Originally Posted by
HywelPhillips
I'd put my penny's worth in for this being a per-user toggle as well.
I don't think I will like it as the GM, for example - I think I will want to have the complete overview as I do now.
But as a player I might want the greater immersion that it brings, and I might want it in some situations and not in others. NPC conversations at a party - brilliant, will bring an almost visual-novel like sensibility to those scenes and a big improvement on a flat map with a big grid and consequently big tokens as now. Being the barbarian stuck into an intense combat - great. Being more of an area control/buff/commander character - probably would favour the ability to have the 2D top-down overview especially in combat.
There's a human being brain processing power limit at work as well as Unity's rendering and I can see it being quite different for different use cases and configurations, too. Some of my players play via a laptop in a hotel room sometimes and for these people screen real estate is at a desperate premium - I just don't think they will have the real estate to make the 2.5D a pleasant experience. They need to be able to see where they are and navigate and target foes efficiently with as little on-screen information as possible, because pixels are precious. Whereas some of us are on multiple monitors and can devote a large number of pixels to appreciate the immersion, and the hell with efficient transmission of information.
If it is at all feasible to do from a performance point of view, I really think there are many reasons why one might want to allow this to be per-user; the only one I can really see as valid for it not to be is so the GM controls the view and synchronises when everyone switches. But there's a good reason why we don't lock all players viewport on the map to the GM's view, and I think this is just an extension of that. Each player is going to have different needs - and different preferences - for what they look at through the course of the game. So I don't see much sense in locking them into the 2.5D mode. Or, more to the point, locking them out of 2.5D mode if that's what they prefer because I as the GM want to be having the traditional top-down map view where I can see everything, including the hidden foes behind the doors and stuff that's in the darkness and so on.
Cheers, Hywel