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I couldn’t help it
I think he is somewhere around this spot. :>
lol Harl… I think you are right.
puts poking stick away
Well, since you asked…
Yep, there are two things about rotating camera that i think are a bit dangerous: 1.) player easily gets lost or at least feels lost and runs in circles. 2.) badly placed objects in the levels are less likely to be spotted by QA 
Solution for 1.) as mentioned by eisprinzessin, litter the maps with remarkable stuff so that the player can tell where he’s coming from.
Solution for 2.) have us swarm the levels during alpha… we will turn every rock (and check for bugs… turtles… etc.)
Another question is, will the game allow setting the camera angle? I mean, not just height but from a “iso” view to a “panoramic” view? Because there are many many problems with that. It’s a can of worms.
People tend to demand this feature, mainly because you want to see the armor or the new cool epic sword at your character from up close or you want to look at the nice maps. (Especially marketing tends to use this feature for better screenshots, the iso perspective doesn’t look impressive in pictures.)
But its a nightmare for rendering and there is basically no good solution that covers the demand for “many mobs” from a iso-perspective together with the possibility to look in the far distance (while having to keep showing more and more monsters up ahead) Some games (Sacred2, Silverfall etc.) tried it but enemies and objects need to “plop” into view, there’s always a nasty “fog of war” and stutterings are unavoidable. Also, all this games have both “go to this location” and “attack this” bound to the l.m.b. In panoramic view you have a much harder time to distinct between some enemy and the terrain. Therefore you keep attacking mobs instead of moving forward.
So anyway… rotation is good 
As a Dungeon Siege (1 and 2) veteran, I can safely say that as long as the level designers leave enough clues in the map design that getting lost won’t be an issue. At no point in either of those games was I really lost. I know DS did have a cop out of sorts with big signs at certain points and there were smaller sign posts littered throughout the game world as well.
The only thing I can think of that might be a problem is making sure the player sees something vitally important. If some huge boss is about to rape the player and he misses it because he was looking the other way then that’s kinda lame, but I think with smart level and enemy design it won’t be a problem.
No, the camera angle never goes much lower than TQ for all the reasons you mentioned. It’s funny, I think a lot of people perceive isometric games as being more “old school” and therefore assume they should not be as performance intensive as a first or close 3rd person game with a free-look camera. This is definitely not the case. Each type of game has its own problems and advantages when it comes to performance and you just have to design the game within those constraints. Trying to offer both with the same type of enemy horde gameplay would be difficult or impossible to really do flawlessly.
I never find I get lost in TQ purely because of the map, lol. Should never be getting lost in these kinds of games. Just move towards the blackness!
Aye, if you have rather narrow maps like TQ mostly has (with the exception of Gizeh and some other areas) than it’s less likely. The issue becomes larger with increasing size of the areas.
Totally agree. I, for one, remember the awful gymnastics involved, when I tried playing neverwinter nights without pausing the game every 2 seconds.
sorry if i missed it but can we pan up/down or are we stuck at the same diagonal camera but with rotation? like mentioned above can u drag the camera right behind your head for sudo first person where u look out at what your toons are looking at?
At R3D: it’s gonna be the “stuck at the same diagonal camera but with rotation” variant. For the good reasons medierra has mentioned, i might add.
sorry i only descoverd all the other pages after i asked and i should have gone back and eddited sorry
I really liked the rotation in DS2 when it came out.
Now I think it is distracting if you end up doing it a lot.
I think sufficient zoom is the biggest issue I have, especially if the enemies can react to you beyond the edge of the screen.
I would like a max zoom out that is generous. If you dont want that much in the default game, then a config file setting is nice. I dont like searching the web for elaborate procedures for that. I normally use singleplayer mode. If you want to restrict it somewhat for multiplayer, that is ok.
Still, in TQ, I never liked going down especially in the later acts.
If you want some limited visibility, then D2’s idea of obstruction based visibility might be something to think about – except the player should be able to see something even if it is partially viewable. That might be somewhat involved.
As long as there’s an easy-to-remember reset to default angle button, it’s all good
i guess the reason i wanted to be able to pan up and down was that in tq i allwase wanted to zoom in and check out my gear and if at the highest zoom in just a little drop in camra angle or if it droped to look straight at the toon it would have been so much better
Fable has this camera mode, called “hero mode” or something, that zooms close to the character and shows him from the front. This is just there to let you check out the gear (pretty much like the cam in the main menu from TQ).
That seems to be a good way of giving the player both options without having to hazzle with a “free” camera.
On the other hand, you still would need to implement a sky-box etc. just for that.
The option to view your hero in Fable was pretty cool imo. I’m not sure if I ever really used it more than once though.
I know what you mean!
It’s one of those options that you hardly ever use but thinks its very cool to have.
I did use it a lot, actually, at least in Fable II. But that is because of another problem of that game: i played as a girl, as usually and was really shocked to see, how butch she turned after eating a couple of pies and putting some skill-points into sword-fighting. So, i respecced and ate a lot of tofu and checked on a regular base, if she’s becoming more girl-shaped already. I know, how shallow is that
Ah… got carried away… anyway. Yeah, some sort of closeup if cool to have, i guess.