Just finished trying out the Company of Heroes demo, and I’m afraid I’m going to give the finished game a pass. Same reason as I’m going to pass on Warhammer 40k: Dark Crusade.
The d**N 3D camera is too close to the action.
Note to developers: do not set your highest viewpoint lower than the range of your direct fire weapons. This is bad, bad, bad.
I’m tired of fighting the camera, seeing my guys shot from things off-screen, trying to tip it at a shallow angle so I can look ahead, then tip it back up again to see what’s happening. If I could just pull back a little farther, I’d be able to see what’s happening, and focus on the strategy rather than fighting the camera.
What I can’t understand is why this is so hard? Isn’t this what 3D was supposed to bring us? Zooming in during RTS games is frankly pretty useless most of the time, but zooming back… ah, that would be great.
Oh you’re not alone on this! This has been a major grip of mine since RTS’s went 3D. It really turns me off of a game if I can’t see the full layout of a given battlefield when I’m trying to issues unit orders.
I’ll be picking up CoH despite this annoying and annoyingly common flaw. I work around this in RTS games by excessive use of the pause button. CoH can play a little like Combat Mission when you pause as much as I do. The lack of pullback is still annoying, but pausing and scrolling around for a second to get your bearings when giving orders compensates a little. I’ll never be able to play online, but I don’t care since I lost my taste for online gaming a while back due to the rampant asshattery of the general online population.
I haven’t been following this one but surely this has been voiced on the official forums? It’s too claustrophobic leaving me wanting to go back to something simliar and non 3d like Blitzkrieg.
I’m pretty sure the reason they locked it is so that everyone is on somewhat equal grounds online. I imagine if they let you pull out a lot further, even with turning the details all the way down, you’d need a pretty beefy machine to run it. Thus giving beefy machine people online an advantage.
Then again, they could just lock it for online games, but alas…
Not a bad point Chris, but it hasn’t really bothered me yet as I’ve just sort of gotten comfortable ALT-tilting quickly and using hotkeys to jump between locations to fight camera jitter when you scroll. On the other hand, I kinda wish they’d scrapped the separate 2D tactical map and made it a zoom-up view with multiple levels ala Empire at War.
And just for the record, CoH absolutely decimates TBfME2 in terms of at least a happier field of view, plus the ground level tilting. I feel like I’m either kissing Orc and Goblin snouts or getting motion sickness panning the camera in the latter.
Warhammer fans, you’ll be happy to learn Mark of Chaos has a camera system similar to CoH (tilt low enough to see well up the skybox), but also lets you zoom out Rome Total War style and includes the Empire at War full map top-down zoom-out.
