Dota – How to zoom out when watching a replay

dota-2

Can you zoom out while watching a replay?

I know my question has been asked for playing the game and I understand that you can't. In another answer to that question it's claimed that:

…but you can unlock the camera while viewing replays.

However, linked article is from 2012, and involves a lot of console commands, whereas you often see casters zoom out on a whim. I think I started seeing that in 2013 or later, so it feels like a proper feature had been introduced to do so. A Steam Forum thread suggests the same (emphasis mine):

Question:
i was watching Ti4 playoffs and dota 2 casters zoomed out game from very high point of view how can i do that ingame ? i want to zoomout far

Reply:
Sure you can, you just need to spectate (or watch replays) in free camera mode and use the mousewheel to zoom in and out. I often do that when a teamfight is about to break out, I switch to free camera mode and zoom out a little…

However, I've tried this while watching one of my own replays, and it doesn't seem to work. What am I missing here?

Things I've tried:

  • Changing the camera mode to all different options;
  • Going through all of the Spectator key bindings;
  • Meticulously go through all replay UI components to find an option for this;
  • Double checking my scroll wheel is still working 😀
  • Searching with Google (last year's results) as well as Arqade;

No dice.

What are the current instructions for zooming out while watching a replay?

Best Answer

This has indeed been possible for quite some time now. Perhaps you've been following the advice on disabling zooming? Because however nice that may be for normal gameplay, it also prevents you from zooming out during replays.

Look in this folder / file:

\Steam\SteamApps\common\dota 2 beta\dota\cfg\autoexec.cfg

And check if it has the following:

dota_camera_disable_zoom "1"

It should be set to "0" if you want to be able to zoom out. Here's a screenshot of how wide a field of view you can get while zoomed out during a replay:

zoomed out view of mid

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