Developer Corner: Jon Peters on Camera and FOV (field of view)

I’ve seen a lot of topics on this both here and externally so let me try and address it. The current FOV is going to stay because increasing it, while having some benefits for some players, has too many drawbacks.
 
1) performance suffers greatly because of how things are built and view distances

2) art suffers because of texture tiling, LOD problems and just general stretching from the fisheye effect.

3) gameplay suffers because positional awareness becomes less necessary in a game where combat is greatly designed around positioning.
 
There is a a serious camera problem, however, which is making some players nauseous. We believe a large number of these cases are not FOV related but rather due to bugs in camera smoothing. Because of this we are expediting a quick fix to this issue that is currently in testing and should see the light of day in the next build we do.
 
FOV in GW2 is 75, which is the same as the default in Half Life and WoW. While I understand people’s desires, (I play source engine and quake engine games at about 105 or 110), we are not just limiting it for technical reasons, there are also gameplay implications that we are taking into account that we believe are a core part of the game. Additionally we keep it at 75 to maintain the integrity of our art which is also important to us and many of our fans. If there was a single reason we might think about looking for a workaround, but because it relates to core issues for 3 of our major departments this is not an easy problem and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.