I didn't realize how important headbob was until I played an RPG without it

I’m gonna show you two clips of walking in videogames: The first is from The Outer Worlds 2, and the second is Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

Here’s The Outer Worlds 2…

…and here’s KCD2.

You seeing what I’m seeing? The difference is small, but the effect is huge. In The Outer Worlds 2, which I finally got around to playing this week after hearing great things, I don’t feel like a real person while moving around. I feel like a camera, perfectly hovering in place and magically stabilized as I plop one foot in front of the other. It’s as if Adam Jensen installed gimbals in his eyeballs.

I’m talking about headbob: the subtle camera movement of first-person games that mimics the body’s natural bob as it walks or runs. Headbob is so established and omnipresent in first-person games that it’s rare we have an occasion to acknowledge it. When headbob comes up, it’s usually because a game has too much of it.

The Outer Worlds 2 has no headbob. Zero, unless you’re sprinting. Your neck is totally detached from the motion of your body, and it’s driving me up the wall. It’s distracting, ugly, and comes off as a totally unforced error. I didn’t realize just how necessary head jostling is to believe I’m looking through a person’s eyes, especially in an RPG.

It’s not like The Outer Worlds 2 is the only first-person game to ever go bob-less, but it might be the only modern RPG of its kind to do so. I had to check to make sure: Fallout 4 has a little headbob, as does Skyrim. Cyberpunk 2077’s bob is very noticeable, even a little too jerky while sprinting. Both Kingdom Comes have it, of course. The only other bob-less first-person RPG I can recall is, well, Obsidian’s other 2025 game, Avowed.

So why has Obsidian taken this extremely minor, yet personally offensive stance on first-person cameras? I doubt it’s purely an accessibility concern—it’s not uncommon for headbob to trigger motion sickness, but that’s why thoughtful studios provide an option to turn headbob off. To leave it out completely tells me Obsidian’s steadicam is a stylistic preference.

Maybe the thinking is that The Outer Worlds 2 is an FPS, so no bob makes aiming a little easier and more consistent. That’s the reason many competitive shooters (like Counter-Strike or Rainbow Six) have no camera bob, but it’s not unheard of for even those developers to decide a tiny bit of headbob helps their FPS more than it hurts it.

How Overwatch Conveys Character in First Person – YouTube

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My favorite example is Overwatch: Blizzard uses headbob sparingly to give heroes a unique gait. As demonstrated by the YouTube channel New Frame Plus, hulking tanks like Reinhardt and Orisa have a small camera jerk between steps. Heroes that are meant to feel lighter than air, like Mercy, have no bob at all. Junkrat has the slightest, barely perceptible camera bounce every other step to accentuate his peg leg. Isn’t that cool?

The Outer Worlds 2 does have some bob, but it’s always separate from your still head. Your hands sway up and down while you’re holding weapons—part of some generally excellent animation work I’ve seen so far. If Obsidian made traditional shooters where your guns were always glued to your hip, I think that arms-only sway would be fine.

But I don’t like to wave guns in the faces of random townspeople while I’m playing an otherwise immersive RPG, so when I’m not using them, they’re holstered. As soon as my screen goes blank in The Outer Worlds 2 (which is a majority of my time so far), the spell is broken. I’m comfortable calling that a failure of the game in this instance—I could just keep my gun out all the time, but then I’m trading one annoyance for a bigger one. You let me holster my stuff, Obsidian, not me!

The lesson I’m taking away from this experience is that headbob is even more important and load-bearing than I realized. I never appreciate it while it’s there, but I sure do miss it when it’s gone.

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