W5-Response to “A Look inside – Evaluating Camera Angles For Immersion”

This article takes immersion as a starting point and analyzes the pros and cons of several mainstream game perspectives and their performance of immersion. The article covers five game perspectives, namely 2d horizontal view, top-down view, first-person view, third-person view, and “Over the shoulder”. I’d like to share some of the perspectives I’ve played with and express my thoughts on the immersion performance of these games.

2d side-scrolling was one of the first kinds of games I played. I played Megaman, Sonic, and Contra. Personally, I think the immersion offered by this type of game is terrible. 2D games provide more of a sense of manipulation and mastery of skills. In my opinion, the immersive feeling of games like this is mostly provided by storytelling and atmosphere creation, rather than the perspective itself.

Top-down, a little bit better than 2d games. I usually call top-down “2.5D”. This kind of perspective is usually found in strategy games such as Red Alert, Warcraft, Age of Empires, StarCraft, and Civilization. They provide the player with a unique sense of immersion, a sense of control, which this article also mentions.

The first person perspective and the third person perspective are very common, so I won’t go into that. But I want to talk about the perspective of “over the shoulder”. Because one of the games I played recently took this perspective. It is “God of War 4”. This is the first time I’ve experienced this perspective. I have to say that this new perspective mode that combines first and third perspective can provide players with better story experience and strike experience, which I think is the big trend in the future. In addition to these perspectives, I would like to present here a new perspective that I think is likely to be developed in the future. It is the virtual reality perspective. Yes, this is the ultimate answer, the most immersive perspective, is to become the protagonist himself. I really hope to be able to experience virtual reality perspective games in the near future.