First-person shooter
From Halopedia, the Halo wiki
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First-person shooter (FPS) is a video game genre. FPS games center around the usage of guns and other projectile weapons in combat, and the action in these games is depicted from a first-person point of view -- that is, the player experiences the game through the eyes of their character.
First-Person in Halo
Nearly all of the action in the Halo games is seen from a first-person view. There are certain circumstances (such as driving a vehicle) that will switch the viewpoint to a third-person view, however. Players can see their character's arms and weapon on-screen, and from Halo 2 onwards, a player's legs are also visible.
In all[note 1] of the Halo games, each playable character actually has two sets of arms.[1] The third-person arms are visible to everyone except their "owner", and tend to be relatively lacking in detail. The first-person arms are visible only to their "owner", and since they are much closer to the in-game camera, they tend to be far richer in detail.
In Halo: Combat Evolved, the entirety of a player's body is hidden, and the first-person arms are shown. Halo 3 does not hide the player's legs, but does hide everything else.[note 2]
Notes
- ^ Countless Halo Custom Edition mapmakers have worked with this system, proving its usage in Halo: Combat Evolved and its derivative games, Halo PC and Halo Custom Edition. (An abundance of tags for first-person arms exist on Halomaps.org.) Two glitches (Corpse Respawn and Higher Weapons) prove that the system is used in Halo 3 (both de-synchronize a player's third-person arms from their first-person arms). Because the system is used both before and after Halo 2, it is extremely likely that it is also used in Halo 2. Finally, one can safely assume that Halo 3: ODST uses this system, as it is based upon the Halo 3 Engine.
- ^ This, too, is demonstrated through the Corpse Respawn glitch. When a player corpse-spawns, they find themselves looking through their own midsection at a rubbery, black object: the "base" of their torso. The torso is not rendered invisible as a result of backface culling -- if backface culling was making the torso invisible, then at least a few "stray polygons" (polygons whose normals still face the camera) would be visible when observing the glitch from the first-person in Theater; no such polygons can be seen from any angle.
