Ultimate Screenshot Mode

(as with all of my pictures in posts, click on it to make it bigger and more perdy. It will open in a new window)

Wow. Just WOW!

I have never been a big screenshot person. I wish I did better at it but I always tend to miss the right moments as I am focused on playing the game and not capturing specific things. As a gaming blogger I need to enbe better at that. Some, such as Bhagpuss at Inventory Full, seems to have an endless trove of amazing screenshots to put into his posts. Heck, TAGN has a whole website dedicated to EVE screenshots and even wins awards (on purpose and by accident) for sharing them. Screenshots are a nice way to breakup the monotony of text in blogging. I have been trying to share more in my posts when I think of it.

Playing Warframe, I noticed there was a weird word under the “appearance” tab of my frame when I was doing some color editing for my skin for my Rhino frame. It said “Captura” and I assumed it was some sort of screenshot for the frame I was working on. Turns out it is much, much more than that. It allows you to load an area and create scenes to take pictures – with a ton of options. Kind of like when they load the dojo in the Matrix. This makes a lot of sense as I have often complained that even my own screenshots of Warframe have my frame taking up big chunks of the screen. I did a little bit of playing this morning with some of the options. First off, the best part, is getting a “free camera” mode.

Here I drew my bow, then clicked “Toggle free camera” and it froze the scene and allowed me to pan around.

While not a huge difference from the first, I clicked “advance timeline slowly” and “hide menu” so you can see my Sentinel rotated around (looking for enemies as he is apt to do) and that introduced a new light source to the picture.

Speaking of light sources – I toggled “3 light setup” and it loks as though it introduced a new light  source from the angle I have the current camera, highlighting the shapes and colors on his back.

and because it’s the holiday season (and because its an option) I changed the 3 light setup to a green fill light with a red rim light to see what effect that would have. Very cool.

Here I messed with the “Field of View” which now gave more to see. Distance and Depth changed the blur factor. At this point I noticed the “Kill Enemies” box at the bottom, and scrolled down to learn that I could spawn chosen enemies into my scene!

The issue I had when I spawned an enemy and toggled off the “free camera” is that they react like normal enemies. They started attacking. I re-toggled the camera and captured this moment that the Heavy Grineer was smashing the floor with an AOE attack. Because I wasn’t too far away.

Here is the other angle of it.  I think the warped effect is part of the AOE damage attack, not sure. This is all very new.

I am amazed, to be honest, and while I only spent 10 minutes messing with it this morning there are 5 base “scenes” you can load (and can unlock more) and this is a game within the game – capturing the minds of those chasing the ultimate screenshot you can just set it up yourself. I do want to learn and read more about it – I’d love to spawn multiple enemies, for example, and show you the Rhino stomp picture I promised. Trouble is my Sentinel attacked and killed this one before I could spawn another – and they spawn the enemies right on top of you so setting up several in a circle might be a challenge.

I think this is yet another brilliant add on to an already wonderful game. I am looking forward to exploring it more. I can’t recall many games having this feature but believe it is a great addition. Does you know of other games that do this well?