Strategic Zoom and the importance of the game camera

These anti strat zoom threads remind me of the hardcore starcraft people who railed against "auto mine" and "being able to select more than 12 units at a time" when starcraft 2 was in development. If you want to stare at your units, no one is stopping you. I understand if you don't want to spend the whole game staring at icons, there needs to be a balance. But if your complaining because you want to stare at your units the whole game and still expect to win, I gotta ask how you think adding a camera where you pretend to be driving one of your units is going to help.

Another thing to consider here, the maps in PA aren't flat (last time I checked that wasn't a sure thing, but I'm going off the trailer), even when zoomed out a fair bit the units in the trailer looked readable enough not to need icons. I think having to pan around the sides of the globe is going to balance the effectiveness of strategic zoom enough that these kinds of discussions become moot.

The whole reason the strat cam broke immersion in the first place was the whole idea of massive battles without understanding the implication for the gamers experience. Strat view I totally agree was great from usability standpoint. It wasn't great that it took you out of the battles completely and made the graphics mostly irrelevant. It trades one problem for another.

More importantly most people on the forum so far haven't thought about the implication of a bad camera system for MODS. If you ever wanted to do something else besides massive battles, a bad camera system makes your life miserable. I'm thinking of the modding potential as well. Most people on the forum have not thought through the implication of what a bad camera system means for modders and new game types.

You keep saying 'bad camera system'. You seem to have trouble understanding all the people saying 'supcom did not have a bad camera system, it had a fantastic camera system'. Your opinion is not a law of nature.

The strategic zoom was good. And now I will prove it.

OK lets say you were making a mod for a gameplay style that wouldn't be about massive battles at all. Let's say you were making a dungeon crawling RPG like Baldur's Gate or Dragon Age.

You have a party of 6, a moderately sized dungeon, and strategic zoom.

If you zoom all the way out you'll get a little minimap, with your line of sight showing, and the dungeon you haven't seen yet is blacked out. You can zoom all the way out, put your mouse over what you want to see, and zoom into where you are comfortable. If you want to cast a spell at range you can zoom out to where you can see your caster and target.

And if you want to watch a sword fight you can zoom in. You can always view the game at whatever level you are comfortable with. In an RPG you'll probably be really close in most of the time.

I would honestly enjoy playing Dragon Age with strategic zoom. It's a good camera system.

Like I said, if you don't care about usability no one is stopping you from spending the whole game zoomed in to the action, I've played a lot of my games that way.

I'm all for the devs opening up the camera to modders, but there has to be a standard for multiplayer, and I'm sick of hearing people demand a feature I and a lot of other people care about be removed in the name of TA nostalgia or immersion.

I, for one, loved both its usefulness and the impression that it gave me; seeing all those icons doing there stuff was awesome! And I could zoom in at a moment's notice and watch them all up close to!

Why would you force everyone to only view stuff up close (which, as has been explained so many times before, would really be a horrible decision).

You've all put words in my mouth I never said to get rid of STRATEGIC ZOOM. I said I wanted them to have a well designed game camera system. The two things are not the same.

When your posts are full of ridiculous claims that supcom has a bad camera system of course everyone takes that to mean you don't like strategic zoom. That's the distinct difference between the supcom camera and more primitive RTS cameras. Then you compound that by complaining about how the icon view breaks immersion (again a ludicrous suggestion, does the map in an RPG break immersion?) so what else are we supposed to think?

But in my opinion, it is well designed.

And if I'd ask what's wrong with it, you'd probably say something that defines strategic zoom - in other words, wanting to remove (a part of) it.

But, ok, what's wrong with it then? Maybe I just grossly misintepreted your post...?

Not my problem they misinterpreted my post. Nowhere did I suggest its removal. I talked about pros and cons and designing the game camera system (hence SYSTEM).

Even if the standard meta game for multiplayer is zoomed out for 90% of the game?

Not everyone enjoys looking at icons.
The only solution I see is for the game to have a high enough element of micro so that during battles you are required to zoom in and take a more direct control approach where as the rest of the game (mostly macro side) can be played zoomed out.

Perhaps if you actually READ MY POST here it is in the first post:

"So the problem ISN'T strategic zoom per se, it's about the implementation of the game camera and the viewport. Having a key to toggle between strategic view and 'battle cam' view is absolutely necessary if PA is not going to repeat all supcom 1's immersion breaking mistakes."

This was lost on all the flamers because they didn't bother to you know, read.

This is also far from the first thread on this topic, others before you HAVE called for the removal of strategic zoom, and i think most of us are irritated at this argument coming back again and again.

Which doesn't excuse you from refusing to read what I said first before jumping to conclusions with your response.

No, actually it is your problem if you can't communicate effectively.

What you actually did was whine about specific characteristics of strategic zoom breaking immersion. You made some broad accusations that supcom had 'a bad camera system' with no suggestion as to what you actually thought was bad about it, leaving us to assume the stuff you whined about was the problem. And finally you said you wanted some kind of 'battle cam' on a hotkey with no definition of what such a thing would actually do. Do you want a close up top down view like every RTS ever? If so, just zoom in already. Why does transitioning from close to far zoom with a hotkey not break immersion while using the mousewheel to do it does? Or do you want some kind of first-person view? If so, why would you possibly want this? How does this address icon view allegedly breaking immersion?

In short, your first post was a rambling mess of apparently unconnected whining about the supcom camera with no concrete analysis or proposed solutions to the undefined problems you claim it has. Your later posts have not improved.

What's that you didn't read my post... here's what you missed when you first responded.

""So the problem ISN'T strategic zoom per se, it's about the implementation of the game camera and the viewport. Having a key to toggle between strategic view and 'battle cam' view is absolutely necessary if PA is not going to repeat all supcom 1's immersion breaking mistakes.""

Nowhere is it implied that strategic zoom would be removed if I was talking about toggling between them. Read it next time.

Let's have a look shall we...

So far it sounds like you're advocating not being able to zoom out past where you can't see the models.

Here you explain how zooming out too far breaks immersion for you. You mention well designed camera/viewport system, but don't explain it yet.

You ask for a camera from a first person perspective.

You suggest that people were expecting a first person camera from the original supreme commander and were dissapointed when they didn't get it. You claim the majority of the game is spent looking at icons and base building.

This bit is hard to decode, you say the problem ISN'T with strategic zoom despite all your previous complaints about it. You request a key to switch to battle cam view.

You support moddability.

You again claim that most of the time in game was spent zoomed out. You express dislike for this.

You show a video demonstrating that supreme commander looks good zoomed in.

You claim once more all you saw was icons.


Nope, sure looks like everyone has been interpreting that post correctly.

I DID read your posts and address them, it seems YOU have not bothered to read mine, don't mistake my last post as an apology.