Indiana Jones and the Great Circlewas officially revealed earlier this week, giving us our best look at a brand-new Indy adventure thatwe’ll get to experience at some point later this year. While the game looks pretty great and has ticked a lot of boxes for Indiana Jones fans, one of the biggest talking points on social media is whether the game should have been in third-person rather thanthe first-person perspective that developer MachineGames has decided to go withfor the majority of the game.
Opinions on MachineGames' decision to go first-person are incredibly varied, and almost seem to be split right down the middle. On one hand, you have people who are disappointed that they won’t get to actually see themselves controlling Indiana Jones while playing, as the third-person sections are exclusively reserved for certain traversal animation and cutscenes. For example,Twitter user KdeKercywanted to “see Harrison Ford in my screen” rather than just a pair of hands.
Making the Indiana Jones game a first person game is one of the most stupid decisions I’ve ever seen in video game adaptations. Dude, if I’m playing an Indiana Jones game, I want to see Indy, I want to see Harrison Ford in my screen, not a f***ing hand smh.
It’s not a particularly popular opinion either, as KdeKercy’s tweet has racked up over a thousand likes at the time of writing. They’re not the only person to express that opinion either, including Twitter user BrokenGamezHDR who thinks the decision was a “fumble”, andTwitter user ShirrakoGamingwho thinks third-person is “much more enjoyable for these types of games”.
On the other hand, you have people who think the decision to go first-person was actually quite clever. With two very similar properties in Tomb Raider and Uncharted already extremely popular in the gaming industry, people such asTwitter user Dachsjaegerthink the different perspective is going to “make it unique in its genre”. Going first-person also stops potentially harmful comparisons dead in their tracks.
Then you have the experience of MachineGames, a studio most commonly known for developing the modern Wolfenstein games. Having plenty of experience making great first-person shooters, it does make a lot more sense for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle to be majority first-person so the developers can draw upon their knowledge. Making it third-person would definitely have been a frankly unnecessary risk.
In any case, it’s not exactly like MachineGames has the time to change anything even if it wanted to. Those that are iffy about it being first-person will have to give it a fair shake when it launches later this year. We, unfortunately, still don’t have a specific release date, but we do know that it will be launching on Xbox Game Pass when it does release, so you can even try it out with very little investment.
