I was reading this other post and noted some people talking about playing offscreen. Until relatively recently, maybe a year ago, I too played centered. I began that way and got used to it and so it felt natural. Even now, sometimes when I go offscreen, I get confused. Anyway, that was until I started playing on a pserver (because RotMG is blocked in my school but I still wanna hone that skill (even though I still suck)). The pserver basically made it incredibly beneficial to play offscreen and so I brought that back to realm, finding that offscreen is pretty beneficial here too and now I play a hybrid of the two, switching when I find it advantageous. So my question is: How do you guys feel about offscreen vs centered? If you play offscreen now, when did you switch? What caused it? And how would you advice other people to start playing off screened? If you play center screened, have you ever tried offscreen?
Off-Centered vs Centered
Having off-centered in your toolkit is objectively better than centered only.
It enables you to react to things much sooner, enhances your ability to use ranged classes etc.
Always off centered for me. I can’t aim to my side because of the weird offsetting between where your shots go. Ik shadows makes it the same but it doesn’t feel right aiming different areas of the sprite.
I play centered most of the time so I don’t get surprised from behind, and also to keep myself oriented with directions and minimap. I do occasionally go off-centered for a battle, most often as assassin, but it’s about 1% of my playtime.
time to get shamed
Off centered and constant screen rotation is objectively the best way to play the game.
It allows for a greater field of view so you can hit enemies that would usually be off your screen and a longer period for you to react to situations that may arise in front of you.
Realm is a forward facing game. If you have a bunch of enemies around you (which is usually the excuse of centered plebs; “muh 360 degree awareness!”) you’re playing the game wrong. Enemies should be in front of you, or in your rear view mirror.
Off centred and screen rotation all the way. If you’re playing centred you’re obviously not using screen rotation.
I originally phrased my sentence like that, but realized there were a select few moments where centered is more beneficial. For example H switches to centered:
or when rushing a ddocks since rotation makes me have to constantly adjust when going along those one-tile wide paths. But yeah you’re right, 95% of the time it’s better to use off-center + rotation.
Like most beginners, I had always stuck to centered+no rotation and it felt perfectly fine. I did try to offscreen one time, and it felt uncomfortable because I had very limited view of what’s behind me. The fact that I had to implement screen rotation into my gameplay was confusing to 12 year old me, and so I’ve just never tried to play in offscreen.
It all changed when I saw a video of a wizard fighting O2 with screen rotation and offscrn. I was amazed at what difference it made just by having more frontier view, and that was back in 2014 or so. I decided to take the time to learn how to screen rotate. It was very unnatural for me back then because I was so used to WASD only, and not QWEASD. But after practicing for a few days to a week, I got the hang of it, and the game felt like a fresh breath of air.
Nowadays, I find it off-putting to play off-centered. That being said, there’s one area of the game I still play off-centered, and that’s the 4-clone phase in Void entity due to the sheer number of bullets coming from everywhere.
As for advice to get people to switch to off-centered and screen rotation…I think it really just comes down to whether you feel it’s worth it to see a few more tiles ahead of you, to be able to see whether your staff is hitting the enemy, or to teleport further, or to see the danger coming in earlier. When you do value its benefits, you’ll naturally practice to become more familiar in mastering the technique, as I have.
This story is kind of a replica of my switching from MS Paint to Paint Tool Sai art program, or my computer mouse to tablet for drawing. Things may be more difficult at first, but if you take the time to become familiar with it, you’ll see the benefits outweigh the difficulty as you overcome it
I’ve used off centered-screen rotation since I knew it was a thing.
Personally it helps me focus on what’s in front of me, since usually I can’t watch an entire screen anyways due to my attention problems.
However I do use centered screen in the final void dodge phase, just so I can see the void shots behind me as well.
I play centered 80% of the time as I’ve been so accustomed to it, and most of the time everything happening is within my viewing distance. Although I do occasionally switch to off-centered when I have no need to see anything behind me or enemies are too far to see from centered view.
I used to play centered for a very long time, but I switched about one and a half year ago. I still play centered in glands, abbys and a few other things.
If you want to learn it my advice would be to start using it in situations where you barely have to rotate.
I usually play centered for melee and daggers, off-centered sometimes for ranged. For dungeon rushing I always play centered though, regardless of class, because it makes navigation a lot easier and I will be surrounded by enemies most of the time. I prefer centered because I can dodge better if I don’t have to worry about screen rotation. I can also circle enemies MUCH more easily while still retaining perfect aim. For some bosses like o2 I like off centered though, if I have the range to make use of the extra distance I can keep to the boss that way.
Off-centered and always rotation, since I saw Kalle’s videos the first time (first or second week of gameplay). It just felt better and more natural for me, after one hour using the off-centered and screen rotation… time flies.
i’ve always played center, not because i’m bad(well actually i am but whatever), but because screen rotation has always confused me. by now i’ve been playing centered for 4 years so it would be hard to switch. not to mention i use arrows keys instead of the wasd so makes it harder to screen rotate. i only use off centered for when im at a boss on a ranged character
I usually play Center, and use Off-Center typically for harder bosses where I know where all of the shots will be coming from, or where I can’t get too close (eg: Oryx 2).
“lol blue star ofc plays center” incoming.
fam its the exact fucking same learn to use rotation i swear to god the game will be so much better