games (see: World of Warships, Tanks to a lesser extent). Your default camera is like a mile above the ship, making it feel like the several thousand tons of steel you’re supposed to be controlling came out of a bottle. The camera angle issue is notable when you compare it to its advertising. The vast majority of the camera angles used here are at around deck height, or slightly above the bridge. The birds-eye view is used sparingly, to either give an overview of the battle at hand, or to give you the perspective of the bombers diving from above. When you see a shell impact a ship that’s right below your feet, your world is being shaken apart. When you see a shell impact your toy boat, it’s like being hit with BBs.

The fury of being hit by shells heavier than cars just doesn’t exist when you’re so far away from the action.

I’m not sure whether it’d be practical to move the camera closer in, though. While sure, standing on the deck of a battleship half aflame will definitely bring you into this massive machine of war, you also won’t be able to see anything with half your screen covered by boat. A real ship has hundred of people looking all around for obstacles and threats, in a game there’s only you. You’d have to make a few hackjobs to get this to work, like making the ship partially see through.

You’ll get the benefit of allowing the sound design team to go wild, you’d be almost directly on top of the action after all. The camera can shake and blur as guns fire, near misses send geysers of water spraying over the ship.

But would this be worth the worse Field of View? I’m not sure. Warships does have a close-up camera, after all, though I feel like the devs didn’t expect anyone to seriously play like that fulltime since the sound design and HUD doesn’t change at all.

Ships just fight a lot slower, after all. Its harder to build tension when you take half a minute just to turn around and go through an entire firing cycle.