The HUD down-scaling in Original Sin is wonderful, thank you for that, Larian.
It's companion-issue is the very-near FOV in the game, and I'd like to reiterate the importance of its resolution:
Increase the distance which the camera can be zoomed out to. Itｴs too close a perspective to the characters. Not enjoyable, for my tastes, and it requires a more cumbersome and meticulous management of camera-movement - and thatｴs a part of the stuff that should not be thought about while playing the game, but work as inconspicuous.
The currently FOV really is very stressful, due to all the wasteful screen-management that needs to go on.
The extremely-low top-down FOV in Original Sin is not conducive to gameplay, it actually takes a large amount away from it: When constantly having to shift the screen just to keep clicking so my characters can keep moving, it prevents me from observing my actual characters and experiencing their actions through considering them.
The current FOV mandates incessant screen-panning, and an OCD-level of mouse-clicking for every meager bit of screen moved.
It is a wholly unnecessary and undesirable burden.
It feels almost as if it were designed for consoles, and when TVs were still 4:3. And in this way, the issue mirrors the same which first-person shooter PC gamers complained about all through the 360/PS3 years, where they were getting FOVs that were locked in at 60 degrees - and now 90 degrees is the standard, yet some gamers will crank it up ever to 120 on a normal monitor.
Again, the current setting for the top-down FOV is, for myself and surely others, only a cause of stress and a significant non-desire to play the game - enough so that I've put the game on hold, hopefully until a time that I can play it and just enjoy the game, and not be irked by the distraction of excessive screen-management, which really just clouds the experience for me.
The screen FOV here is a non-gameplay, non-story, non-substance technicality, and so its management should have a minimal presence - yet it perhaps has the largest presence of all things going on (now that the HUD isn't making me fall out of my chair, anymore). Let those who want to play with their nose to the screen zoom-in, but don't rob others of their equal desire to experience as they likewise are able to.
And a great bonus of having available a further-back FOV is that suddenly the game's 3D graphics receive an instant fidelity-upgrade, when more detail is contained in a single screen, with each poly vertex being less noticeable and accounting for a smaller % of screen-detail.
Better scenery, and a source of stress resolved - that's a comprehensive improvement.
