With Dragon Age: Inquisition, I’m pleasantly surprised to see the rise of the term tactical camera for what many fans have long been calling isometric view.
The tactical camera in Dragon Age games let you zoom out (not far enough, Bioware!), and view stuff from above, but you still see stuff in perspective. In an isometric view, on the other hand, stuff is not presented in perspective.
I mean seen in perspective, stuff in the distance looks smaller. Seen in an isometric view, everything looks the same size even if it’s further away. As a result, you don’t have room to see very far away. I think Baldur’s Gate 2 was the last Bioware game with isometric graphics.
Look at this Baldur’s Gate screenshot, how the floorboard lines all run parallel:
That’s an isometric view. Each floorboard looks, over it’s length, the same width. Floorboards aren’t foreshortened. Floorboards of the same size occupy the same space on screen.
Now look at this screen from Origins:
That’s not an isometric view. Even though the floor tiles are in disarray, you can tell the lines between them don’t run parallel. Tiles in the foreground look bigger than those in the background, even if the difference is modest from this angle. Of course you could tilt this view and the perspective would be more pronounced.
If you come to the English language from, say, Chinese, I guess “isometric” is just yet another bunch of letters stringed together that you have to learn by rote. I understand that the word is not transparent to everyone in the world.
But at last native English speakers should be able to see that the word has Greek roots that have to to with equal (ἴσος) measures, and doesn’t simply mean zooming out.
Now, why did I post this in Feedback and suggestions? Well, I want to voice appreciation for the folks at Bioware whom I believe have been so actively promoting the term tactical camera. And suggest we all stop calling it isometric even more than we already have. ^^
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