Call of Duty: Black Ops II update raises max FOV to 90

Earlier, Treyarch’s community manager had announced that the PC version of its flagship game - Call of Duty: Black Ops II - will have its  field of vision (FoV) locked to a maximum of 80 degrees. According to the latest patch notes posted on the game’s forums, the company has now released a patch for the game that fixes a number of bugs, and raises the limit on the FOV.

Here are the patch notes for the update for singleplayer, multiplayer, and Zombies:

• Max FOV increased to 90
• Fix: Horse falling through the world in Afghanistan when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
• Fix: RC-XD and the AGR sinking into the map in MP when playing on some CPUs with 4 or more cores
• General performance improvements in SP, MP, and ZM for CPUs with 4 or more cores
• Fix: crash when a 7th player tries to join a 6 player league lobby
• Improved dedicated server matchmaking
• Fix: some cases of ‘Connection Interrupted’ in MP while loading into a match

The black future doesn’t have tunnel vision anymore

Earlier this month, the community manager @pcdev tweeted, “And don’t ask me to raise the FOV cap. Max is 80. Thankyouverymuch. <3, -pcdev”. When users asked @pcdev the reason for the FOV cap, he replied that technical limitations were stopping Treyarch, otherwise it would have increased the cap just to prevent a backlash from fans.

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FOVs are generally locked because of the hardware limitations of gaming consoles, as the consoles have problems streaming high-resolution textures in a game. With the FOV locked, less in-game area is visible. Hence, less in-game area needs to be streamed. Games on the PC don’t generally have the same problem as the hardware on gaming PCs is leagues ahead in terms of power than that on gaming consoles.

This is a big deal when it comes to first person shooters because the FOV determines how much you can see in the first person view. While FPS games on consoles are usually capped at 60-65 degrees because of the hardware limitations of the systems, this isn’t a problem because players are generally far enough away from the screen for the FOV to be right. When playing a PC game, players are generally much closer to the screen and require an increased FOV to avoid feeling nauseous due to tunnel vision.

Back in 2009, when Activision had released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the company faced a lot of complaints from players for locking the FOV of the game to 60, and removing the capability of playing on dedicated servers. This forced PC gamers to play on peer-based games, which caused high amounts of problems if the host of the game was on a slow connection.