Discussion Main / BehindTheBlack

Pulled these while clearing up Examples Are Not General violations; they need to be rewritten to stand alone

• This is averted in all third-person shooters where the player can rotate the camera around the character and zoom out. This allows the player to see around corners, over obstacles, and other impediments to line of sight without needing to expose the character. Until the game suddenly denies you camera control.
  • World of Warcraft upgraded to a slightly more realistic form. You can still turn the camera around to look behind objects, but you can no longer scan for objects using your mouse (which used to show enemies even through solid stone walls). You can, however, still use a keyboard command to show the lifemeters of all hidden enemies around you, including those below the floor you're on and behind walls.
  • Gears of War gives you the opportunity to not just look but shoot blind around corners and over obstacles. The flipside of being able to do this is that that you have no accuracy, so firing an automatic weapon in this manner is a case of spray-n-pray.
  • In turn-based games that keep track of what your character can see using fog of war, a four dimensional version of this can occur. Characters with enough movement points can pop out from cover, catch a glimpse of something, and return to safety all in the same turn. This often makes it impossible for other entities to react to or even SEE your character.
    • An especially vicious abuse of turn-based games is to perform an action (like taking a potshot at somebody) when you do this. Some editions of Shadowrun allowed heavily enhanced characters to open a door, run in, knife someone, run out, close the door, and lock it in a single turn.
  • The latest Syphon Filter installments take this to the logical next step. Aside from knowing what's around the corner without actually exposing Logan, you can now pre-aim shots from behind cover! This results in "peek-a-boo" headshots, where the agent will come out of cover, shoot the mook in the head, and duck behind cover in just half a second. Granted, this "pre-aiming" is only effective at close range and in a rather narrow angle of coverage - many situations need the manual aim which requires the player to come out of cover. Still, Dark Mirror and Logan's Shadow takes the omniscience of the third person camera to a whole new level. Also present in WinBack, which - when you sidle up to a corner - allows you to queue up multiple headshots for button-press execution.
  • Some games have very simple cameras. Oni did not push the camera in or clip outside walls, so you could swing it right through walls and see all kinds of things (or block your view with the other side of the wall Konoko's backed up against!). Since Bungie didn't fix this bug with Halo: Combat Evolved's 3rd-person vehicle camera, it might be the reason why Halo became an FPS.
  • Perfect Dark Zero and Rainbow Six: Vegas switch to a third person view when you're in cover, and you can pre-aim from here. Like Syphon Filter above, however, you need to actually pop out of cover to properly aim and hit enemies; outside of abusing a glitch with sniper rifles in the second Vegas, attempting to blind-fire from behind cover only works at extreme close range. Vegas also has camera issues, since the game always wants to view the action when you're leaning up over low cover from a specific angle depending on which direction you're aiming from that cover - the problem being that whichever angle it wants is always the one that blocks your view of who you're actually trying to shoot at with your own body.

Trouble Cube continues to be a general-purpose forum for those who desire such a thing.

This is how you switch characters in the Lethal Weapon NES game.

Is it just me or does invoking this trope in videogames make no sense most of the time? Player characters aren't exactly expected to behave realistically. Yeah, Donkey Kong may easily see a coin that the player can't. But what do you expect him to do about it? Signal to the player? Take control from the player and pick it up himself?

Anyone else think the inverse of this trope (in which characters can see things they shouldn't be able to simply because the player can) should be a different trope altogether?

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