The half life series have over 15 million copies sold.
http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=news&id=648
Comparing the aggregate sales over years of multiple games in a series to the sales of Bioshock alone over 3 weeks? Do you really imagine that to be a valid comparison?
If anything Bioshock got MORE sales due to bad FOV implentation and all the publicity it received around it.
Oh yes, I always run right out and buy a game when I hear people complaining about it. It must be the complaints that created those 1.5 million sales, it can't possibly be the widely reported strong reception of early versions of the game at game shows, or the virtually unanimous rave reviews from gaming magazines and major web sites, or the demo. You certainly have a high opinion of your own impact on the market...
There is probably a lot of 4:3 users within the 1.5 million copies sold too, don't you think? ;) And they are not complaining about FOV being too wide....
Based on the statistics, widely reported here that show how wide screen gaming is taking over, I doubt if that had a major impact. A lot of those copies were XBox 360, and the big selling point of the platform has been its support of widescreen HD gaming.
Talking about the sales of Bioshock is a waste of time, unless for publicity reasons. It does not reflect whether or not the FOV was bad and if you really were a scientist, you'd dismiss that as evidence.
On the contrary, sales are the closest thing that we have to an unbiased survey. Word gets around pretty quickly if a game doesn't live up to the hype.
People are not complaining about the game being bad, but that the FOV implentation of it was bad
Aside from here, I haven't seen much of anybody complaining about the FOV. Can you find me any professional game reviewer who complained about the FOV? But I do agree that the average user does not judge a game based upon a single rigid criterion such as FOV, or whether his monitor shows "more" than somebody else's, but rather upon the total experience--whether all of the esthetic and gameplay choices of the developer combine to create an exciting, immersive game experience. And people who are willing to judge the game as a whole seem to regard it as a hit.
This is the same formula as the other one you have referred to earlier, just put in another way. I wasn't asking for the formula on how to calculate the FOV based upon the distance you are sitting. Bioshock have a locked horizontal FOV and its not adjustable to where you are sitting. As I have mentioned earlier, 75 degrees are too narrow for desktop widescreen gaming.
75 degrees corresponds to an optimum viewing distnce that is 2/3 of the width of the screen. Do you really think that many PC users sit closer than that?
Since we are talking about a locked FOV which you defend with this formula saying its optimal, I am asking you once again: Whats the relevance of the given "optimal" angle compared to human eyesight?
The relevance is that it is an angle at which an undistorted, correct perspective, actual size image can be provided at typical viewing distances.
To give you some insight upon human vision, since you, despite calling yourself teacher, are operating with a 75 degrees optimal angle despite how the human vision functions.
The human visual system functions very well with a limited field of view. We look out of windows, we drive cars, we fly airplanes, we wear glasses that provide clear vision over only a portion of our visual field, and yet we judge sizes and distances accurately.
I think you misunderstand. We EXPECT to see more horizontal [hor+). The size of the objects registered with our brains are based upon our depth perception as mentioned earlier.
When we look out of a window, we expect to see what we should see, based upon the width of the window and how far we are away from it, and that expectation informs our perception of size and distance.
This is where you don't understand the mission for first person shooters and people. We don't want to look through a window or stand at a doorstep. We want to be in the world. Our lifetime experience differ from yours. we are not looking at the world through a window or AT a window if to use Bioshocks FOV.
But it is hard to perceive yourself as being in the world if what you see is distorted, unlike everything that you see in the real world. Short of a true virtual reality system, there are only two choices: a view that looks like a window into a real world, or a view that looks like a distorted picture in a frame.