Why I prefer 3rd person view

I was thinking about this last night before I went to bed. I almost wanted to type this blog up then, but I didn't want to wake anyone else up.

I have never liked playing from the first person perspective in games. First off, they are almost always 3d or psduo-3d. Games such as Ultima 1 in the dungeon levels fit this description as does the early might and magic series of games. Later games that had this perspective included Halflife, Marrowwind (although you could switch out of it in Marrowind if you wanted) and a number of other 3d online games have this, but I have always prefered the over the shoulder or rear end view to actually trying to navagate the world in the first person.

Some people seem to think that playing the game from the first person perspective makes the game more immersive. The idea is that you are the character navigating around the world playing the game. However, I have found it to be somewhat disorienting.

Several years ago, people tried fully imersive 3d type systems for playing games, such as looking through glasses so you would not see anything else except for the game world. There is a reason this did not become popular, and it is not about the cost of 3d glasses or other items need to play the game. Like most things, the more of them that would have been made, the more the cost would come down. The real problem is people would get sick trying to go around and navigate a fully immersive 3d world like that. Hence, people are stuck looking at a flat computer screen at a psudo 3d character. It feels like you are supposed to be the character, and yet you still have all that other stuff going on. You can see your real life computer, and the stuff that is happening around you, your real set of hands and the lines around the computer screen. When you have a third person perspective, it is easier to make it feel natural. It is more like you are just rearanging objects or characters on the screen instead of trying to pretend that you are somewhere you are obviously not.

In first person, it is hard to see what your character is wearing. I find it kind of neat to see how the character looks and the way they move. In first person, I do not get the same sense of joy seeing them all decked out.

The other thing I like about the 3rd person perspective is that feeling of being detached from what is happening to the character. Sometimes it is hard to turn away from the game and you get so stuck on what is happening to the character that the game becomes flustrating or upseting. Putting things in 3rd person makes it easier to put it all into perspective, because then you realize it is just a little figure that you are moving about the screen and not really you who is taking the beating.