AndyPett said:
I guess I still think that most third-person games are too similar, too repetitive, and the MOST annoying of all are the games that keep flashing an indicator to press “X” or something to open doors etc. I want to be able to think for myself! Teach me how to interact with things, but let me figure out how and what to interact with to progress in the game! :P

If you have not played it, i recommend “Penumbra” from Frictional Games, which was their predecessor to Amnesia.

The game world is backed with physics, and their invention was to have an interaction model that operates on objects in a realistic and quite intuitive way, e.g. opening doors / drawers, but also some more complex puzzles.
This mechanic has been adopted by many games meanwhile, but Penumbra did it much better. (One reason for that is physics engines and their limitations. Half Life 2 hides jitter behind a magic force field effect of a gravity gun, but Penumbras physics are stable enough to emulate bare hands. Pushing an object against a wall or a stack of boxes works robustly and control is precise. Thy used the Newton Physics Engine which is open source.

So, in this game there is no ‘X’ indicator which clearly destroys immersion / illusion and reduces the game experience to: ‘Oh, so the devs give me a choice of finite, static set of 2 options.’

There was a free tech demo. Maybe it's the rar file i've found here: https://archive.org/download/PenumbraFull1.1​

That's surely interesting, but still very limited because mouse / gamepad movement is just a point on the 2D plane. And i never played a game like this with a gamepad, assuming that's a worse experience than using mouse.

Peter Lezak said:
In a first person game, on the other hand, it seems to me as if I am the actor myself and somehow I can't get used to the idea.

I have the impression many people have general discomfort with first person, but i don't know if it's mostly about ‘watching’ vs. ‘being in the game’ preference, or about a kind of motion sickness.

After seeing you work on a game with modern sided character / over the shoulder camera, i'd like to ask if there is something you do about the offset issues?
Personally, in such games i often experience slightly annoying issues like this:
* Want to run forward, but end up running a bit left or right. This can become a bigger problem if i have to do precise movement like balancing over a narrow bridge.
* Claustrophobic feeling indoors. The view feels narrow, as if it would be only a cutout of the whole thing i'd like to see.
* Looking around feels somewhat odd, because circling radius differs between left and right side.

What i really like about third person is the better oversight of the surroundings without a need to constantly look around. (But for indoors the situation somewhat reverses so it's not easy to make a choice.)
If possible i prefer slight top down view with smaller and centered character to avoid the offset issues. I liked how Horizon Zero Dawn constantly switches between top down / over the shoulder, and if you don't pay attention you do not even notice.

JoeJ said:

After seeing you work on a game with modern sided character / over the shoulder camera, i'd like to ask if there is something you do about the offset issues?
Personally, in such games i often experience slightly annoying issues like this:
* Want to run forward, but end up running a bit left or right. This can become a bigger problem if i have to do precise movement like balancing over a narrow bridge.
* Claustrophobic feeling indoors. The view feels narrow, as if it would be only a cutout of the whole thing i'd like to see.
* Looking around feels somewhat odd, because circling radius differs between left and right side.

Very interesting issues that you bring up that gave me a lot of headaches. However, I tend to have fewer original solutions for this, I've just tried to reduce them as much as possible. In principle, I did not set the cameras differently indoors than e.g. when traveling outside of closed or narrow areas. Instead, I have set the control of the character as directly as possible so that you can at least navigate relatively easily and quickly so that you can look around relatively quickly. In addition, I have set the cameras so that if you are in very narrow spaces the character is faded out relatively early. In combination with the relatively direct controls, it feels, at least for me, as if you were playing a game from an ego perspective. This is not a real solution to the problems, but at least the claustrophobic feeling is reduced a bit. As far as narrow passages are concerned, I probably use the easiest way you can imagine. Invisible walls. For me it was the easiest way to control the character in narrow passages. But what I have also done is that the player can decide how he wants to position the camera. Whether it is further away, more to the right or to the left. The camera in the combat control is always fixed in the same way.

But your top-down view idea sounds promising. I haven't tried it yet.