My name’s Silver. I’ve owned Overwatch since the very first day of its release, having played the open beta and pre-ordered Origin Edition and all. I was part of the initial crowd from back in the day when people were calling Overwatch a “TF2 killer”. While I took a hiatus from the game years ago (Hammond was the newest character before I reinstalled the game last weekend) I have otherwise played a very great deal of Overwatch, put a large amount of time into it I’d like to think, but something that’s always bugged me about it was the lack of customization in certain parts of the game, compared to similar live-service, (sometimes) class-based shooters. Specifically, in this case, Overwatch’s stingyness with how much of the screen you’re allowed to see.
Overwatch’s narrow maximum FoV is the reason why I quit for years, after so long of trying to put up with it and finally just not being able to. Time after time after time of being so frustrated by my inability to track a moving target or properly judge distances, only being able to see a tiny sliver of what’s actually in front of me. It’s nauseating, it’s horribly straining on the eyes, and it’s borderline motion-sickness inducing. The entire game picture feels like a flat moving image; it feels like I lack depth perception entirely, and like I’m looking through a rifle scope at all times. It’s horrible, and only becomes worse when one brings up all the inevitable comparisons to other games that lack this problem, which, of course, includes almost any game one could call a competitor to Overwatch, and then becomes even worse when you remember that you can’t modify Overwatch freely through external means, meaning that fixing this limitation is entirely in the hands of the developers.
I know I’m not the only one who’s had this problem. Google search after Google search has shown me several times that this has been going on since at least 2019, on these very forums and beyond. Just the first five examples on Google - here, here, here, here and here - should give one a good idea of how sorely-desired an improved field of vision is for Overwatch, even if demand may have gone down over time due to complacency and other time-related factors. It was bad back when I played the game on a 1920x1080 monitor, and is even worse on a 2560x1080 widescreen one; I have played games at 90 FoV that have better visibility than what Overwatch calls 103, and according to Reddit, it seems to be because the game does not scale horizontal FoV relative to vertical FoV to the degree other games do (and Overwatch ought to).
Time and time again I have witnessed a phenomenon otherwise unheard-of, in Overwatch players genuinely arguing against this very basic feature that has been an important part of first-person action games since some of the very first ones ever made. So many times have I seen old topics where people request this, only for others to act as if allowing others to use a higher FoV would be the absolute end of the world, and it shocks me. The very basic ability to have proper depth perception and peripheral vision relative to the size of one’s screen being a point of contention is something I have never once seen outside of the Overwatch community, even for games that have to be fiddled with in unconventional ways or even hacked outright to customize the FoV of properly, like Skyrim, or No Man’s Sky. Even the developers themselves have expressed disinterest in fixing this problem, with Jeff Kaplan having said himself some years ago in a (now-seemingly-gone) post on the forums that there were no plans to increase the FoV at the time, and even acknowledging that those with 21:9 monitors would just have to suffer for it (despite this issue also affecting 16:10 and 16:9 resolutions, just slightly less).
As someone who’s grew up with ADD, games that let me customize what I see on the screen have always been a boon, since they let me compensate for how easy it is for me to lose track of any one moving object on the screen; games like Warframe that let you change the individual colors of tons of UI elements, for instance, or games like Doom Eternal or TF2 letting you change the size and position (and in the former’s case, even the angle) of the weapon viewmodels, so they’re out of the way but still don’t look weird. I have always thought of these options not as competitive advantages, but as mere matters of preference and accessibility. Thus, as much as I try to play Overwatch, and as much potential fun is contained in this game for me, I can barely ever do my best, rarely ever bringing my A-game, because I feel like I always have a handicap placed upon me that can never be removed, and I’m confident I’m not alone.
So on the off-chance this topic doesn’t get buried within a day and isn’t completely ignored, I ask of Overwatch’s development team that they please, finally, expand on the Field of View option for the sake of all the Overwatch players who are negatively impacted by its limited degree of adjustment. I apologize for the long-winded introduction and pleading tone throughout my writing, but I’ve witnessed so many people ask for this and fail and I really, really want to see if a difference can finally be made, if maybe I just catch the ear of the right person, or enough voices come together to agree and show there IS a need for this seemingly-innocuous “problem”. Whether it finally gets added to Overwatch 1 after years or is a new setting Overwatch 2 introduces - as I’m sure most of the team’s efforts are currently focused on that game before anything else - I would love to finally see this lingering problem receive closure, and, of course, to finally be able to play Overwatch as freely as I play other games in my active library similar to it like Team Fortress 2, Destiny 2, and so many more (a sentiment I thoroughly believe that, again, is not unique to me). Oh, and I apologize if this topic is in the wrong place or violates forum rules of any kind, as being an annoyance or a rulebreaker was certainly not my intention when I typed this up.
