Well, I didnât expected this to be such a polarizing topic. But on the other hand, I am asking here, because we were also not sure if its a good idea and if there is even demand for this. So I expected that people may not be interested in it (third option) or will be against it or will say its great. But now 30% people want it, 22% are against it and the rest doesnât seem to care So no matter what we do, we will piss someone. Ooops.
I really do think, that its a win win situation - those who want to play it from 1st person view will get what they expected and those who missed this feature will get it as well. I will repeat this again:
It doesnât come at cost of something else. The first person viewwill not become less important than 3rd person. Its actually theopposite. The way we animate characters means, that when we animatesomething from 1st person, the same animation looks good on NPCs andand 3rd person as well. We dont do extra animations for the player.We do animations, that fit to any character in the game.
Nobody will be forced to play the game from 3rd person. Quite the opposite. Some things will force 1st person - shooting, interiors, crafting minigames
Its still going to be 1st person game, with 1st person view as the primary way how it should be played. Period.
To be honest, the feature was requested by many people and its not that hard and expensive to implement. So just from the economic standpoint the trade off between the time it will take us and the income it could generate seems to be very good and will allow us to improve some other stuff, which is not as much attractive to be a stretch goal.
And I will just add, that in the past I worked on several quite sophisticated 3rd person camera systems, so I am totally aware what does it mean to implement this. In our case, its much simpler, because we are not a shooter, which causes most of the problems (different viewpoint of camera and the character and weapon, problems that you cant shoot at something that you see from camera, but there is an obstacle in front of the weapon etc.). Also we will get rid of the camera in interiors, where it really is a problem and you usually need to change FOV, position of the camera and adjust the size of various objects (doors, ceilings, corridors). So if you were afraid about thase issues, it should not be a problem in our case.