Player View: Please give me your opinion Thread

Hello All,

I am a hobbyist game programmer with around seven years of experience creating single and multiplayer games for the PC using various engines. Me and a couple friends are ready to embark on a new project, and have all recently licensed cryengine3.

My friends and I are all fans of the game, "Natural Selection" where players work as a team to destroy an alien hive. We want to place the game outdoors in a small city or urban environment and give players more mobility and freedom than players have in Natural Selection, also incorporating session-based player 'level ups' which are a component in Natural Selection's 'combat' game mode. This game would be coop vs AI and if we do release it, it will likely be free to play depending on our personal level of investment in the game.

I wanted to know which view sounds better to you in this setting: First or Third Person camera, and why you prefer which one.

Thank you for reading, and for your potential input.

I play Natural Selection II, I got it in a bundle with Overgrowth a long time ago. It's a cool game, interesting concept. I don't know if you are aware that they worked ten years on the project and probably had a few times of almost giving up along the way. It's a very ambitious shooter. Lot of game mechanics that aren't your everyday code and asset work; and they did a great job at it and delivered a game I enjoyed playing. So that's just to put into perspective, the time and effort it took to make the original game.

So there is a ton of work waiting, it's nothing that will be done in 1 year. And technically I am not even sure this is possible with Cryengine without source code.

Hypothetically, I would use a 3rd person game camera. You say you want to make it more open and outdoors, and I think 3rd person is the best solution there to get an overview of the environment. The view could switch to firstperson when you are using ironsights or scopes (e.g. by holding rmb you go into "scope" view).

Thank you for your grounded and realistic response, SinKing. I didn't mean to say that we are re-creating Natural Selection tit-for-tat, but that our game will be centered around some concepts inspired from it. As we're just a group of hobbyists we've taken the game's scale into account and do realize how incredibly ambitious our project really is.

After some play testing with both camera types we have decided to go with a first person player perspective because we don't want players peeking over walls or around corners without any risk of endangering themselves. We feel like the player will be more vulnerable with a smaller field of view and will be more immersed in the game's atmosphere.

Any other readers please feel free to share your thoughts.

I'm with SinKing, third person perspective sounds like your best bet. I might also suggest though that you're careful with levels that happen per-session. As someone who's more of a fan of longterm progression, I might suggest something more akin to Homefront's Battlepoints system. Then you encourage longterm progression but there's also mid-battle unlocks, unlike something like a MOBA where you have to grind every ability you want every time mid-match.