Atomic Heart developer Mundfish has announced that the game will, in fact, soon support custom FOV values. With the majority of modern AAA productions providing a way for players to tweak their viewpoint's field of vision, it was a bit of a surprise to see that Mundfish opted not to provide one such feature in its long-awaited FPS, locking it at a fairly low value instead.
While Atomic Heart has plenty of problems in the grand scheme of things, such as reportedly poor writing, many players found themselves at odds with the game's low field of vision, in particular. A low FOV value usually makes a game's movement feel slower, and compared to higher FOV values, it can make it seem as if the character is looking through a porthole of some sort, depending on how far the player is from their screen.
By default, Atomic Heart seems to have had a field of vision of about 80 degrees horizontal, and it doesn't appear that there were any plans to include a way of changing this value at first. Following heaps of feedback from the players, however, Mundfish announced via Twitter that the development team is already working on the feature. According to the announcement, the FOV slider will be made available as part of one of Atomic Heart's future updates, though there's no word yet on when, exactly, this update might be coming out.
For the most part, the availability of a proper FOV slider has historically been the purview of PC gaming, though the feature started making its way into console gaming as well in recent years. COD: Warzone 2 launched with FOV settings, for example, after the game's player base repeatedly called for its introduction. While there is a competitive element to being able to see more stuff at once, a proper FOV slider is also an important quality-of-life feature, especially for users with non-standard aspect ratio screens.
Atomic Heart is a dedicated single-player game, but with the sheer number of people complaining about the game's low FOV, it's clear that the feature is very important for a significant number of gamers. It is, of course, worth highlighting the fact that it is possible to force a higher FOV through third-party applications, but a first-party implementation will be the superior option once Mundfish puts it out.
The game does have other issues, too, however. For example, one of its most confounding problems is that Atomic Heart launched with no ray-tracing features to speak of, which is strange for a game that spent the better part of its pre-release marketing specifically on advanced RTX visuals. These, too, should be coming sometime in the future, according to the developer.
Atomic Heart is out now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
