Widescreen Gaming Forum

Using a lower FOV brings all the action closer to you and makes everything appear faster-paced and more action-oriented. When using a default FOV of 90, you kind of feel like you're sitting back from the action.

You've almost got it there. The main reason is that PC gamers generally sit notably closer to that action being displayed on their monitors and hence filling their views far more than the TVs of console gamers. The lower FOV on games which target console games is done to offset that difference in how much the displays fill the gamers view. I personally prefer a PC style FOV when viewing from TV watching distances, but such higher FOVs actually causes some people to experience motion sickness.

higher FOVs actually causes some people to experience motion sickness.

Lower FOV is also known to give people motion sickness, I defiantly felt it in the bioshock demo. It felt as if you were looking through a video camera as you were walking, Your view was so zoomed in that the camera was not in your eyes but hovering out infront of you.

If I were to take a guess it'd be they choose a lower fov to:

a - render less things on screen aka, easier to get better performance
b - need to reduce the viewport so the sub-720p rendering doesn't show as much
c - are putting in their respective 'artistic visions' which, by the looks of other art fields (such as a blank canvas being considered art) can be a good or a bad thing.
d - all of the above.

A is not entirely accurate. You may think there is less, but almost all games use LOD for models. The further away you are, the less complex the objects are. The same works in reverse. So by having the view closer to the action, the engine may actually draw more complex objects and models.

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As I said, a guess :).

Lower FOV is also known to give people motion sickness, I defiantly felt it in the bioshock demo.

this happened to me when playing bioshock, too. i had to just give up and wait for the widescreen hack before i could play it properly.

Yeah, it works both ways, and again depends on how far you sit from a given size display. The uneasy feeling is from your brain rejecting the difference between the FOV of the 3D image and how much of your own field of view the display actually fills. Moving further away from a lower FOV view will reduce the feeling of motion sickness, and moving closer to a higher FOV will do the same.