Do you play first person ?

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Whulfgar, Jun 18, 2021.

  1. Leerah Augur

    Always play in 1st person because I run into walls and up characters' butts if I don't. That is a major handicap that prevents me from tanking. When the mob moves, I am slow to find it again. (My visual motor ability is in the 10%ile. I often don't see them coming into camp either.)

    Not only that, I still use arrow keys to move. I still haven't gotten the hang of ASDW. That was a real problem when I tried to play Valheim with my adult sons.

    Tallie and Niskin like this.
  2. SunDrake Augur

    I'm kinda shocked at the number of veterans who use 1st person exclusively. I find the view charming, and I remember using it more frequently early on in EQ, but I'd guess 90% of the time I am pulled back into some variation on a third person view. Constantly mouse wheeling out to check surroundings, then back in when a mob is in camp, usually settling on view that's only slightly behind my character, sometimes looking up / down slightly. I just get so much more information from the visual cues that come with third person. I hadn't thought much about it, and am actually really impressed that so many are able to find success utilizing only one POV. Fun thread.
    Skuz likes this.
  3. kookoo Augur

    same ,
    i play since 1999 , and using 3rd view since 15 years +

    same player , same skills :: if i was playing 1st view and other one 3rd view , i am a better player using 3rd view hand down.
    ---------------------------
    LOL , our last crusader raid, we had the MT ( warrior ) on boss to get agro and pull him to the area to kill , he pulled him right where a cube was , we had to tell him, ** move some you are right where cube is ** , if he was playing 3rd view he would have see it easy .
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  4. bobbin Elder

    I always scroll out. Don't know if that's considered first person or not.
    Metanis likes this.
  5. Bristlebard New Member

    Everquest was the first game of this type I ever played. I started playing shortly after the release of the original Kunark. I have mostly played healers, and really didn't see the need to roam from 1st person. For the last several years, I have played a tank quite a bit. I clearly see a game play advantage to using 3rd person for tanking. Situational awareness is greatly improved.

    That said, after 20 years of 1st person play, I have a hard time driving in 3rd person and I often overrun my intended destination. My brain is also fond of 1st person and I will subconsciously scroll back into, or tap my "F" keys back into, 1st person. I literally do it without thinking. If I could start all over again and learn the game in 3rd person, I would. However, it is a muscle memory thing at this point. I will play in 1st person even when I intend not to.
  6. Annastasya Augur

    Always first person. i play a cleric though, and a raiding cleric at that.
    It's a different game than many of you play, entirely. My screen is 80% full of UI pieces. Chat windows, group and extended target windows, buffs and hotbars.

    My job is to anticipate and react to incoming damage. Basically to prioritize (as a team, in tandem with the rest of the healers) who is most important to the success of the raid or group at any given moment.

    Most of this information comes from UI pieces and not the environment. Yes there are emotes, and places you have to move to, or away from, but all of that is secondary.

    It's like driving, you are peripherally aware there's a tree or building over there that you don't want to run into, but you stay focused on the road, whats directly in front of you. You memorize the routes you travel often so you know to get in the right turn lane early, or avoid that pothole etc.

    i can understand why one's surroundings are of high importance when your job is mob positioning, when your character's facing determines whether you are engaged in melee or not, when line of sight is necessary for you to hit your target. So, i get why other players are incredulous about the camera angle people are using to play. But none of that stuff applies to me. i don't use mouse clicks in the game environment to acquire targets- that is slow and inaccurate.

    TLDR : You focus on the mobs, but i focus on YOU, and i don't need or want 3rd person views for that.
    Tour likes this.
  7. Thundersnake Elder

    Imo it is very hard to be a decent tank in 1st person, I've been playing 3rd person since 2004 almost exclusively with the exception of a very few instances. 3rd Person with WASD + Mouse movement is a staple for fast engagement and situational awareness I think. It enables a tank to see adds coming at the group from behind and thus giving them the ability to intercept it before it kills someone. On another note, playing this way makes the transition to playing other games with ground based mechanic events much less jarring.
  8. Niskin Clockwork Arguer


    The way EQ's 3rd person camera works, I doubt it. In games like The Division, they place the camera and rotate it in such a way that what you see still feels close to 1st person in functionality. EQ's moves very clumsily in comparison. I can't put my finger on the exact reason, but it's something to do with height, distance, FOV and all that.

    Rocket League's default camera didn't work well for me either (this is true for many), I had to adjust things to get it to feel like I was in some kind of line with my car. I don't know how to describe it well, but I would miss the ball by the same vertical space constantly, consistently. I need a perspective that feels like 1st person, even when I'm in 3rd.

    I played (Phoenix) DAoC a bit a couple years ago and it didn't bother me there, but the character is so small and the camera so high that it felt more like Diablo. Plus I mostly played casters, so it mattered less.

    I think people are just used to different things, and their brains are wired differently. I used to play inverted mouse only, couldn't play the other way. Now I can do both to some degree, but struggle with non-reversed horizontal axises, like how Google Street view works.

    I left my box in 3rd person a lot yesterday to monitor invis dropping while running around on Thornblade. Any time I had to try and move that character manually it was extremely disorienting. This was playing a human, which kept the camera higher. I may try again with a Dwarf or Gnome to see if the effect is as bad. But there is definitely something to this for some people. It's not just a "learn 3rd person and you will be better" kind of thing.
  9. Metanis Bad Company

    As a cleric I mostly play in first person for reasons already given earlier in the thread. However when raiding I am always scrolled out, back, and up a little ways just for the extra situational awareness. It really helps for the raids with a duck mechanic to actually see your character duck. And it's so much easier to see the edges of auras!

    I think having to count how many times you hit the F9 key is clunky beyond belief. Maybe the EQ Devs could be persuaded to work on an easier way to manage the camera? Or implement something like Picture-In-Picture?

    But in the meantime, scrolling back is simple and doesn't require a brain re-wire!
    Cadira and Skuz like this.
  10. Windance Augur

    Metanis and others bring up a good point. The type of 3rd person camera mode makes a huge difference and I find many of them hard to use.

    I start in 1st person then use the scroll wheel to adjust the camera out behind and above my character so I'm looking down.

    I also use the mouse to rotate and pan my view and cast spells from the keyboard.
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  11. Liin Edud (Tunare) Augur

    I main a shaman so I fall in that category of classes that it doesn't seem like it matters as much. I would say I'm probably 75-80% 1st person if not more. It really is a muscle memory thing but I do zoom out if I'm somewhere I need to see around me or the event requires it.

    Honestly when I do zoom out for whatever reason I rarely zoom back in until I'm done playing for the day. I wonder if I should put a sticky note on the monitor that says zoom out and see if I can retrain myself.
  12. Filter Augur

    1st person all the time. When I'm finding max melee range I scroll out and up with my scroll wheel.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  13. Helicoprion New Member

    Veteran tank here. Been playing 3rd person forever. Only time I play 1st person is in super tight corridors or tanking a boss in a corner. My friends and I call 1st person players 'turrets' because they literally move like one. You can spot a 'turret' in groups on how they play, their reaction time, responsiveness, ability to assess agro range by proximity etc... Sometimes a detriment to groups and raids, I try to tell them the benefits but they still to their ways /sigh :(. But hey, 'each his own.'
    Conq and Skuz like this.
  14. KarmaKitty Augur

    Molo/solo and almost always play in 1st person.
    Exceptions: Look at the character, Meditating in a sketchy spot.
  15. Annastasya Augur

    i think there's a couple more layers to unpack to how we got to this 3rd person vs first person view in the first place.

    Firstly - Mouse vs. Keyboard users and let's call it the percentage use between the two.

    And second -Functionality of different classes and mechanics in this game regarding motion and/or connectivity.

    On the first point i am personally at about a 5% to 95% on use of Mouse vs Keyboard.

    Physical preferences aside (and there could be plenty of reasons that one is easier to utilize over the other depending on what dexterous abilities or limitations a person might have) it can be clear that the speed of moving the mouse cursor and clicking on something is largely dependent on the frames per second the game is actually operating on. Keystrokes seem to have significantly less difficulty in carrying simple commands to their destination. i'm not a tech head, i don't know how latency affects game play in technical terms, but the results are unmistakable.

    Some of you are lucky and have never experienced the dismal lag that's become worse in this game over the last decade. Congrats on your kit/internet connection/personal brilliance. The rest of us have to adjust, and over decades of practice, i've come to abandon using the mouse for anything i don't absolutely have to. So when other players are talking about all these fancy maneuvers they are pulling off with the mouse and they are flying around the environment like a modern action-shooter game, i have no frame of reference for that.

    It's simply not the game i'm playing because...and that takes us to our second point-
    Imagine if you will, that while your character is in motion, strafing, pushing forward, making micro adjustments that your attack swings pause, that your discs and abilities do nothing. Not only that, but if you do move, any attacks you've made in the last 2 seconds are reversed and your job is undone.

    Welcome to healing. It does not work while moving AT ALL. (shut up bards) True, heal over time spells are a thing, and may have saved you a few times, but hots are not the foundations of keeping a raid force alive and kicking.

    i'm a proud "Turret". The more i move, the more likely it is you are going to die, and we are going to wipe. The most effective healing is finding the safest place to glue myself to the floor, generally speaking. Healing positions on raid events, is obviously a different animal than tanking or dps positions.

    Tactically speaking, i wish more raid leaders understood the dynamics of healer placement. Unfortunately, these days events seem to reward the guilds that can push some crazy dps and just bunch everyone together, AE heal and brute force burn through mechanics.

    TLDR: Focusing on things that make you a good tank, specifically in 3rd person, like mobile threats, main target placement, and micro adjustments, would make you a less effective healer.
    Metanis, SunDrake and Elyssanda like this.
  16. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Been using mouse to turn with W / S to move forwards / backwards since I started playing EQ & this lets me strafe with relative ease.
    Maybe I adopted that from FPS playing a very long time ago but it felt more natural to me.

    "Keyboard turner" has been for almost all of my EQ time an intentional insult and the vast majority of bad melee players I have seen were those, I've heard it used by pretty much every "considered skilled" melee player & tank I have grouped & raided with.

    As a Berserker I also use "Battle-Leap" a huge amount on raids (immediately after using an /assist Raid hotkey) just to move to the mob rather than move the screen actively searching for the target ring, saves so much time.
    I also hate having to be levitated, it throws off my distance to target judgement as a melee, if I can afford to I prefer to play without levitate at all.

    If I was forced to play EQ in 1st person I think I would rather quit, I'm sure those who are deeply entrenched 1st person players feel the same, but performance wise I think 3rd is far superior for any melee/tank class.
  17. SunDrake Augur

    I agree with this, and I've also raided mostly as a Priest class, so I'm in agreement about there being a greater advantage to melee / DPS classes than healers to using third person. But.. these are actually separate things, correct? You might not NEED third person as much as other classes, but you could still operate under your plant and heal scenario from third person view also, like, exactly the same? I will say, I am less active with the camera when I am maining a healer, but I could and do also rotate the camera view a lot.

    Edit: I even think its a bit different playing a Shaman or Druid than a Cleric. Thinking on your post I am definitely remembering a very different style of play for my Cleric. I didn't get up to look at mobs, I didn't necessarily need to know the proximity of different mobs, all I needed to know was how much healing was needed to succeed, and to whom it went. On my Shaman, I'm a lot more interested in positioning of mobs and positioning of players. Which mobs arrived in camp first, which mobs are most likely to be taken next, where players are gonna be when they engage, etc.
  18. Cloud the Third Augur

    I don't know about other pullers but as a puller class in most groups being in 3rd person makes it really hard to play. It doesn't mean you never do 3rd person but when running around a zone trying to look up and down for mobs to lull and pull first person is so much better than 3rd person. There are times in a raid where I scroll out to 3rd person because I need to see where my player is standing to make sure I don't stand in fire or when running up something you can fall off with a zone that has no levi.
  19. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    First person almost all the time. I prefer the immersion to the benefits of third person. I guess a raid would be an exception if I felt third was needed.

    And I play with sound on but music off. Immersion again as unlike King Arthur I don't have a minstrel playing music as I clack my coconuts... errr ride my horse.
    Aenvar likes this.
  20. Rolaque Ancient

    Played exclusively 1st person for the first 10-12 years. It was natural, and was reinforced by the lack of in-game maps, i.e., you had to recognize the terrain and where you were. Plus raids were more simplistic in design and player demands. However about 10 years ago, I started playing SWTOR. While I started in first person, I soon changed over to 3rd person, and once I became comfortable with it, I then changed my EQ play to 3rd person. Now switching to 1st person is like putting on blinders, which would be fatal for me in raids and many missions.
    Skuz likes this.