Feedback:User/Raine Valen/Enhance screencap capabilities
Enhance screencap capabilities | |
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User | Raine Valen |
Categories | Mechanics → Game features Mechanics → Graphics |
Currently, we've got two ways to save pieces of our Guild Wars experience: screenshot (which saves the exact image you're looking at) and observer mode (which plays back a recording of an entire match). Unfortunately, it's often very difficult to play the game effectively while taking good screenshots of you playing the game effectively; this makes screenshots sort of... clumsy, at times. As for observer mode, it's only used for a very small niche (that boils down to Halls and top GvG); it's hardly accessible for casual players.
With that in mind, I think that it would be nice to have something between the two, something where players could record their own experiences and play them back, maybe even with playback options (pause, rewind, seek, etc). A personal obs mode, if you will.
The reason I think that it'd be useful is that it's often difficult to get good screenshots of things, especially in PvP; for example, I've been trying to get a screen of my Dervish landing Bull's Strike on three people at once, and, even if I did, it would probably be a bad image from a photographic standpoint because, like most players, I angle my camera for functionality rather than for aesthetics.
On top of a way to save and replay these recordings, a way to export and share them would go even further; top players could share their matches in a way that allowed users to view them as they pleased rather than as they were recorded (youtube isn't the best medium, usually). Friends could share their matches with friends. Heck, this could even be useful in PvE!
This would also be useful for data collection; for example, I did a study on profession usage in RA (it's in my userspace, but I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to link it here), and I had incomplete data in a lot of places because I was trying to collect it while playing the game.
Quite simply, this would be an all-around badass tool for just about everything.
The functionality for this already exists, to some degree. The obs mode matches are saved as a sort of recording that the client can already play back; what the client lacks is the capacity to record them, though, obviously, that functionality also exists elsewhere. Because of this, I'm inclined to believe that this wouldn't be a massive project.
Again, I think this would be a relatively simple project that a lot of people would be excited about!