Half-Life 2 – Sickness Update 1 Comments
11/23/2004 7:23 PST | Half-Life 2 | by Briggsy
Over at Halflife2.net forums, Anguished has posted an Official email from Bill Van Buren @ Valve concerning the FOV. It seems this is not the cause of the motion sickness. Or so they say. However most of you seem to be getting motion sickness when driving the airboat or the Buggy, unfortunately there is nothing you can do to stop this from happening, some people say forcing the refresh rate to 75 will help. Some people say forcing the FOV to 90 will help. You could try all of these if you with but we will probably just have to live with it.
We've been rigorously playing and testing Half-Life 2, Counterstrike Source and Half-Life Source for a long time now - and we've found nothing to suggest that the FOV change is a significant factor in causing motion sickness. We have, however, put a great deal of work and attention into reducing the motion sickness that can be experienced in the vehicles in Half-Life 2. During our early playtests, many of us were experiencing motion sickness from driving the buggy and the airboat - especially the airboat. We've done a lot of work on tuning the experience to reduce any ill effects - especially looking at how we manage the players head/view in relationship to the movement of the vehicles. Interestingly, for all of the vehicle sequences we revert back to FOV 90 so that you have more peripheral vision which is helpful when moving at these faster speeds. Even so, some people still do experience some motion sickness effects from long stretches in the vehicles - personally, I find that I am most affected by the intense jarring that occurs when you slam into something in the airboat at high speed - like when you miss a jump or something.
You can read the full email here.
Thanks Sven for the update.