If you HAD to choose between first person or third person view, what would your choice be?
- First Person
- Third Person
0 voters
I enjoy a good first person RPG, action or adventure game. That’s mainly why I chose first. I love those first person Starbreeze games (The Darkness, Riddick) and of course Bethesda stuff.
Third person, mainly because I enjoy seeing who/what I’m playing as.
I chose 3rd because of great games like Max Payne and Transistor. Although 1st person puzzle/adventure games are quite enjoyable.
Never was a fan of First-Person Shooter genre ever since Doom was released.
I love both of them really,but i think third person might just edge it for me,and the reason for that might just be the GTA games.
1 Like
Hmm… It depends on what’s on the menu. (Almost like saying ‘breakfast’ or ‘lunch’ or ‘dinner’) perspective is like the presentation, and some games tend to be better lunch or breakfast foods, it boils down to how they are prepared (designed) It’s not even genre specific or simple as saying: _‘the fantasy action rpg or dungeon crawling/areana hack and slash is better in third person, or an overhead 2D mode if a retro game’ (This is a common opinion i’d imagine, it’s just how countles titles are done.)
It’s not as common to do a game of such genre in FPS but there are some great examples, Elder Scrolls IV Skyrim. Arx Fatalis, Thief. Remember how the CRPG (i dislike the term but it is very specific) perspective in the 90’s as RPG shifted AWAY from their grass roots of FPS in blocky vector dungeons to stunning and beautiful scenes that showed you black isle styled towns and complex background art scenes? (Such as The Temple of Elemental Evil or Fallout 2 Very diferent from what used to be Betrayal at Krondor. This overhead 2D thing became a great way to show off artistic talent and breathe life into scenes that was previously limited to simplistic artwork. But thanks to technical improves (Direct3D?) we had games like Diablo open up… FPS now has become a bit back in vogue (after previously going out of style in the fantasy/rpg setting as I mentioned) we have Bethesda to thank for it.
Ironically the FPS went into a orthogonal direction, and that’s how we tend to think of it today, as the ‘shooter’ but originally It was actually dungeon crawling. Now we see mixed designs. With Virtual Reality, you aren’t seeing too many really good shooters but i’ve played a few really fun adventure games that bring new life into that genre. (another 90’s genre that had a bit of a heyday thanks to the technical FMV type videos made possible (quicktime?) but lost a lot of fizzle along the way.
For me personally shooters have lost a lot of their luster. Late 2000’s ‘overkilled’ the genre. I’m rambling a bit but this is a rather heavy and deep question that warrants more tha a poll as you look back at whats been published, when it was published and what the technological means to present were at the time. In the end a sandwich is a sandwich i guess 
1 Like
Think it’s somewhat game dependant, but personally having started off my gaming life very much in the world of FPS, now very much prefer the third person view if there is the option, but again it’s game dependant. e.g. currently playing the Talos Principle in third person view as it just feels right, but playing Portal 2 some years back, the first person view felt right at the time as it added to the mystery (and disorientation!).
1 Like
I’ve always felt that a third-person-view is actually much closer to real life than a fist-person view. This may sound counter-intuitive, but in the real world, your sensory input isn’t limited to what you see and what you hear. You have what is called ‘proprioception’, a sense of how the various parts of your body are positioned relative to each other at any given moment, how your body is positioned in space, and what muscular effort you are expending. And in addition to that, there is the haptic information from any object you might be standing on, leaning against or carrying on your body. All of this creates a three-dimensional mental image of yourself as a moving, living object in the world. That part of your real-life-experience, however, is completely absent from any first-person-view that I’ve ever seen. In shooters, you are essentially a floating ghost, whose vision (and hearing) resembles that of a human being but whose body is eerily absent. I don’t know how many times I’ve died in an FPS because my invisible feet got caught on some object on the ground and I couldn’t get away from it fast enough, frantically hopping and turning for want of sensory feedback, until a headshot put me out of my misery. 
In short, I usually prefer third-person, because it provides that familiar sense of where I am in space.
4 Likes
…You make some excellent points. Never thought of it that way.
Thanks! So the time I once spent reading up on spatial perception wasn’t all for naught. 
Neither is the time I spend dying in shooter games.