Unfortunately yes, and It was one of the problema for many casual players. There were a lot of graphic criticisms for that (not detailed graphic on units and Buildings and Giant weapons).
Oh no I meant high zoom - low camera.
I’d also like to be able to zoom in all the way sometimes, usually when I want to check units’ models. But yeah I definitely feel the need of being able to zoom out more.
Something that doesn’t help that is the fog. It’s completely artificial, it’s an option for the map set in the editor. Maybe it’s there for performance or ambience but it’s way too invasive. You can see in screenshots of very old builds it wasn’t enabled.
It is sad that they still havent eliminated that fog when you zoom out. It looks horrible. In their presentation videos and trailers, this zoom is removed so it can actually look good and attract people, they also use a free camera movement there.
But when it comes to you playing it, you get the ugly fog and a locked camera.
They do this from fear of players not being able to run the game properly, but like it was said here already most people have more than capable hardware these days.
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Quite a few people may do, but they also have a legal obligation to continue to respect the posted minimum specifications required to run the product.
Of course, this can be an option, but at the same time if you’re saying “with better hardware you can zoom out more, see more and respond to more”, it suddenly seems less fair.
I still think the developers should do something about it. But I don’t think large improvements are likely, unless a miracle of optimisation can occur.
Where was everyone when virtually every multiplayer game for 20+ years gave people with bigger monitors, faster machines, better RAM, faster internet, higher resolutions, faster polling mice, n-key rollover keyboards, and dual monitors a competitive advantage over players without that stuff?
I wish the original (or early?) Pong was multiplayer on two screens in the 1970s and we were all transported to then. People here would probably be arguing about how players on a 19" black & white Magnavox TV screen with mono audio are at a disadvantage to those on a 25" color Zenith that’s built inside a giant furniture cabinet with stereo audio, and suggesting the latter be forbidden from playing, or the dev lock those players out
I highly doubt performance gets impacted that much. And if it does, it’s for a small majority. And that small majority can choose to, you know, not zoom out more. Even if it is a medium majority or high majority – which I really doubt – then don’t zoom out more.
And the devs could, you know, implement it for non-Ranked parts of the game only, as I’ve said a bunch of times over the years
Seems like a short list of cons, and they aren’t that solid, imp
None of whose factors change a game’s ability to zoom out, though?
The developers don’t control what hardware you buy. They do control game updates.
Agree to disagree. It’s up to the devs either way.
But I recommend not alienating those that actually support zoom improvements. You’re being very negative to literally any point raised, and your points are making it about the poster more and more.
I’ve already said there are parts of the game where a competitive advantage don’t matter at all (like SP). Assuming it doesnt mess with mission scripting too much (there’s a lot of custom camera work, as well as scripting where units are spawned in at specific points during each mission).
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This doesnt change the fact that they could give an option in the graphical settings to disable the fog with a warning message that this can impact performance, like many other video games out there.
It is just… very lacklustre how they (havent) dealt with this.
What other RTS games let you disable skybox fog?
I had an interesting discussion with a couple of old DoW players yesterday. It’s popular amongst the competitive scene there to play with mods that massively extend zoom-out and remove all skybox fog (similar to how I’ve seen reports that AoE II competitive players turn trees to stumps, etc).
It’s certainly popular to remove aesthetic effects (that may have dual purposes; for example skybox fog often shrouds spawning in squads in SP missions, etc) for the competitive scene, because it grants an advantage to gameplay.
I don’t think that’s where Darkness is coming from though. I think they just want less restrictive zoom.
I think the best example would be all their Company of Heroes games, including CoH3. So the same engine, also RTS, but you dont have fog taking over when you zoom out, and you can also pan the camera at whichever angle you like diagonally, something you only see in the AoE4 trailers but it is disabled for us the players in game, we can only zoom up and down.
You know those spectacular views in the AoE4 original trailer with that walled castle up ahead? you can freely and easily do that in CoH with the camera.
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This one has me puzzled as well. I know you can remove that fog as we on the Companion Book used that function to make screenshots of entire maps for the campaign, as seen here for the first Rus mission:
Unfortunately, that feature is a debug command only the devs (and my team four years ago) have access to.
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CoH 3 definitely has skybox fog, but they might have pulled it back a bit. I haven’t played since the alpha, mind you, but skybox fog has been a thing in every Relic RTS all the way back to before Essence (DoW had it, and in DoW: DE it’s been pulled back to accommodate the improved zoom out / camera height).
Probably due to how the skybox looks when you look up, with it disabled. But I haven’t messed with it myself (I’d assume it’s a SCaR command that you can put into a game mode, if someone really wanted to test it).
I know you support changes. Didn’t mean to sound like hyperbole, sorry, just some passion here about the topic. It’s tough as a SP skirm player mostly, and occasional MP vs AI skirm, to have Ranked and slower PCs restrict and limit the potential for the game, for 4 years now. Slower PCs should not be a factor in this, imo,.for reasons I’ve mentioned.
I learned early on that PC games don’t always… usually don’t… run that great on max settings on my PC, and to fine-tune the graphic settings, accordingly. I’m unable to figure out why people are against doing this for AoE, or why they don’t think of it, or don’t care to bring it up when talking about zoom. I’ve seen that argument countless times over the years and it perplexes me.
Units popping in is a new one, so didn’t know that. I trust devs could just increase the pop-in distance in tandem with zoom out increase. If not, then I guess campaigns should be like Ranked and maybe not get this update, which would be a bummer. I’d have to believe pop-in is a simple setting in the code, like an LOD threshold or something, that could be easily adjusted or removed in the code. And, again, if someone’s PC performance somehow tanks, then the player could choose to not zoom out more.
We also have to consider that setting zoom in-game is incremental, so if more zoom out is allowed, most players could benefit at least somewhat. Some players could get to mouse-wheel zoom out two more clicks before their PC lags, some will get 4 more clicks, and some will get 7 more clicks. Each player will decide for themselves.
And as stated in past threads, to avoid accidentally zooming out more than your PC can handle or more than they want while in matches (since some players accidentally engage the mouse-wheel when clicking around the viewport), devs just need to put a threshold cap that players can adjust to their liking. This talk may have been in AoE2DE land, actually, but it would apply here
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I realised this is a tired and probably useless thing to point out, but everything in the game is restricted in some level based on the targeted specs for the game on release. Some of the limitations align with past AoE games (200 pop, for example), but in terms of what can be done in the possibility space for “technical improvements”, the developers literally open themselves to legal risk if they blow past it.
While this isn’t necessarily a problem for opt-in features, this becomes a problem if the opt-in feature is so advantageous that not having it is putting you at a disadvantage.
But ultimately, I think the real reason is simply performance. More on the screen at once is more to render in a single frame. Increasing the amount shown by zoom increases this in a beyond linear fashion (unsure if it counts as exponential, I suck at maths).
Which is why I think it’s unlikely.
I have no idea why zoom-in is so restricted; model detail is better now than it was on release (I think around Sultan’s they invested in a substantial art uplift for Villagers and the like, which beforehand looked very rough when closely-zoomed).
But at the same time we have mod tools that haven’t substantially changed in the (nearly) four years since release, observer UI issues, awkward map selection UI / UX, and other pain points that have gone untouched. There aren’t any technical barriers to these things either, and they still haven’t happened. So I assume it’s a resource issue first and foremost (not even a competency issue - we’ve had plenty of solid updates to terrain rendering, water rendering, etc, and we know Relic are still involved with the title).
At the end of the day, I just want the game to keep getting support, and for that to happen, the devs need to branch out a bit from supporting just MP stuff (even if the observer UI I mentioned is also an MP thing 
). If the thing they decide to do next season is revamp the camera and let everyone zoom out more, I’m not going to be arguing against it.
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Kind of opening a can of worms with this, but you guys talking about hardware restrictions and playing on different kinds of hardware is extremely relevant:
Playing on an ultrawide does give a definitive gameplay advantage. It’s something that changes how people play games across every genre. FPS games have a totally different FOV, RTS games have a different screen economy with things feeling less crowded.
So it’s not like it’s impossible. Sorry if I gave that impression earlier, I’d like better zoom options too. Ideally without dropping thousands of money dollars on PC equipment.
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if anyone feels zooming out further gives some folk a competitive edge, its not that simple, you see as you push the camera further and further back, your clicking becomes very noticably less precise, you’re trading your precision (which can bite in the ass no matter how adapted you are to faraway camera) for extra vision which brings another factor, the more you can see, the harder your brain has to work to keep track of your desired target and more likely it is to disappear in the noise that all the extra vision brings on screen
what zoom distance is best is completely situational
but aoe4 devs picked the strategy of making people play the way they see as right, and not offer options they wouldn’t care about
There are absolutely diminishing returns, but it’s a fact that at the lower end of zoom out extension, it would confer a pretty inarguable advantage.
But like I said, I prefer the performance argument anyway.
i can give you a simple challenge, aoe3 DE is free to play, so boot that up and first play with only the game’s default camera, then enable ludicris zoom in graphics options, you should be able to see the loss in precision, combine that with like 100 apm and you have issues
pros playing at 400+ apm have camera zoom pretty close in all games for a good reason
What relevance does extreme zoom have on saying “increasing the zoom a bit gives an advantage”. Because it does, otherwise nobody would want it in the first place!
People want the viewspace to be less cramped. People want to see more on the screen at once. Let’s not pretend otherwise, or that the only option is supermechagodzilla -zoom 
(and let’s not discount those that want it for purely aesthetic or other immersive reasons - these are also important)
simply pay attention to who is asking for greater zoom range in either direction, its not the competitive players that are all about BALANCE, its everyone else thats still left that plays nice and slowly and wants a camera distance thats better suited to that preferance
thats why i don’t understand folk saying its an advantage in ranked, it simply isn’t, i won’t win against someone playing at 50% of my selected zoom distance because the other guy isn’t viewing anymore than he absolutely needs to
A lot of people have, over the years, casuals, competitive players, whoever. Don’t let prejudice against competitive players cloud the fact that sometimes they want the same things non-competitive players do.
Having the option to see more at once is absolutely an advantage. Having the option to see a ton more at once, isn’t necessarily an advantage. But 5, 10, 15, 20%? It’s absolutely an advantage because it’s more information to take advantage of in a single glance. If I can see your army coming before you can see mine (because reading the actual ingame world is often better than the minimap for fine details), that’s an advantage. However much or little you want to argue.
But, for the third time, like I said, this is why I believe game performance is the greatest indicator of a lack of progress here. Other than a lack of resource.