The picture in picture scope is a weird design choice. I remember old delta force games, after moving on to rainbow six, ghost recon, or operation flashpoint, not sure why you would go back to that for scopes…
It is genuinely more realistic and tactical because people don’t close one eye while looking through an optic (usually).
But yeah. Hard to convey and they haven’t pulled it off yet. But modern (and historic) Microprose knows how to rev my engine so still very interested.
There’s no good 1-for-1 way to represent it on a screen.
In real life, the entire image in one eye would be the scope, and the other would be everything else. On a monitor with a little scope pop up you have a small image-in-an-image that you’re looking at with both eyes and bouncing back and forth with to the surroundings. Your brain isn’t processing it the same way.
This is a case where i don’t think it is possible to replicate the real experience, but that doing image-in-image is a more annoying choice than others. I’d veto it on being annoying to play with grounds, and do hope what we see in the trailer either doesn’t represent how it works or is an option.
I mean, you also don’t have the entire image “taking up” one eye. Eye relief is very important because even “light” recoil is a black eye if you are right up on that. So you tend to get a weird tunnel vision as you focus but it IS important to be aware of your surroundings. So having a PIP that you look at and look around actually is a pretty good representation of that and probably about as good as we can get without eye tracking to handle focus.
The real issue (aside from fun animations) is that video games very much put point of aim/impact in the center of the screen. By having the optic take up the right side of your screen it either makes a disconnect in where point of aim is or it shifts point of impact when you aim down sight that is inevitably going to “feel bad” to players.
Also there is one screenshot of this being down with iron sights which I think actually wouldn’t work since those are designed around focusing very heavily. But hell if I know and the people I have talked about and seen this kind of stuff with years ago all had optics.
But for a game? I can see a heavily scripted cod sequence where they take advantage of you being focused on the optic so you have a “wow, I looked at the capture footage and it is so cool you can see Glenn Howerton sneaking up on you” moment. But for anything that is not heavily scripted it is mostly poorly focused effort. Which… is the reason I love MicroProse games.
Also we are probably 10-ish yearss out from actually having direct camera feeds for at least the more expensive soldiers. The US (and I think also UK?) is putting some VERY expensive kit and computers in the basic infantry optics. Full augmented reality setups are unlikely to be effective within the next hundred years, but a return to the “future soldier” drop down display for a HUD style deal is increasingly viable and even consumer grade optics are increasingly having ways to get real time video out of what the optic sees.
I’m hoping that was done for some sort of misguided “cinematic” reason for the trailer. I caught a moment at 0:50 that looks like full screen scoping in, and then later at 0:54 that looks like a clearly cinematic angle where the scope-in-screen seems visible in the corner.
