Valve increased the FOV of Half-Life 2 from 90 to a zoomed-in version so that you can see all those pretty Source engine faces more clearly

PC gamers love to tweak our field of views sliders. This is the extent of your peripheral vision in-game that gets rendered. Real heads have a "the more, the better" mentality. 90 degrees is a common sweet spot. Why did PC gaming giant Valve give us a 75-degree default field of view in Half-Life 2 that was so meager, I dare say console-like?

"In Half-Life 1 we used a field of view (FOV) of 90 degrees, which was standard at the time for first-person shooting games. "We were unhappy with the 90-degree field of view in Half-Life 2 development," said Valve developer Kerry Davis, in the new 20th Anniversary commentary mode for Half-Life 2 "With our game focusing on characters, we put a lot of effort into facial and body animations. But the 90-degree FOV did not allow players to get up close to fully appreciate this detail.

"So we started experimenting with a smaller FOV, and eventually landed on 75 degree. It took some adjustment for both us and the players. We also needed an additional FOV to accommodate viewmodels (the player's weapon at the bottom of screen). Their models were built with 90-degrees in mind and looked distorted when viewed at 75 degrees. This change achieved what we wanted, putting our characters in the center of the game."

It makes sense. Valve's efforts to scan faces and create detailed animations in Half-Life 2 are legendary. They chose this route because they didn't want to offend the small but vocal group of FOV sickos, while still wowing the large number of players, who won't be able notice the difference between the Source engine facial animations.

The tyranny low FOV was a much more effective champion than console shooters. The logic is that since you sit further away from a television than a computer screen, the in-game view takes up less space in your real-life view. Therefore, a smaller FOV would be a better fit. This also means that less of a game world needs to be rendered per frame, reducing the load on consoles. We're fortunate to live in an era of more robust settings menus that allow players to adjust their FOVs according to their preferences.

The new Half-Life 2 commentaries are full of interesting facts like this. Valve engineer Jay Stelly explains why the Source engine uses that iconic fuchsia-checkerboard error pattern, which you may recognize from Garry’s Mod.