I really do agree with some of your criticisms regarding the way 3rd person view works in DKS. Theoretically, those technical shortcomings could be 'fixed.'
My main criticisms were:
- the camera is too far, so consequently it's harder to notice fine details that are close to the character. This plays a role in close encounters, where you have to quickly react to enemy movement.
- the character obscures part of the view. This similarly plays a role in close encounters, when your character obscures the enemy.
I can't see how these can be fixed.
It's true that you can abuse the camera mechanic to see things your character cannot
I wouldn't call it abuse, because it's the norm. Your character can't see with his back, whereas you can see what's behind him. He also can not see anything sitting on a wall above his own height or behind an obstacle, while you can. So in fact you see things that he cannot all the time. In my mind, this breaks immersion.
I think each camera setup has its own place. In games where you control several characters, 3rd person view is necessary and natural. However, these games are not suited for manual combat control: you just tell each character what to do, and they do it alone. That's what AI tactics are for (e.g. the way it works in Dragon Age). The only things you are expected to do is using special abilities and issuing movement commands (also not with arrows, but just pointing the target location). In a nutshell, it's a completely different game style from what DKS offers.
Another game that got it wrong was Risen, which is quite similar to DKS (single character with fine-grained control), and in it, this deficiency was even more evident, as Risen gives you much more involved combat mechanics than DKS. I feel that this switch to over-the-shoulder view and dumbing down of control mechanics is driven by the consoles audience, that loves eye candy and hates anything harder than repeatedly clicking an action button. I guess that's also why DKS treats aiming so liberally.
Also, if you're interested, I wrote my own impressions of DKS here a few weeks back... it has dropped off the first page of this forum already, but you can read it
Very nice review. Looks like we agree on quite a lot of things.
