A Cool Adjustment To The Camera Angle Faceing Mobs

(Theres Pictures with examples written)

This is an idea I had through the new patch:

Could the zoom be adjusted to a zoom like in the Warcraft 3 Games, Where you could zoom down like Path of Exile But as the camera reches 3/4s of the way zoomed in, the camera would span across and adjust to an angle that you could see mobs and such across the battlefield like a 3rd person view and you can see mostly everything in your characters line of sight. Now the way it would work is your character would remain the center of the characters movement so everything functions the same as it would before.

I think that because it has instancing graphically and capability for peoples computers it could be done.

It would severely help rangers on the zoom in because its quite full on with the current zoom.

By full on I mean the fact that rangers cant see much which is a part of the difficulty to some extent, but if I think by having the camera closer to the character it is already harder. So by being able to see across the field you could actually take mobs further than 2 inchs from the screen, when its fully zoomed in.

To Combat the whole difficulty thing and the aspect of the style of the game, when the camera is zoomed in and is facing line of sight. Implement radius of light and darken the background, via mist/fog or anything it's an example. path of Exile is a Dark game so it wouldn't feel so much as if it was an open world Mmo but more of a mysterious adventure through dark lands in a nice open yet instanced action rpg.
The example of that Rpg Being Dark Souls, Warcraft 3's zoom was good but the graphics is not so much and its not a good RPG these days :)
Heres a pic from Dragon Age origins, I'm imagining the angle of the camera with Path of Exiles camera movement.
Imagine If you were the guy in the middle and radius of light was only arround you mobs had to enter your radius of light to be spotted well and using shift would make your character stand in the middle and duke out large mobs while they thrashed upon your shields and got pinned down by your rain of fire. Of course not as zoomed in as this but nearly:



I believe maybe more of a view like this...Pretending that the character in the middle is your guy and radius of light would affect spotting mobs well or not:



Lastly heres one from the dark souls action rpg.
Imagine if you were in Act 2's Forests chilling with a view like this:



So what do you think about this idea or one like this :)

Any thoughts?
Also the pictures were somewhat meant to look like Path of Exile even though they are other games.. I used them because they appealed to me quite a bit

I started playing fully zoomed in for the heck of it today and was amazed at how good everything looked, and how playable it was (as a melee Shadow).

I wondered what it'd be like if they locked the camera behind the character's back -- just like the Souls games, actually. It was a vague thought, though, because that would require a LOT more design for each level. With the zoom-in, GGG have revealed that the isometric view is potentially much more third-dimensional.

I tried this with Torchlight and Titan Quest. Neither game pulled it off. There was too much dead space all around -- the sky was blank, the distance draw was impossibly short, clipping issues were abundant. ARPGs in the Diablo vein really don't do well zoomed-in. They are some strange hybrid of action and strategy game in that respect: as a player, you can see both more and less than the character can. You can see more as in you see what's around him (or her), what's behind you, what's around the corners. But less, in that you don't have the long range forward vision that a typical person does.

These are just the tropes of the isometric action game.

I'd love to see PoE step past that and into the realm of the over-the-shoulder third person action game, but I think it'd take a LOT of work, and I think they've enough on their plate for now (act 3, other essentials due by open beta).

But it's a really nice thought.

I think this would work a lot better if WASD movement was enabled.

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Djohm23 wrote:

I think this would work a lot better if WASD movement was enabled.

I agree. WASD for isometric doesn't work for me, but if you lock the camera over the shoulder, it becomes 'driving'.

I'm not saying I'd do it, but it'd be interesting to see if it could be pulled off.

Meanwhile, I'm still playing fully zoomed in and loving the intensity and intimacy of it.

"

Chris wrote:

Unfortunately, we can't allow people to see into the distance or from other angles because of the way the art and engine were designed.

I've been curious to this to some degree, as in some of the cinematic cuts we've seen the camera flying around (presumably Act 3) without any problems.

I've also had an opportunity zoom way out and alter the angle of the camera to see what actually happens, and I didn't really see anything of note.

I'm sure there are some technical issues associated with moving the camera, but I think there are means to do so within reason.

Biggest thing is standardizing the viewport zooms between resolutions.

Why would you want to turn PoE into another game?

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Nemix wrote:

Why would you want to turn PoE into another game?

Not so much another game, but it allows for a completely different viewpoint (and therefore experience) with minimal extra coding required by the dev team.

Indeed. If this is the type of game play one wants, there are games like Skyrim or any number of MMo's.

I enjoy those too.

However this is by design a ISOMETRIC display game.

There are inherent limitations with the design and it is BY DESIGN.

I enjoy isometric game play too and it is one reason
I am here.

If there is one thing I would be critical of is the
very annoying habit of the game designers here
to design areas that hide the character and mobs
from the players view.

The proper way to do it, IMO, is the way it has been
handled in D3 when zoomed fully out.... in that there
the art objects that hinder the players field of view
will fade out when needed.

Diablo 2 had a similar problem in some areas and would
get one killed in Hell mode in a heartbeat.

I think that is a poor design.
It shouldn't be that hard to fix given the FIXED perspective of a isometric game.
Why else make it fixed isometric if not allowing for camera rotation?

As I said, it appears Blizzard has learned from D2 in this regard and when I played D3 during open beta, never saw this issue (when zoomed out as normal).

I would like to see PoE do the same. Too many caves and trees totally block the players view.