The Motivation behind is the fear to loose players with lowend machines, specifically low end gpus.
Economical success most important for a game this size.
More Zoom = More stuff needs to be shown, more strain on gpu = more possible bad performance = more refunds = less profit.
Now i hear the counterargument already “then people with low end gpus should not zoom out more”.
They will want to though, because they technically can. Specially if the Zooming is a “fluid” mechanic with the mousewheel as implemented right now.
You should ask yourself: Who in their right mind would design their game in a way where the ability to zoom has to be scrapped for the sake of performance. That’s a horrible design decision, especially for an RTS. The game has so many other performance issues that should be addressed first, the ability to zoom should never have gotten the short end of the stick.
It would’ve been better for them to not change anything (as they keep it with other issues). That tiny change told us that they either don’t give a crap, or don’t understand the underlying issue that lead to people requesting more zoom.
If they give us more zoom they should also let us do more camera angles. It would be great to be able to pan the camera down to look at our walls from street level etc. No reason to not let us do this by moving mouse up and down while holding alt. At a minimum add it to spectator/recorded games?
Didn’t people discover a cinematic camera mode during the beta but the access was patched out? Not seen screenshots of it though just read people talking about it.
I mean, RTS games are commonly designed around a specific viewing angle. Pretty much all games are. The baseline in rendering is finding an acceptable spot for a limit of “things that can be viewed on-screen” (usually per-frame).
I’m not explicitly linking this to zoom, but I really think people need to cool it with the hot takes on how to design games engines.
Or they could implement a max zoom out into the settings window with a warning “Your GPU might not be up to the task!” if you try to select a higher zoomout.
That’d be up to each player. Just because Ultra settings exist for every game doesn’t mean players enable them all the time. Every player makes their own decisions based on what they are comfortable with putting up with. If Ultra settings turn my game into a 12 FPS stop-motion animation, then I don’t choose Ultra settings. If zooming out all the way were to make my game chug along, then I wouldn’t do it. I’m guessing most players would, too.
People have a way of figuring out what graphically works for them and what doesn’t. The game doesn’t need a hard-coded throttler set at a nearly unbearable zoom level to limit every player to; if PC performance is the issue/concern
Red Dead Redemption 2 would have Playstation 3 graphics and be capped at that if the developers were wanting everyone to have the same visual experience or worried about some players having performance issues if they enabled higher graphical tiers
Zoom becomes an issue of competitive fairness though.
So sure give more, hide it behind a setting or something that warns you it’s not recommended (because honestly the game would become practically unplayable with a lot more zoom since hitboxes are already hard enough to click), but even then you can still only add zoom up to the point where the minimum specs can do it.
That shouldn’t be the reason, though, since someone playing at 1280x720 vs. someone at 4K is already a disadvantage. Same with 1080HD vs 4K. Or a 1 monitor player vs. a multi-monitor player.
I think with AoE2:DE, the game doesn’t slow down for everyone is someone is lagging like it did in HD and before. Isn’t it unfair if someone lags and someone doesn’t?
If competitive fairness is the goal, then resolutions should be capped at 800 x 600, and any lag experienced by one player should be experienced by all
Resolution such as HD vs 4k is not very relevant like zoom level is. In many games pro players play with graphics set to their lowest. Although, things like ultrawide vs a regular monitor are.
Not covering every single way players hardware could give them an advantage is not a valid reason to not cover any of the ways. That is a false dilemma fallacy. Just because they cannot or do not do everything does not mean they should do nothing.
Maybe this is not one of their reasons for not allowing more zoom. Maybe it is purely based on optimizing playability, I don’t know (in which case I would argue give us the choice), but it is certainly a valid reason.
That is what they did in AOE 3 with ludicrous zoom exactly in fact. When you click the option bottom to enable the zoom, it warns you. And after they did it, there wasn’t even a single complaint from anyone about the option to enable it, nor did it result in the catastrophic game balance issues alluded to in this thread. There aren’t huge threads protesting the ability to enable zooming out more. The only result was a bunch of happy players who like to use big monitors/tvs/projector screens.
And as I said in another reply here, I feel like the devs do not want to increase the zoom because there are other things that are going to break and the “fairness” is just a veil to cover this up (this of course just being speculation).
You can see how the yellow waypoint lightbeam effect cuts out completely at the top at the exact spot the “old beta zoom” level was, which makes me to think there are other effects, features and assets in the game that would need to be remade and fixed, and increasing zoom would cause too much work for the devs to justify it at this point. Why else wouldnt they have tested a much larger zoom during the beta? Why would they just keep telling us this is fine when many players with larger screens hate it?
Well I don’t think they’ve ever even said this. The closest they came was mentioning in passing working with lots of different specs. It’s just speculation on possible reasons by some of us and it would be a valid argument.
I’m guessing a big part of it is because the game really would be practically unplayable zoomed out much further and people would be frustrated trying to click on things. There are already hit box issues that need to be sorted out.
Ah, alright, I’ve heard the fairness thing mentioned so many times here I assumed it was something the devs have stated, my bad.
The hitbox issues might be a good reason they are avoiding increasing the zoom further, thats a good point.
I myself don’t think lower end PCs having less framerate with higher zoom is a valid reason to block users with capable PCs from zooming out more. I still feel like that would be like limiting the FPS in a CS:GO match based on the player with worst fps on the server.
Better PC has always meant better performance, I really dont understand how this is now suddenly a fairness issue.
But people playing the beta already played the game with the hack to zoom out more and it worked fine. I could be wrong, but to the best of my knowledge it worked fine.
I’ll need to research this issue, as I’m not familiar with it. If little AoE2 and AoE3 units can be selected at far zoom levels, I wonder why AoE4 has issues. Hopefully, the issue isn’t insurmountable. On the surface, it sounds like a temporary bug more than anything… as most any piece of software, no matter how big or small the items are that you need to interact with, requires precise clicks and selections. Imagine trying to click the “Bold” icon in MS Word but getting “Italics” half the time instead.
True, but it’d be shame if the current max zoom is because of that. If it is, it should not be that way for single-player matches. I’m sure the AI wouldn’t care how far out I zoom.
And that, then, creates unfairness for the more casual player who doesn’t know to do that or doesn’t want to.
And what about all the mods pros use in AoE2 for ranked matches?
The game will never be perfectly fair. Based on feedback, zoom level seems too close for 90% of players at present… so I hope it goes back more someday. If fairness is the reason, I trust they will never allow mandala mod, small trees mod, and similar mods in ranked matches
This could easily be fixed by having “extreme zoom” be a default toggled off graphics setting, with a warning when you toggle it on like “warning enabling this feature may cause performance drops”
also lets not kid ourselves, the graphics of age 4 are nowhere near enough to tax most systems.
