Age of Empires Online: Opinion on camera zoom

[Kork]

Here I am talking about beta than, in beta the zoom was good and now I can't zoom out, it was possible for us to be able to zoom out further than what we are able to now. Personally I find the close up zoom, even at my native resolution (I know someone will mention up the resolution but it's NOT the same), to be entirely too close. What's everyone else’s opinion? Please if anyone here has any idea on this than provide me?

[Adonis]

Here I must add something in this. I noticed that in one beta build they removed the zoom distance option from the Options menus, but I wasn't too concerned since they still allowed me to zoom out to Very Far distance. Has this changed? I have the pre-release but I haven't played it since I couldn't connect to the servers. But even in the beta the zoom was too close. Would love for a more strategic view.

[MacIntel]

If I had to give one point of constructive criticism on Age of Empires Online, I would absolutely choose for the possibility to zoom out more! Or if I say, I really have difficulty comprehending why they took it out in the first place. Everyone had access to it, so it did not provide an unfair advantage. As it is now, I don't want to even log in because it's just too close. To clarify, the zoom distance modifier was only for capital cities, not quests, PvP, etc.

[Common]

It seemed particularly useful to zoom out further to see all that was going on in the capital city. It was especially useful for building placement. Also people that used scenery as artwork will be more limited in their overall city views. There were significant performance issues, even on high-end systems, in some regions and in a lot of player's capital cities with standard vanity rewards and all required buildings.

[desilva]

I am not sure what I can say to convince you otherwise, beyond "we have the source code for the game and know what the min zoom and max zoom values were/are, and what that option did." We all have strange memories for this kind of stuff. We removed the option because you could literally drop the game to single-digit frame frates in cities on the highest-end systems that exist today, your i7s with SLI video cards. This engine isn't currently architected to support zooming out very far.