Pro FPS players are maxing out their field of view settings whenever they have the option. The usual reasons you may hear for this is that it improves peripheral vision, while this is true, it also reduces visual clarity, makes targets appear smaller and can distort the image. The real reason why pros have gravitated towards high field of view, is actually because it significantly improves their aim, whether they know it or not.
The primary mechanism for higher field of view improving aim is in the perception of mouse sensitivity. That may not seem to mean much at first, so let’s take a look at why this works.
In the image above we are looking at a thin target in KovaaK’s with 100 HFOV. With this FOV, 1 degree of movement will move the scene by 1/100th.
On the other end of the spectrum, if we change our FOV to 1, the thin target now dominates the screen and 1 degree of movement will completely move the scene out of view.
If you were to use the exact same sensitivity in these two examples, the lower FOV option would feel exceedingly fast and hard to control, despite the cm/360 being identical. This is because the pixels per degree are vastly different. Despite moving 1 degree in both examples, the pixels traveled is immensely different.
This is precisely why scopes have sensitivity multipliers to make them slower. If you use the same cm/360 when zooming in, things suddenly feel too fast. This also goes both ways, 30cm/360 on 90 HFOV may feel like a mid to low range sensitivity. But 30cm/360 will likely feel significantly faster when playing on 120 HFOV. Generally speaking, the lower your sensitivity is, the more precise you can be. There are of course gameplay limitations to this so lower doesn’t necessarily mean better. But in regards to FOV, playing on a high FOV essentially unlocks ‘lower’ sensitivities that that would otherwise be unviable to use when playing on a low FOV.
High FOV lets you play on low sensitivity, without it feeling like low sensitivity. That’s the magic of it!