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I think the problem with FPS is that you have so many players who all have a completely different view of the game at any time. That makes it difficult to follo

by jiggy2011 14y ago

I think the problem with FPS is that you have so many players who all have a completely different view of the game at any time. That makes it difficult to follow on one screen because you would have to keep switching between player's viewpoints which would disorient you to what is actually going on and make it difficult to see the state of play at a glance. You might be able to fix this by showing a zoomed out overhead map and zooming in on parts that look like they are about to get interesting. Problem with this would be predicting which parts will be interesting to see, because you never know if someone is about to get sniped or whatever. With something like soccer there is only one ball so wherever the ball is will probably be where the most interesting play is happening. I guess F1 would suffer from the same problem, but in that case there is just something exhilarating about watching a car take a corner at those kinds of speeds.

corin_ 14y ago
There are 1v1 FPS titles, namely Duel games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc. which don't have this problem. For team FPS games it's certainly an issue, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. For starters, we've already seen that there are plenty of people happy to watch it (a Counter Strike tournament earlier this year saw 77k concurrent unique viewers for its final match). Good commentators play a big part in this, it's their job to help viewers understand the big picture and understand what's going on all over the map, not just where they're looking. One option, that hasn't often been used but is certainly a potential solution, is to have a slight delay on the broadcast, just 30-90 seconds to allow the cameraman/men to know what action is about to happen and show it appropriately. Generally speaking, the view on esports streams is usually controlled by a single person, often one of the commentators, but with a slightly bigger budget there are other ways to play around to get the best footage. For example there was a league called the Championship Gaming Series a few years ago, they were News Corp. owned and had $50m in funding (there's a whole long story here that I won't go into) - one of the games they used was Counter-Strike: Source, and rather than the usual production standard of taking a feed from one client which changed views repeatedly, they had one client spectating each player, and a number of other camera angles set up, then did standard TV production to switch between them, which was a big improvement. But hey, those shows were produced by 13 (if I remember the number correctly) time Emmy-award-winning sports producer Mike Burks who had experience from NFL and a bunch of other sports.
bryanlarsen 14y ago
That's a solved problem in professional sports broadcasting. They have dozens of cameras, and if something interesting happens away from the current camera they just do an instant replay from the camera that caught it best.
- corin_ 14y ago
  It's not quite the same in team FPS games, as most sports (that I can think of) tend to have one area of action at any one time, for example in soccer there may be 22 players on the pitch but there's only one ball - so replays to show what they missed are more to show better angles or other tactical plays, rather than missed action. But yes, this is still a useful (and currently often underused) tool in esports broadcasts too.

corin_ 14y ago

There are 1v1 FPS titles, namely Duel games like Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc. which don't have this problem. For team FPS games it's certainly an issue, but not necessarily an insurmountable one. For starters, we've already seen that there are plenty of people happy to watch it (a Counter Strike tournament earlier this year saw 77k concurrent unique viewers for its final match). Good commentators play a big part in this, it's their job to help viewers understand the big picture and understand what's going on all over the map, not just where they're looking. One option, that hasn't often been used but is certainly a potential solution, is to have a slight delay on the broadcast, just 30-90 seconds to allow the cameraman/men to know what action is about to happen and show it appropriately. Generally speaking, the view on esports streams is usually controlled by a single person, often one of the commentators, but with a slightly bigger budget there are other ways to play around to get the best footage. For example there was a league called the Championship Gaming Series a few years ago, they were News Corp. owned and had $50m in funding (there's a whole long story here that I won't go into) - one of the games they used was Counter-Strike: Source, and rather than the usual production standard of taking a feed from one client which changed views repeatedly, they had one client spectating each player, and a number of other camera angles set up, then did standard TV production to switch between them, which was a big improvement. But hey, those shows were produced by 13 (if I remember the number correctly) time Emmy-award-winning sports producer Mike Burks who had experience from NFL and a bunch of other sports.

bryanlarsen 14y ago

That's a solved problem in professional sports broadcasting. They have dozens of cameras, and if something interesting happens away from the current camera they just do an instant replay from the camera that caught it best.

corin_ 14y ago
It's not quite the same in team FPS games, as most sports (that I can think of) tend to have one area of action at any one time, for example in soccer there may be 22 players on the pitch but there's only one ball - so replays to show what they missed are more to show better angles or other tactical plays, rather than missed action. But yes, this is still a useful (and currently often underused) tool in esports broadcasts too.