What the hell is wrong with third person shooters?

So I was reading an article about an upcoming Obsidian RPG called Alpha Protocol. It got me pretty excited, to be honest but one bit did make me roll my eyes. I discover that all the gun play will be experiences in the trite over the shoulder third person style I've come to deeply distrust.

This got me thinking. When was the last time I played a third person shooter and I actually enjoyed it...

So I thought about this for a fair while and concluded: Max Payne 2.

Here's the thing- Gears of War, Kane & Lynch, Mass Effect, the Splinter Cell games - they all handle more or less the same and they are all deeply unexciting shooters. They may have other plus points that make up for it or they may not, that's not what I'm here to talk about. The fact is that first person shooters like Crysis, Far Cry 2 or Left 4 Dead are nail biting, exciting and exhilarating (in my opinion) and third person shooters are not (in my opinion) and I've been trying to work out why.

In theory, both of these game types should feel identical. They all have the same control system, the all handle... similarly... And yet, and *yet*, whenever I play a third person shooter, it feels cold, it feels numb...

Part of this, I think, has to do with what you see as a player. Most third person games are played from an over the shoulder perspective. This means you see every move the character makes. This is okay when you're heading straight for an enemy, guns blazing because the standard position for a character is having their feet shoulder width apart with their arms outstretched, pointing their gun dead ahead.

Now, I don't know about you but were I in a combat scenario, that's not how I'd behave all the time. Particularly in something like Left 4 Dead, you'd be swinging around a lot, taking many anxious glances over your shoulder, pointing your gun and then moving your body around it. It feels natural to be skittish and make lots of quick turns from a first person perspective because your subconcious assumes that your characters body language changes according to your mood. Mine does at least. No-where in Left 4 Dead, ignoring those moments when the horde comes charging straight at you, do I imagine my character holding their gun at arms length. Not consciously at least.

This may seem like a very small thing but when you combine it with how immersion breaking it is to see your character on screen anyway, I think this must be the main reason why these games feel unnatural and numb - it looks so damn unnatural to have your character whirl around unrealistically whenever you make a sharp turn.

I then got thinking about why I haven't made this observation before... then I realised that... apart from Mass Effect 2, where this is far from the biggest problem, and Max Payne 2, I've only ever really played third person shooters on consoles... They don't whirl round at great speeds because the controls don't allow for that level of movement speed...

So why doesn't Max Payne 2 suffer from this problem? It's simple. The default stance of your character is having the guns at their sides or in a neutral position. Having the characters return to this feels so much more natural. It also helps that the camera is isometric rather than over the shoulder so the characters' movement looks more natural anyway because you can see more of it.

So, in conclusion, put these fucking games in the first person, please. If you need to go to third person for actions, do what the Riddick games do and slip into third person for those bits. If you have melee combat, go to third person for that by all means, just keep shooting in the first person. Please?