Sometimes I understand why modders flame out, burn their bridges, and give up entirely. Every time I look at a posts page on Nexus Mods, for instance. A perfect example of this has been the reaction to Relysia’s True Third-Person Camera mod for Baldur’s Gate 3, a labor of love that gives the traditionally birdseye CRPG an over-the-shoulder viewpoint.
Baldur’s Gate 3 already has a third-person mode, you might say. All you have to do is plug in a controller and the camera will drop for a more console-RPG experience. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the Native Camera Tweaks mod. Hundreds of people on the internet have been tiresomely pointing this out over the last couple of weeks, every single one of them convinced they are the first person to make this vital observation the rest of us need to read.
Relysia has seen these comments and then, with admirable patience, made an eight-minute video documenting all the ways their mod is different. For starters, with the True Third-Person Camera mod, you can look up. The viewpoint when you play with a controller is locked into a downward angle and can’t be changed. Native Camera Tweaks does let you look up, but when you need to bounce back to a more distant view you have to manually adjust the camera, where True Third-Person Camera switches with a simple press of the asterisk key.
There’s also the fact True Third-Person Camera defaults to a slightly off-center over-the-shoulder view, where the other solutions default to centred third-person. It’s the difference between Tomb Raider 2013 and Tomb Raider 1996. The Native Camera Tweaks viewpoint is adjustable, but you have to edit a file to do so, while True Third-Person Camera is compatible with Mod Configuration Menu for in-game adjustments to the POV position on the fly.
There’s more to it than that, but basically, yes, it is a different experience. I’ve played with the mod for several hours and found it meaningfully distinct and the perfect excuse to start yet another playthrough.
Baldur’s Gate 3 works better from this angle than a lot of other CRPGs because so much effort was put into making it look good in those up-close dialogue scenes. Not all of it, of course. Looking up when you’re underground or on the bottom floor of a building sometimes reveals places where nobody expected you to do that, and you’ll want to switch to the regular camera when you’re sneaking or when a companion points out something they’ve spotted nearby but which you can’t see. If Larian put this in as an option they’d have made a lot of extra work for themselves tidying up the kind of stuff that’s forgivable when exposed by a mod.
The mod also changes back to the regular camera when combat starts, although Relysia is planning to address that in an update, adding “immersive combat mode, where the camera stays very close to the action throughout”. I might stick to the top-down camera for combat myself, but it’s always nice to have options.
A big part of the appeal of PC gaming is being able to personalize things to your persnickety preferences, and having multiple ways of doing that—even if it means having two mods with similar but different effects—is the perfect example.
You can download True Third-Person Camera from Nexus Mods, along with WASD Character Movement for the full “what if Dragon Age was turn-based” experience, and get Party Limit Begone while you’re at it, because that’s still the most essential mod for Baldur’s Gate 3.
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