I don’t think you quite yet get what he was trying to demonstrate with the graphs. Here’s the thing: people don’t just coincidentally all prefer the exact same level of zoom to play on. Each person will have a particular level they like better, some will be further out, some will be closer. If everyone is concentrated on the right part of the graph, playing at the maximum, that doesn’t mean they just happen to all like it exactly like that. It means some like it that way, but many have to use that zoom level because the one they would prefer doesn’t even exist - it would be farther to the right.
In other words: look at the graph on the left. Just imagine that devs of that game, for whatever reason, decide to reduce the zoom out capability to the mid point there. What would happen to the graph? It would become pretty much a new version of the graph on the right. Not because players suddenly and magically decided that they now love the new max zoom, but because they were all clumped up at the new max against their personal preferences.
This is exactly right, and is my current proposed interpretation of the histogram. Thank you for your extra summary FragrantLion957.
In reality I imagine the histograms are more complicated- and you may even see multi-modal distributions between those who are more pro/hard core, and those who play more relaxed - regardless, you should be aiming to find a way to represent the “expected” distribution as much as possible, instead of shearing off one shoulder of the population and forcing them to be at a particular zoom.
To put it extremely lightly - I would not put my money on it
I still haven’t seen any official response from both forum activity + surveys and closed beta itself. I would not be surprised to see this subject being cut short by literally one sentence. Things mentioned here wouldn’t not leave developer’s office.
Maybe in some post-mortem during GDC '28 somebody might dive into that.
You would never know any of this from looking at graphs though because pretty much everyone plays this style of RTS at max zoom and gets used to it (or dislikes it enough to stop playing). You have no idea what their preferences are from looking at graphs because everyone will just be at 100% zoom. Your whole concept of “some might like it that way, some might want a larger zoom” is just conjecture, not data you’re going to get from graphs in this case.
Yes, one would have to actually get the data and look at it and see how it is generated to really get an idea of where each mode in the histogram comes from. I am simply positing one potentially valid interpretation based on what we might expect if the data was skewed in such a way. That is called hypothesis generation.
Furthermore, we already know that pros like to play somewhat zoomed in, therefore not everyone plays at maximum zoom out. Thus we can expect to see interesting patterns in the histogram data and that is therefore not conjecture.
We do? Why would they? It completely cuts off your line of sight and decreases the amount of info you’re receiving. Dawn of War, Company of Heroes, Age 2/3, AoM, Iron Harvest, all these RTS games with similar camera style - I’ve never seen anyone play them at anything other than 100% zoom except for a random moment of checking something specific out. They’re basically meant to be a fixed camera, unlike RTS like SupCom, Ashes of the Singularity, Sins of a Solar Empire where it’s all about dynamic zoom in and out across massive maps.
zooming out reduces the hitbox of everything
at some point (eg. zooming out so you can see the whole map in one screen), the difficulty of clicking on things becomes more disadvantageous than seeing more stuff
these games (in PvP) are more about really minute elements like targeting individual animals / trees / enemies and walling 1-tile gaps rather than high-level strategy and positioning of armies
but the point is that you can customize how you want to play. if you want bigger hitboxes and less view, you can choose that. if you want smaller hitboxes and more view, you can choose that
Yeah, that’s a good point but Age games aren’t usually zoomed out that much where targeting becomes an issue - and this is an argument for a closer camera view whereas most of the feedback I’ve seen seems more like players want 10-20% more increased zoom. I feel like Age games are also just as much, if not more, about macro than microing minute elements, although micro still is part of it.
In a game like AOE, you rarely click on individual villagers or military personnel. You drag click multiple all the time. The only time you click individual is when you are clicking idle villagers to get them to do something. When you do need a specific villager, you zoom in. But majority of the time you drag click. And zooming in so much makes micro so difficult to do. Especially when dealing with long range units. These are core component parts of AOE.
the fact remains that pros - especially noticable in aoe2 - prefer a closer zoom compared to other players. They do this for precision of clicking. As that out weighs the added information from zooming out at all.
Sometimes they zoom out to see things better but usually they stay quite close.
Besides, this is all not the point - the point was that different people play at different zoom levels, and that will be reflected in a histogram. If the histogram is different for aoe4 compared to other aoe titles, it may be due to the maximum zoom truncating peoples prefered zoom level.
I am simply asking the devs to perform such a simple histogram data analysis (which they can do with a few simple scripts and recorded games) and just look at the data. They may find patterns (as the one I’ve presented) which support or do not support changing the default maximum zoom and to increase it by a %. (infact, they’ll even get an idea of by how much % it should change)
This is explaining a different nuance of the issue. I am focusing strictly on camera zoom level. The “look” of cities, the space between buildings are not important here.
The only important thing is the relative size of things relative to the viewport, i.e. zoom. And offering a data driven solution to assess if the zoom level is too low.
If you read the whole thing he goes into detail about the whole zoom issue. And he lists problems with it.
He even does a comparison of if you were to do the same viewport of AOE IV to other AOE games, how small the view port would be. Basically you couldn’t do sufficient micro if especially against long range weapons, the placing of buildings become arbitrary because you can’t plan building placement without the scope of the land, scouting becomes very hard to scope out the enemy base etc. it’s basically very hard to strategise on and takes the S out of RTS.
Yeah unfortunately I can’t respond to your comments made due to NDA. But the issues presented about city planning, difficulty in walling etc. are still unaddressed and relevant especially micro!!! How can you micro a treb when you have to keep scrolling back and forth between them!
I agree in case of custom games but not for ranked since if we allow giant zoom in ranked anyone who doesn’t want to hinder himself will be forced to use maximum zoom for most of the game.
