Hello, may be someone here has an experience as a player or dev in games, where you have typical ARPG camera (e.g. diablo) AND non-medieval fantasy at the same time. A game with melee weapon, pistols, shotguns, sniper rifles...

The problem I have is that I tried many things:

1) Ignore the fact that I have ranged weapons and simply use camera that follows the player and the player is at the center of screen. Then I have to either make weapon ranges very very unimmersive OR let the player to zoom out a lot so they can shoot something with long ranged weapon at long range, which is very bad as it forces players to zoom in/out too often, which is terrible game design, just like all these 3D rpgs like Neverwinter Nights 1/2 or Wasteland 2+ where players spend more than half of their gaming time on camera rotation, because devs of these games never played their own games and don't even know that you should never use high FoV on strategic camera, because fish eye effect on top-down camera forces players to always rotate it in the direction of movement/target which destroys the whole damn reason to have top down camera. Constant zooming in/out is somewhat similar problem and is very very bad for game design.

2) Make camera centered on cursor all the time, so the player moves camera with mouse. Great idea in theory... motion sickness after practice. Lerping movement to reduce motion sickness makes it even worse as it reduces responsiveness, which makes players very very angry. As the result you have either vomitting players or mad players. Neither is good.

3) Return to #1, but reduce weapon ranges to typical top-down medieval fantasy RPG, where archers, for some reason, shoot at almost point blank range, but it doesn't break immersion... for some reason. For modern weapons it does. It's stupid that pistol bullets fly just few meters and SNIPER rifle is used in close quarters and its bullets fly just few meters more!

I'm giving up, I don't know what to do, and I thinking of complete change of the game genre - remove "action" from ARPG and make it more strategic with free camera and you just select character and point and click it with ability to set pause any time. Like Infinity Engine games, except not medieval fantasy. But I really want the player to pull the trigger of a gun with every mouse click or spray burst enemy with automatic weapons in ARPG style, so the player feels his character. My game is also post-apocalyptic in Fallout1 style, so I want the player to feel how they venture in that rusted dark vault followed by beautiful Fallout1-like music made by Alexandr Zhelanov from OGA and then see some giant mutated rat jumping on them from the corner. This feeling will be lost if I make the game not centered on the player. And I also want the player to be able to use that scoped sniper rifle to remove someone from afar and even cripple giant scorpion's leg and then kite it before it reaches the player. I want ranged diablo-like game in post-apo world! And I have absolutely no idea how to design camera for it. Does anyone here have a link to a game that solved this problem and solved it right? Or may be someone worked on a game like this and knows how to deal with it?

Thanks.