I'm putting this here although it isn't necessarily directly related to Receiver, though Receiver does play into my response. I was reading David's blog posts about the GDC Animation Bootcamp and something stuck out to me in
part 5:
Sometimes you really do have to break the rules though. The highest priority is to show the player what is happening, so everything has to be in front of the camera. Nobody would really reload right in front of their face like that, and the first-person camera FOV would not be able to see a weapon that is fired from the hip, but we have to compromise on realism to keep all the important action on screen.
Well actually...
Generally not, no, at least not with recreational shooters. However in combat, it's becoming somewhat standard practice (as in among PMCs, SOF, and SWAT officers) - particularly as taught through the
Magpul Dynamics school of combat rifle shooting - to keep the weapon up in front of your face while reloading or clearing malfunctions rather than looking down at the weapon. This has to do with threat detection; if you're looking down, you're no longer paying attention to what is going on around you and that can get you killed. If you bring the weapon up to your line of sight, even though you're focused on the weapon itself, you're watching around you via your peripheral vision and can that way detect and respond to threats that would get you killed otherwise. Same reason they started putting head-up displays in fighter aircraft, putting all of the major flight data (bank, attitude, altitude, heading, airspeed, angle of attack, etc.) right on the gunsight so you rarely have to take your eyes off the sky to look down at the panel.
This is actually aptly demonstrated in Receiver. Granted that it is not a fast-paced game and you generally aren't looking around for threats while you're standing still and configuring your weapon. Still, when you are manipulating the gun, it helps to be looking at it - particularly if you're doing a press-check* - and there's two ways to do that: look down at the weapon, or hold RMB/tap (Q) to bring it up to your line of sight. The later is more comfortable, at least for me, and certainly better if you are worried about a shock drone suddenly drifting into view. That also leads to a second point which is, in Receiver, the weapon is obviously not visible to the player unless aiming or looking downward; I don't think this detracts from gameplay, and I still don't think it would if there were actually animated arms holding the gun.
*Technically if it's dark to the point that you can't see the weapon, you can still press-check by feeling for the cartridge with your fingertip in the ejection port, but that doesn't really apply to Receiver.
Oh, and firing from the hip? No one who knows what they are doing fires from the hip, ever.
It's a Hollywood invention and saying it's bad form would be a gross understatement
(when I wrote this I was trying to think of exceptions to that statement and couldn't come up with any, but someone pointed out to me that the Browning Automatic Rifle was indeed used from the hip, buttplate cupped in a metal holder on the shooter's belt in an attempt to control the recoil. It was a bad idea, and shooting from the hip is still dumb.) Shooters on the move who aren't really able to aim down the sights well, or using a weapon like a pistol-grip shotgun with high recoil, poor accuracy, and no buttstock, typically have the weapon still held up and out in front of them lined up near the shoulder or the center of the chest.
In fact, with the vast majority of first-person shooters, it is a pet peeve of mine to have the weapon sticking out of the bottom-right corner of the screen. In real life, the gun is lined up with your right (assuming you're right handed) shoulder blade and your body is turned so that the weapon goes across your chest and is lined up directly below your right eyeball.
(Alternatively, if you're wearing a Kevlar vest with rifle plates and you want to keep the ballistic plate facing straight forward toward your aggressor, you'll instead generally have the weapon perpendicular to your body, lined up near the middle of your chest with a shortened buttstock.) In-game, your weapon should really always be displayed lined up with the vertical center line of the field-of-vision rather than inexplicably floating off to the side... Heaven forbid I ever suggest any modern FPS should be more like Doom. Watch
the intro for this old Armalite promotional video for the AR-10 with the guy running up the beach firing from the hip and tell me it doesn't look completely ridiculous and ineffectual - this is basically what I imagine all FPS player-characters doing at all times.
Just one woman's opinion.
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