Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback More Camera Freedom - Struggling to see the game

So far, I'm loving the game, it's beautiful!
The issue I'm having is that I cannot change the camera angle, its either zoom in or out, and rotate. I would like to zoom out and change the camera angle to more of an over the shoulder view. Similar freedom is enjoyed in Neverwinter Nights, you could move that camera wherever you pleased (Just for reference).

Take the intro stage for example, seeing the ship flying through the air while you make your way to the helm is incredibly beautiful, such an epic scene, but it is wasted because you cant manipulate the camera to take it all in. Your can view over the edge of the ship if you zoom out, or kind of see into the distance if you zoom all the way in, but you cant get a great angle of what's actually happening off the edge of the ship and on the horizon.
Im a big fan of environment and immersion through the landscape, and I feel for all the beauty in the game, it is lost solely because of the camera angle.
Thanks for considering the request!

Agreed. I summarized it in I want to look up!

Well... Yeah!

Yes, the missing ability to freely tilt the camera and zoom out further kinda annoyed me in Divinity Original Sin already (and even made friends quit the game and never touch it again) and i wish i would not need to rely on unofficial/unsupported/potentially malicious software to unlock the camera.

Yes please yes, let me move my camera more easily. I got stuck in a ceiling on the opening level for like 4 minutes because I was too zoomed out. All I wanted to do was look around.

I second this. You can't have a full complex detailed 3D environment and stuck the camera to such a narrow viewpoint.

Also the camera zoom should be more free. No point in having such detailed faces in game when you only see it's beauty in the conversions. (BTW: a bit less eye wrinkles would be nice. In some scenes my chars eyes look like my grandmas eyes)

I'm normally not much of a dittohead, but the camera controls (or lack thereof) has got to be my biggest problem thus far. Edge-panning works inconsistently. Sometimes I have to use the keyboard to get things moving and sometimes it won't work at all with the mouse (to be fair, rotation on the middle mouse button works most of the time). Zoom in/out is about enough to say that it's there, but that's about the best that can be said about it. If I've got a 60-foot range for a ranged attack, I mostly have to use the keyboard to get the camera to a point where I can put the mouse onto the target. There is zero camera tilt, so the more-or-less fixed camera distance/perspective is frequently a problem. "Fix the camera controls!" really needs to be high on the buglist. I'm not sure that it's a bug and it might be working as intended, so maybe "high on the list of user-desired features" might be more accurate, but "Fix the camera controls!" really needs to be in there somewhere.

Yeah it's a little wonky. Then again I've had the issue in DOS to some degree. It's just not an easy problem to solve if you need a camera that is basically supposed to be third person distance all the way up to birds eye and work with the full 3D environment from every angle.

it cant be that hard either, we had good camera in games like NWN and DA:O. Divinity always had this camera problem, its time to fix it for this game..

In DOS2 there was a mod for vertical tilt, but it stopped working at some point. so it will probably be made via MODS if its not in the main game.

I’m lovin this game but my one request would be a bit more movement ability with the camera

The camera sits on weird angles at times. It needs to be tweaked, definitely.

+1

Yes, absolutely would be great to at least be able to tilt the camera up/down. Like, the "tactical camera mode" already exists so obviously the functionality is already there to some extent.

Another potential improvement would be the ability to raise/lower the camera. Together with the above it would make it a lot easier to take a good look at some bigger structures. As it is right now, it's very easy to miss places that are high up if you haven't seen the place from a distance before, because the camera just never points at them. For example, a certain building in the Blighted Village has a belfry, which I only found out by complete accident after already spending a good deal of time around the village.

I agree on that. The camera is wonky. Two suggestions:

1) The game already allows you to release the fixation of the camera on the main character. This is very pleasant. But controlling the camera with the arrow keys is not very comfortable. Why not allowing the player (as an option) to move the camera by navigating the cursor to the edge of the screen (like in BG1-2 and other games of that era)?

2) Allowing the player (as an option) to switch to an ISO perspective, will say a perspective where x, y, and z axes are all the same. As far as I can remember, this was an option in DOS1. Not that the game necessarily needs a nostalgic feature like ISO perspective. And yes, it can also be a problem in a 3D game with a detailed environment. But I think that I lot of the complaints about "this is DOS3" could be responded to just by this (optional) tweaks. Remeber how many complaints there were about the UI and what a fantastic job the team made with the new version.

I couldn't agree more with this

Gonna add my suggestions on the camera here.

1. It's essential to keep the ability to unlock the camera from the character BUT there needs to be a limit on how far you can pan around. Now it appears unlimited and it's COMPLETELY broken. You can literally pan around an area and see all the enemy activity without ever needing to sneak around to recon.

2. Camera angles need to be finetuned. We should be able to go parallel with the ground or even look up in the most zoomed in position. You can already see in many situations that locations have ceilings and there is a skybox and everything. In addition you can already pan freely and see everything on the map so it is not an issue of seeing too far and getting too much info. On the other end it baffles me why we can't simply zoom out all the way to the topdown camera when it's available to be toggled with the O key by default.

3. The current camera is generally VERY buggy at least for me. There are options in the settings to enable and disable "attack camera" and "dynamic camera" but I have no idea what these are even supposed to do. I think the dynamic camera makes the camera snap into a cinematic angle when enemies are attacked but the camera ends up inside objects or under the ground atleast 50% of the time. Regardless of if I have the "attack camera" enabled, when enemies attack me the camera usually just snaps to the enemy and I have no idea where they have targeted their ranged or spell attacks. This is more of a bug report than a suggestion, but to make this more constructive I will say we need some more controls for how the camera acts and at least tell us in a tool tip what these settings are supposed to do.

4. Make the dialogue cinematic camera optional? I know Larian have put perhaps unreasonable amounts of work into this feature and I'm sad to say I don't really like it in this current iteration. The dialogue animations are extremely buggy. Lip sync animations play maybe 70% of the time for me. This is not a big thing for me, but I would not mind having a free camera during most of these dialogues. Especially when it's a one liner side npc...

5. There should be some kind of "fog of war" or line of sight implementation. This is pretty close to point 1 and could be largely fixed with a more limited panning ability, but I really would prefer having to sneak around and recon areas to avoid getting ambushed.

Yeah, the landscape is done nicely but you can only see very little of it due to the camera.

In some areas the camera just go nuts. It flies up and down, and into the buildings/cliffs, and is in general a pain in the ass to control. If there is one thing that completely turns me off the game, is is the clunky super tedious camera controls.

I agree that it would be nice to have the option to disable cinematic conversations for most NPC's, to limit it to quest related or even main story dialogue?

+1000

POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

1 - If we could zoom out MUCH further it would solve 90% of the issues IMO.

There was a mod for DOS2 that allowed the camera to zoom like 5x further out and it was the best quality of life improvement ever. I could actually orient myself and didn't have to pan around forever. I never understood why the developers would not allow that.

2 -Looking up would also be great and remove much of the frustration with the verticality issues when trying to see the perspective of the character over-the-shoulder.

Isometric combat is fine, but what is the purpose of paying graphic artist to create super detailed models if you're so far away that you can't tell a goblin from a kobold.