FF XII has completely seamless combat. You see an enemy, you attack it with no world-switches.
FFXII doesn’t do that. Combat takes place on the same screen as travel/exploring.
I’m with Charles on this one. Fuck devs up the ass with a rusty cheese-grater who don’t include this type of option.
I agree with Charles 100%. Why on earth can’t they put the change in the options? It’s so fundamental.
I just couldn’t understand how on earth this originated, this whole practice of moving the thumbstick left, and your view moving right. Vertical inversion makes sense to me. It comes from flight sims, space sims, etc., and there’s a reason for it. In fact, I always play first person shooters with look inversion on, because my very first mouse-look game was Descent, which came out long before Quake. And the default control scheme with the mouse was the same as with the joystick: you go up to look down, you go down to look up.
So I can understand why people are used to one way or the other with vertical look inversion.
But I always used to say “WHICH MOTHERF*#KER CAME UP HORIZONTAL LOOK INVERSION?!?!” Who first thought it was a good idea that if you turn the thumbstick left, you should look to the right instead?
A friend of mine worked at Sucker Punch, and he actually had the answer to this. And I’m pretty sure he’s right.
It started with Mario 64. And suddenly it all kind of makes sense. You see, in Mario 64, they made this big deal about your camera being this bee that’s following you around. In fact, you could see the bee carrying the camera when you were near a mirror. So with the C button camera controls you weren’t controlling the VIEW, you were controlling the BEE. So when you say “left” you want the BEE to go left, which makes the view go to the right.
But try as I might, I just can NOT get used to this. I played a game a couple of years ago where they didn’t have Horizontal look inversion option, and I finally had to give the game up, because I just couldn’t handle it anymore.
But hey, at least with FFXII, they’ve got vertical look inversion on the way I like it. I wonder if I should avoid the game or not?
Actually, I think the explanation is far more simple than that. For a programmer, it’s logical that stick right means move the camera right. Problem is, when you actually sit down with it, for many people this is counter intuitive. Nintendo certainly perpetuates the problem though. Not the horizontal issue, but in their Mario and Zelda games, up/down is flight-sim-ish, which doesn’t make any goddamned sense when you are trying to aim arrows or water hoses.
Charles and I may disagree on whether a console should include a web browser, but there’s common ground on this.
Give us the options to change the default choices!
As a dev, it annoys me too, its not tuff to do, it takes more work to put the menu item in than it does anything else, and it really should come up during development, as chances are the entire team isn’t going to feel the same way about camera controls.
I’m just surprised it didn’t get added for NA release. They took the time to add in a widescreen mode but couldn’t add control inversion too?
The widescreen support is half-assed anyway. The 3d is in proper perspective but all the maps and UI stuff is just stretched and looks awkward. Sad that they didn’t put more effort in to that.
Do you think? Looks fine on my TV. I’ll switch it off and on tonight to check that.
Hey, while we’re talking about the interface, what the hell does the “Flicker Filter” option do?
Yep. If you turn widescreen off and have your tv stretch the image, the license grid and the map looks identical. Alternately, if you have the game set to widescreen and you have your TV at 4:3, the icons are all properly square.
I have to side with Charles. It’s nothing game-breaking IMO, but irritating? Absolutely. It’s “wrong” on a fundamental level. Every other time I wanted to adjust the camera of Dragon Quest 8, I wound up moving the wrong direction. I could never get used to it. I bet I’ll react the same way to FF12 because of this. I can’t undo years and years of playing games with “traditional” (aka “the only way that makes any sense”) camera controls.
I recently hit some sort of critical breaking point with camera controls: Nothing works for me now. No matter what combination of inverted/non-inverted X/Y axis I select in a game, it feels wrong.
If they where consistent, it wouldn’t bother me. I can adapt to either way within a couple of hours, but when I have to adapt for ever new game because they all with out fail do it the opposite way of the game you played before it gets real frustrating. FFXII -> Enchanted Arms = AAARRRGHHHHHH. I looked forever, including the gamer profile on my 360, trying to swap the horizontal camera direction with no luck.
Another vote for Charles. Getting used to this and that camera setting every other game is annoying. The worst case I encountered was BGAE which enabled reversing the camera controls but in both axis at once. They didn’t even bother to correct that for the PC version.
I agree that all games should offer camera inversion options, but since FFXII is stuck in exactly the configuration I prefer, no complaints from me outside of empathy for my less-fortunate gaming brethren.
Yeah, I want to be able to zoom out. And autorun. Where’s my goddamn autorun?!
The game actually has so many similarities to FFXI that it’s not funny. I found a ??? marker yesterday! Also apparently there are NMs that can spawn from respawns (not related to Hunt marks).
On main topic: I didn’t really notice the camera control affecting my enjoyment of the game.
I saw this massive fur-covered crocodile thing by the beach in northern estersand last night. Level 36-ish hanging out with level 8 mobs. It dissapeared when I zoned and returned, so it must be a random appearance.
I’m voting against Charles. Not cause I don’t agree with his position just because I like giving him a hard time.