Valve zoomed in Half-Life 2's FOV from the gold standard 90 so you could see all those pretty Source engine faces better

PC gamers love tweaking our field of view sliders⁠, the extent of your in-game peripheral vision that gets rendered. Real heads tend to adopt a "the higher, the better," mentality, with 90 degrees being a commonly-accepted sweet spot. So why did PC gaming grande damme Valve saddle us with a miserly, dare I say console-like 75-degree default FOV in Half-Life 2?

"In Half-Life 1, we used a 90-degree field of view, or FOV, which was fairly standard for first-person shooters at the time. But during Half-Life 2's development...