I think mainly it is a matter of supporting different people’s personal preferences. If you play at default camera distance, there isn’t any need to rotate. However, many players wanted to be able to zoom in and play the game. It is very difficult to play TQ zoomed in because your field of view becomes so limited and there is barely any room between your character and the bottom of the screen.
With the new camera position and rotation, Grim Dawn plays better at both the default, fixed-camera view and zoomed in with the camera rotation.
It allows people to experience the game in two completely different ways. It was one of those extremely rare win-win-win scenarios in game development. We were able to do something at relatively low development cost to improve the game for one segment of the audience with no sacrifice to the other segment of the audience.
I love it, I personally download mods for games without camera rotation so that I can have the ability (I am fairly certain Titan Quest is one that I have done that for, but I might be thinking of something else).
I completely agree. I think the “what? It’s 3d but I can’t spin it around?” effect only lasts for all of 5 minutes, and I never even think of it after that. I much prefer a fixed camera game with the maps designed accordingly, than a free camera where you are “forced” to constantly manipulate it to get a good view.
I’m just glad that it was only camera rotatino that was added and not a first person POV instead. I occasionally will play with the rotation features, but first person in this kind of game never really feels right. That’s why I was only able to play Morrowind with a controller, be it on XBOX or PC, as the targeting with a keyboard and mouse just doesn’t have the right “feel” for me.
An observation I’ve noticed and have yet to fully understand, is why there are two differnet camera systems typically used in ARPG’s and MMORPG’s.
The majority of ARPG’s use a fixed camera or limited rotation camera system (based on single/limited plane rotation), while the majority of MMORPG’s use a free-look camera system (the right mouse button taking total control over the FOV). I’m a bit stumped on why the free-look system isn’t used more often for ARPG’s, is this due to legacy/tradition, or is there an underlying reason to the different camera approaches?
As mentioned from previous posters, it may just come down to preference, but one of the great things I found playing MMO’s is having free reign on what I see.
Apart from legacy/tradition, one other reason is a lack of scene complexity in MMOs. The typical MMO, for example WoW, has relatively simple graphics. A low camera angle and therefore a long view distance generally requires that a lot more objects be drawn than a top down view where the view distance is limited by the terrain.
This is compounded by the fact that in an ARPG, anything that can be seen usually needs to go through the update process. An MMO client is really just a dumb terminal which doesn’t do much or any processing for AI and other things.
That is certainly understandable, thanks for your thoughts. At some point, I hope Moore’s law will overcome the current obstacles and give the best of both worlds.
Part of it is perhaps audience preference but also the controls have a fundamental impact on the nature of gameplay. MMOs tend to be more about world exploration, socialization, and slower more strategic combat.
ARPGs are all about frenzied killing and loot collection with combat that is faster paced and has an element of tactical movement.
As soon as you start making major changes to one aspect of the controls it tends to cause other things to be shifted around. I’m not sure it is possible to just add a free-look camera to an ARPG without it affecting movement and combat controls. Most MMOs go WASD to facilite this and they have combat that is more about key-timing than positioning. Part of the reason for the difference with MMOs though is also influenced by networking needs.
I think it’s more than graphics, as well. MMO’s usually have you just sitting there staring at a fight watching your character whiddle down a single mob repeating the same basic actions and not using movement that much.
Whereas a ARPG like TQ has the player plowing through hordes of enemies, dodging fireballs, and doing a lot more at the same time. That’s why rotating cameras are somewhat harder to deal with in these types of games.
I liked the options in S2, fixed, follow & free, there’s something for everyone without having to force a particular view on anyone. I would have preferred it if you could modify the view(s, I’m mainly thinking of free mode) more easily in-game so you could get “down” further to see more ahead & “up” furtherso there’s less stuff getting in your way of seeing the monsters you need to stick with your preferred pointy stick.
Yeah, like when the camera passes inside an object (tree/hill/house/etc) & the game decides that you’re trying to move to that object rather than kill the dirty great big monster trying to find out what you had for breakfast (the easy way). Though a quick press of the mouse scroll wheel & flick of the mouse sorted things out.
Oh Christ yes, the boss cam was an exceptionally bad “feature”. It’s nice the first time, well, for the first few seconds to show you the diryt great big boss, but then I’d have really liked it to put the focus back on my character. It wasn’t so bad on the more stationary bosses, but the Mist boss & Kral (very mobile, liked moving around & therefore making the camera focus move all over the shop, if you’ve not played S2) were really bad.
The more features I can get the better.
I never understood when people complained about optional features, that could be be set to one way or the other. Controls in RE5 was a good example I personally hated the new controls, but they let me play with the old ones so I was perfectly fine with them adding more control types.
I hope the camera will have a key to return to the default position. Rotating and zooming the camera is nice at times, sometimes needed, but we need an auto default button. S2 lacked this simple feature and I hated moving the camera with a passion cause it would never reset correctly. You had to tab the zoom buttons any number of times after talking to NPC’s in order to reset the camera. This became tiresome very quicly.
