The "yet another thread ruined by ABF" Thread

[A Black Falcon]

Oh, I'm sure it looks cool. And you are right, isometric views at times can make things that you would expect to look great be unimpressive. I can't deny that. But I am of the opinion that on the whole the pluses outweigh the minuses. As in, the plusses like greater detail, more 'character', significantly improved combat, etc. outweighs the negatives like how sometimes things don't look as impressive as they could.

That's because you're insane. A top-down perspective would only slightly help combat, if at all, but a top-down perspective for exploring would be a terrible mistake. I pray you never get to decide on these matters.

Fortunately they don't listen to you and know that for PC rpgs topdown is significantly better, because their next PC RPG is isometric. With a nice looking 3d engine, I might add, so I'm sure that you can move the camera around at times if you wish -- which could solve the problem of things not looking as nice as they could because you could move the camera down and see things at a third-person-ish viewpoint. Though that mostly rides on art direction. :)

In short, PC RPGs wouldn't be so predominantly isometric, even the 3d ones, if the gaming companies, and gamers, didn't know that there were some pretty good reasons. You, sadly, don't get it, but that's just too bad. And somewhat sad. :(