Well, fair enough. I guess rotating the camera is considered busywork by many.
For me, it is just another tool I can utilize.
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Yea it’s a weird thing, to me, for a person to be stuck on with a game and something that normally would have never even crossed my mind that it would be a problem for someone. I can clearly remember playing Titan Quest, for example, and being seriously irked I couldn’t rotate that damned camera.
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But… you’d only have to rotate the camera once, right at the beginning of the game session, to orient south at the top of the screen. It’s not like you’d be whipping wildly back and forth, going round and round all through the game session.
Even putting that aside I really can’t get my head around this set-in-stone notion that the game can’t be played while moving in any direction other towards the top of the screen.
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I hate rotating the camera, and I thank Crate for designing the game in a way that doesn’t make that necessary.
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Camera rotation is essential in Grim Dawn unless you really dont care about finding all the little hidden secret treasure chests in a bazillion locations youll never even notice without said rotation…
Now whenever i play any other ARPGs im so pissed i cant rotate. In my mind this, and the zoom in/out features, are one of many things that put Grim Dawn above the competition, and only by utilizing them can one truly, fully and wholly appreciate every detail thats been infused into the environments of Cairn. Without rotation and zoom youre just missing so much of the flavor and substance in this game.
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Trying to remember any hidden chests that required camera rotation. Scenery fades away nicely to show them typically. Or maybe I haven’t found them, thus I don’t know which ones you mean.
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I can’t recall any either, except for the entrance to the secret chamber in Korvan City that it’s a little hard to click unless you rotate the camera. Otherwise I think that Crate has been very thoughtful on where to put secret locations and chests.
None actually “require” camera rotation - likely what he was more getting at was that you are more likely to notice the really well-hidden ones if you are a camera rotater.
I’m pretty sure by now that I know every single hidden spot in the game - but there are a few that I only noticed purely by chance because of whatever position my camera was in at the time.
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i’m wondering if there’ll ever be isometric view loot hunt arpg that tries to put the ui (skill slots and such) around the character itself instead of at some edge of the screen. like how the ui is 3d and transparent around isaac in dead space. which means the screen will be very minimalist, prioritizing having a clear view on areas around players. only skills & items that are on cooldown are going to be slightly transparent, and the map is transparent too with one key press away to be viewed instantly without hampering player’s view like diablo’s tab-in tab out map.
of course, this ui design will require players to master the use of hotkeys. maybe the game can offer players the option to switch on the fly between standard ui and minimalist ui by pressing a button.
other similar games that heavily incorporate the use of camera rotation in combat are victor fran/sacred 2/silverfall. i’ve tried sacred 2 and silverfall, and imo you need to bind camera rotation to hotkey z & x to rotate the camera in combat efficiently, because those 2 games’ maximum camera view still feels to close to the character for me. coupled with them giving players alternative wsad movement instead of just using mouse click, i feel those 2 games require players to think of the camera rotation buttons as the right joystick for camera rotation button from consoles. if you think about it, those 3 games i mentioned seem to have been designed more towards imitating 3rd person behind shoulder view action games instead of isometric view diablo-like games.
in any case, grim dawn is fully playable & all secret areas can be found without camera rotation in my experience. it might be slightly jarring for ranged characters facing lots of ranged mobs attacking from the south angle, but a little repositioning will fix that problem. for me, the ability to rotate camera in gd is just a nice addition for when i just want to relax and view the sceneries/combat from different angles.
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It’s less “buyswork” but rather something which kill the Gameflow for me and which also kill recognizability of the world. Not arguing that free-cam doesn’t work for isometric Games, but for a ARPG’s where it’s major keypoint is to running around and trashing mobs, it can slow down your pacing and at times quite stressfull. And i’ve to add, here is someone talking who used free-cam for a whole year, but forced himself to stop using it and now have a pretty smooth and faster pace for playing again.
If we would talk about a fullblown RPG like Divinity Original Sin 2 it’s quite a different thing, because a smooth pacing isn’t part of it’s core Gameplay, but rather to really explore each nook and corner, and interact with the world (like moving items around). Or Sacred 2 which have a different type of World-Building (more sandbox-nature and wider areas) it made quite sense, but something like Grim Dawn it simply feels wonky.
Again not saying that Free-Cam should be scrapped, to each their own, but imho if we consider where this topic is lead from, i’m not really a friend of the argument / idea to put a part of the community in disadvantage or f*** them over because you theoretically could rotate the camera, meanwhile the rest of the Game is build around free-cam beeing an optional feature which isn’t neccessary.
In theory maybe, but it still f*** over the world recognition because it mixes the direction, and also out of my personal experience, even if you rotate only “once” each session, it can become a habit pretty fast and f*** over your playstyle.
Thanks @powbam, yeah thats exactly what I was trying to say. Just didnt articulate it very well I guess.
I mean, for you it may screw over your playstyle to rotate the camera, but thats not going to be the same for everyone else.
I cant count how many times ive had to rotate the camera so my character would actually run in a straight path instead of stopping and turning off course because somehow the camera revealed a platform on a higher level that the mouse cursor happened to pan over which made my character think i wanted to ascend the nearest stairs to go up to said higher level. No thanks, not smooth.
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Burrwitch Slums? Old Grove? How did you get there?
My favorite part about the “old” Old Arkovia map was seeing fabius and moosilauke duke it out…
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It was/is a great feature to have. Adding at least for that part non linear play style. Gives different ways to tackle an enemy. I found it a bit of a loss when they introduced the current layout.
And did i argue otherwise? What’s the Point of your Argument? Did you have the urge to say something simple for the sake of saying something? Because unironically i riddle right now what the intention of your Answer / Argument towards me, besides the possible this is one of this generic 08/15 Answers without real reason and context to argue “not everyone is like that”, which i neither implied with my Argument anyway.
Because the Point of my Post was neither to start a argument between Fixed versus Free-Cam, nor claim that what’s better for everyone (infact i even pointed out “it shouldn’t be scrapped and to each their own”) but rather give a solid answer / explanation for people who tend to downplay the situation / issue. Opening up the south-bridge of Devil’s Crossing and going sout would be a fucked up experience for atleast a portion of the Playerbase and saying rotating Camera for exact this people who enjoy the rest of the game without any forced camera-rotation is a pretty bad and wonky solution.
So it’s nice that you can enjoy free-cam, but me playing Uno Reverse Card not everyone likes free cam.
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Thats fair, and I could have articulated what I was trying to say better. In layman’s terms, I thought it was extreme to say that by rotating the camera a single time at the start of a game session to travel south of Devil’s Crossing would f*** people over and have the same affect as it does on you on everyone else (IE; just because you rotate the camera a single time doesnt mean you have to start rotating it constantly).
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I just spent some time moving south and I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. It doesn’t seem like anyone would even need to rotate the camera if they didn’t want to. There’s not much of an angle with the camera compared to the days of Early Access.
I feel like it’s just been an accepted premise this whole time that the game can’t be played while headed toward the bottom of the screen. The “rotate the camera” suggestion was an olive branch for people who for some reason believed this, but that just brought out an even more stubborn “never rotate” crowd.
the southern hemisphere of cairn is probably the only place yugol can’t touch in the entire grim dawn universe.
personally, if grim dawn never explores the southern region at all, i don’t mind. but at least give some plausible reason why the southern region is barely mentioned at all in the game. maybe the southern region is fully covered in permanent aetherfire. maybe there’s nothing worth exploring in there. maybe its just a barren wasteland.
speaking of which, the korvan basin expansion can already be considered the southern region for the game. even though its located in the far east. maybe because of its desert vibe. that reminds me of ugdenbog jungle for some reason. oh yeah, southern region in video games are often associated with wet/dry climates, which equals jungle/desert. which means we already got 2 expansions exploring ‘southern’ regions, which were placed in the north and east for some reason!
all this argument about southern angle makes me think that if enemies ambushed players from south direction, it is as if they’re jumping out of some dark forbidden dimension.
the taken’s greatest weakness is the southern direction.