Guild Wars 2

Twice already now, I’ve seen the game’s Living story’s more difficult bits get still more difficult by what certainly is not supposed to be a part of the difficulty – view angle truncation.

Remember the Marionette’s boss fights? Circular arenas, impossible to fall from… because of solid invisible walls around them. These are there to make sure each arena fights alone. But, since the walls are there, if you get close, the camera’s view point if forced to zoom in.

Look at the pictures below: In the first picture The Warrior and Guardian silhouettes are far from the wall, and get a clear view. The engineer at the border, though, has the view field significantly forced in. The resulting view difference can be seen in the two grayscale images at the bottom.

I admit, I have serious trouble trying to read the »tells« of the third Marionette boss, since if I go to range, All I can see are his ankles and shins. Given that 90% of the Marionette fights I’ve been in end at two severed chest, this is likely the hardest of the bosses, and I’m pretty sure that while the excessive damage he dishes out is mostly to blame, the view angle trouble is also to blame.

The same happened in the Queen’s pavilion arenas. The view from the spectator’s ring was very nice – but as the player inside the cage, I’m pretty sure at least a third of Liadri’s trouble came from the simple fact that my view angle was all over the place. Not only was I too zoomed in most of the time, the uneven distance also made the camera view point zoom in and out unpredictably, adding distraction to the already significant difficulty.

To be honest, this is actually meant for Anet’s terrain designers. I hope in the future, such confined spaces can be designed so that they at least don’t interfere with the camera angles.

Thank you for your time.

Agreed. The walls on the marionette platforms forcing the camera to zoom in is super annoying and makes it more difficult to fight the bosses, particularly Warden 3 given its size. Especially since the 3rd Warden often encourages you to hug the outer wall to avoid mines.

The camera issues have been there since the start of the game. The entire point of Troll’s End was to show the development team how bad the camera was. I remember reading that in one of the posts by a dev. If I remember correctly (Devs if you can confirm or correct me) that dev was the same one who made Mad King’s Clock Tower. In the end they added Troll’s End into the game.

I actually wonder why the invisible walls also affect the camera, actually…

Jure Simich.6154:

I actually wonder why the invisible walls also affect the camera, actually…

Yeah, it would be easy to make it so the camera isn’t affected by it, and since it’s an invisible wall, everything’s fine. Hear, hear!

Lydell.8713:

Jure Simich.6154:

I actually wonder why the invisible walls also affect the camera, actually…

Yeah, it would be easy to make it so the camera isn’t affected by it, and since it’s an invisible wall, everything’s fine. Hear, hear!

The camera is an invisible character that is controlled by the player. Techincally while playing GW2 your playing 2 characters at the same time. The camera and the model. A wall is made impassible (also known as collision) but can still be see-through. This is easy to do coding wise and animation wise usually just a checkbox. Adding exceptions on to what can pass through walls on the other hand is harder and can be extremely buggy since your going down to the physics engine to perform this change.