Preview Dungeon Siege 3 Previews

[Felix]

How about some proofs of flip flops instead of accusing and assumption.

 

[Angthoron]

Dragon-Age. Locked in to a small area around the PC and forcing a constant shifting of the perspective to do near anything that isn't immediately close to you.

Hmm, DA does have a shitty camera, but I'd still say NWN2 beats it by a fair mile - least it never got stuck in a door for me. That's one of the worst things in MotB in fact, it gets stuck in a door til you actually move, at which point you've possibly walked into an ambush or triggered a conversation. Gah!

Then again, it does like to bump the ceilings.

A free-rotating 360 camera, you have full control over it with exceptions only to bad area design that can go far overhead and hits limitations of no x-ray sight through walls, how are any of you having trouble with this? Save for going to first person, you can easily zoom in! Rotate! Funny angles! Normal angles!

But that's just the thing - I kept ending up with having to correct the camera all the damned time, pretty much any of the "chase cam" modes are brutally craptastic and shouldn't have been included. NWN2 has always been confusing to me - it's called a NWN, but it doesn't have a good interface (NWN does, probably the last good interface Bio will ever make), and the camera pretty much sucks as well as long as you use it in traditional NWN chase format. Unfortunately, for some reason I didn't like the PC-centric camera much so I ended up using the abominations that are the rest of the cam modes.

Suppose it's bad camera and bad area design arm-in-arming.

 

[KalosKagathos]

What. The. Hell. The default NWN2 camera is literally 100% identical to the default NWN1 camera. The fuck is wrong with you, people?

 

[Angthoron]

What. The. Hell. The default NWN2 camera is literally 100% identical to the default NWN1 camera. The fuck is wrong with you, people?

It works badly for party management and is poorly coded? Seriously, I've played a lot of games, and many of them had bad cams, especially the early 3D era stuff, but this is the only game that has its camera so mindbogglingly bad that I actually bother writing about it. It's not like I just climbed off my XBAWX and found NWN2 and decided to hate on it, it's just that the camera, just like all the other aspects of original NWN2, is very poor.

If you've enjoyed it, good on you, you'll probably enjoy any camera in any game.

 

[KalosKagathos]

Now that I think about it, I really can't remember a single time a game systematically frustrated me because of the camera. That includes platformers that change the camera angle mid-jump.

 

[Shannow]

What. The. Hell. The default NWN2 camera is literally 100% identical to the default NWN1 camera. The fuck is wrong with you, people?

No, you have extra angles. And in NWN1 all you ever have to do is adjust to the left or right once in a while and even more seldom zoom in or out, not left, right, up, down, in, out, mode 1, 2 or 3 and most of that virtually constantly because some settings don't stay fixed and others need constant babysitting...

If the NWN2 camera were a car engine it'd die on you every time you stopped your car. Sure some folks are so dense and used to shit that they hardly notice, some only find it a minor nuisance and don't mind that much as long as they still get from A to B and some remember the times of 2d engines that were faster, needed less repairs, were more efficient and didn't fucking die on you whenever you stopped at a traffic light...

What I don't get in this whole discussion is how you admit that it's a bad camera and just didn't "mind that much" but don't understand how somebody could call it shit... It's flabbergasting.
Edit:

If you've enjoyed it, good on you, you'll probably enjoy any camera in any game.

Now that I think about it, I really can't remember a single time a game systematically frustrated me because of the camera. That includes platformers that change the camera angle mid-jump.

 

[Heartwarden]

But that's just the thing - I kept ending up with having to correct the camera all the damned time,

What I don't get in this whole discussion is how you admit that it's a bad camera and just didn't "mind that much" but don't understand how somebody could call it shit... It's flabbergasting.

I don't personally have a problem with consistently moving and controlling the camera and consider it a normal practice if the game gives the chance, but I let it run it's course last night while playing a second game to the side. To totally help prove my case on it being an alright camera, it decided to hook up in my character's face on trying to leave a door, blocking the chance to actually leave it without moving back to reset the camera (and I promptly never let it out of my control again.). Damn.

Apologies, anyway! I figured it the norm to constantly control the camera, which is when it's perfectly fine. But a hitch after five-minutes (not even) without it in my hand, I guess I can understand the frustration. I was wrong! I surrender!

 

[FeelTheRads]

I figured it the norm to constantly control the camera

Umm, no... the "norm" is to play the fucking game not to constantly adjust the camera.

Why was it so difficult to include a fixed angle camera? I don't know. Do you? I wish I knew.

And which is that totally "free" camera you're talking about? If I'm not mistaken neither of them allowed you to move wherever on the map to click there to move your party.

 

[Monocause]

You guys probably know that I have an above average tolerance for poorly implemented features when compared to the Codexian standards but even I consider the NWN2 camera to be unworkable. The graphics' engine was a problem too - walls and other stuff obstructing your view didn't fade out reliably, making you rotating like mad just to be able to see a darn thing.

And then, when you found just the right angle you pressed the wrong key or switched locations and had to do it all over again.

DA camera was fine. The only thing that was wrong with it was that you couldn't zoom out enough but it caused relatively little frustration over the course of my playthrough.

 

[Sannom]

And which is that totally "free" camera you're talking about? If I'm not mistaken neither of them allowed you to move wherever on the map to click there to move your party.

NWN 2 did better with MotB and the "strategy" mode. Not perfect, but it gave you the possibility to get the camera a good distance away from your character. The camera in the original was a real chose though. They really didn't tailor the engine for party management.
But "free" camera is more about rotating on the X and Y axis at your leisure than taking it everywhere. Unlike, say, the one in Commandos 2 that only allowed for 90° rotations around the Y-axis.
DA's camera can be one big source of frustration when you know the enemies are there, just at the edge, but you can't oder an attack because you can't have your character out of your field of view! You actually have to go third person to "see" them.

 

[GarfunkeL]

NWN2 camera, for all its flaws, never obstructed me the way DA camera did - the "isometric" view didn't zoom far enough so you had to use the OTS-view to target enemies that where a bit farther, except then walls and spell effects and shit blinded you.

That didn't happen to me in NWN2, though one had to rotate the camera often to keep it focused but I never had to switch between views. Seriously, using mouse to move the party and with left hand panning the camera wasn't that much of work.

 

[MetalCraze]

Obsidian plans to bring its signature story style to the game with branching dialogue options and a deep relationship-building system with companion characters.

Just when you thought Dungeon Siege can't become worse - Obsidian turns it into a shitty dating sim with LARP'ing.

signature story style

It can't be worse than in AP where you had to watch 10 minutes long cutscenes, right? Right?

There’'s no dating sim

Yeah right

but you'll laugh when you see that the icon interface for dialogue sections is actually a tree with glowing branches that point to different conversation choices.

This is as funny as Avellone's humour in Fallout 2


And now imagine Dungeon Siege 3 having worse combat than its predecessors