Chase camera for me. I wish I could drive my own car that way sometimes.
Let me specify that in some arcade games, there are two chase camera modes, close and far. Close is immediately above and behind your car. In this mode, you see the whole vehicle and those immediately flanking and behind you. The far mode moves the camera out about 3 car lengths and significantly higher. This gives you a larger perspective on the other vehicles that are closing in.
I almost always use the chase cam. It provides the widest view of the track (and other vehicles).
I like the 1st person view occasionally because it feels the fastest, but it can be too fast, that I can’t react fast enough to sharp or sudden turns, and you can’t see other drivers coming up behind you.
Cockpit view is very cool, and looks awesome in games like DiRT, but it’s just too restrictive. I use it in replays only.
Oooh boy, this topic always causes intense flamewars on the simming boards I frequent whenever someone is dumb enough to broach it.
I use the windshield cam (sometimes erroneously called the roof cam, tho that depends on the specific sim more than anything else), and my reasons are severalfold. First of all, all the trappings on my desk ARE essentially my cockpit, includes my wheel and speakers-as such I don’t need a picture of ANOTHER virtual cockpit standing between me and the outside world of the sim. I see absolutely nothing wrong with considering my monitor to be my car’s windshield.
And more personally, all those distracting interior cockpit objects invariably give me a severe tension headache after awhile, and the reason is that my mind wants to defocus all these objects so I can focus my eyes and attention on the world outside, but I can’t because they are all the same distance from my eye to the monitor.
Yet, even after reading (and ignoring) my perfectly reasonable justifications, some bozo will inevitably come on and tell me that I am “cheating” by doing this, and that the only “realistic” way to drive is from deep inside his ridiculous tunnel vision cockpit. At which point I will go and tell him to go get himself stuffed, and thus the flame war begins.
Really depends on the game.
In GTA-style games where you need to be doing stuff besides driving around like a maniac (shooting at people, ramming other cars, taking sick jumps, planning your route through the city, avoiding other cars trying to ram yours etc…) then chase cam all the way, because cockpit view quickly becomes disorienting and I also need a sense of how beat up my ride is getting.
However in games like Driver:San Francisco and similar straight-up racing games (particularly racing-through-traffic games), then cockpit view is aces as far as I’m concerned. I get a much better sense of when to brake before a tight corner, when to pump the gas again inside the turn, what’s the clearance between cars/walls, I get a much better sight of the road ahead and so on.
Similar to what John DiFool said about distractions. I can already see my hands in my peripheral vision; I don’t need to see another set of hands on the screen.
Hood cam is the best. It gives the best sense of speed, which is both viscerally thrilling and important to controlling even semi-simmy games. Chase view feels detached, like you aren’t really part of the experience, plus you have a harder time gauging speed which is more important than any additional perspective you gain.
Kobal2 hit the nail on the head – for games like GTA III, the further away the camera is, the better, but otherwise a reasonable “driver’s-eye view” is what I go with.