I only bought the game halfway through Season 2, since the Xbox One released a year later in my country. While I followed the forums and discussed about the characters’ lore and design, I didn’t partake in gameplay suggestions, since I didn’t have the game yet.
But I think there are two distinct issues here: one is the camera zooming out when characters are at opposite ends of the arena - the more they distance themselves, the more the camera zooms out. This makes sense to me, as it is a “horizontal zoom-out”. What we have with big characters is more of a “vertical zoom-out” that makes tall characters appear normal-sized and the other characters much shorter. I don’t know how camera zooms work, in all honesty, so I can’t argue much about how things should be done, nor if I’m making myself clear at all. I just think that there should be no “vertical zoom out” so that tall characters appear much larger and normal/short ones don’t appear shorter.
My argument wasn’t that Gargos, Eyedol, Raam and Aribiter shouldn’t be big, they absolutely have to be huge, My argument was that all the huge character are condensed in S3 and I desired more variety. My other argument is that now aganos looks like a toy just cuz there are humanoid creatures as tall as he is.
I actually think there was less variety in the previous seasons! Everyone was too small! At least now we can balance it all out and have a good amount of large characters with the overwhelming amount of small fast characters in the previous 2 seasons!
Oh, I already mentioned a couple alternatives before. One, add an option to toggle off zoom-out when you’re fighting as a regular-sized guy against a big-sized one … and two, make the actual zoom out from “regular camera” to “far camera” before the round starts, when the announcer goes “READY”.
Your 1st idea’s already been shot down by the devs. Take my main, Aganos, for example. He reaches the top of the screen with a normal zoom-level (which can sometimes be seen after he wins with an ultra), so if you’re fighting him with idea #1, then all of a sudden he jumps and you can no longer see him or what he’s doing off-screen (is he using jumping lp, mp, hp, lk,mk, hk?). Conversely, If the camera follows him, then we can’t see what the other player is doing below him (is he crouching, blocking, anti-airing, dashing out of the way?).
As for your 2nd idea, that will simply serve to make everything too small all of the time. To see this, simply pick the game’s largest and smallest characters (Aganos and either Hisako or Kim Wu) and then have them back away from each other as far as possible. Now imagine the camera stuck at that distance no matter where they go on-screen and only able to pan left or right. While this idea works in theory, you lose a lot of the cinematic camera effects in the priocess. If you pay attention, the game likes to zoom in and out with shadow moves, enders, ultras, etc. I don’t know about you, but I want to keep those - and having the camera panned all the way out would make those dramatic effects far less cinematic even if they’re kept in (and possibly even may become rather jarring).
I get what you mean about the first alternative, but I believe you didn’t understand the second one. As things are right now, when the round starts (vs Aganos for instance) the camera is already zoomed out to fit the big guy’s size. All I say is, the camera should zoom out (transition) from regular view:
… so that way you get a glimpse of what their actual size is for a second or two. Everything else should be unchanged, so there shouldn’t be any losses.
I see your point, but being zoomed in is what actually makes him look bigger, not being zoomed out (which makes him look smaller and other characters even smaller still).
The camera would start the round zoomed-in as if two regular-sized characters were fighting, but then it’d zoom out to fit Aganos’ size as it is right now. It’s just a second or two in which you’d appreciate his real size before going to gameplay.
Something like this, but a bit slower … to appreciate for a moment how the big guys would look in regular camera view (minute 11:50):
Right. When you think about a Golem, you envision a giant entity that’s as tall as a three storey building. We got that sense of scale in Season 2, but no longer in Season 3 with Gargos, Eyedol, and Raam nearly matching him in height.
MS/IG needs to exercise some restrain with making characters too big or too small.
