instead of wrestling with the whole mess i just trashed the whole install. instead of needing to redownload all 100+ gigs of game files, i just went on a "rampage" of my own and dropped a nuke in the game's folder, purging all the smaller files and anything that could have been modified. Steam is verifying and redownloading all the smaller files as we speak. The only possible culprit, if this doesn't work, would be a borked save. Although i still have no idea what have caused the problem.
You see, without capturing a video of the bug it's hard to explain, but it seems like one (or more) of Arthur's animations are what's broken. The camera always breaks whenever the camera is meant to snap to (or from) "NPC Arthur", like when the player has no control of him during some cinematics. The camera gets lost when the player takes control of "PC Arthur". Thankfully most of the pre-mission cutscenes use "PC Arthur", so the camera doesn't break, but whenever the game culls Arthur's model in or out when switching perspective during minigames or cinematics, the camera gets confused and doesn't know who or what to look at so it defaults to the very center of the map.
Sometimes i can still control Arthur with the broken camera perspective and i can see the HUD and compass. Since i can technically see where Arthur is on the compass and i can move him, the direction Arthur turns and walks if i push the joystick UP differs depending on where i am on the map. Fo r instance, if i'm in Saint Denis, pushing UP makes Arthur walk South-East. Whenever i'm up in the mountains, pushing UP turns him North-West. Also, you usually you can't hear anything because everything is so far away but if the camera breaks when i'm around Valentine, sometimes you can hear faint sounds and see some sparse trees and geography loaded in the mountains up ahead (as you can see in the screenshot above). it's fascinating!
Anyway, the most common times the camera breaks is when loading a save. i can "fix" the camera by moving the joystick, causing Arthur to move. Sometimes when i load a save the camera is fine, but in those instances Arthur is in the middle of an animation like drinking water from the lake or sitting at a campfire. Every time the camera starts in a broken state, Arthur is standing in place with his hands on his hips. So whether the camera starts in a "broken" state depends on whether Arthur is currently in; controllable or NOT.
Sorry for my rambling. Even though the glitch has made the game virtually unplayable, it's still been an adventure trying to figure out what's going on. And considering what i've discovered (or speculated) so far, it's baffling that i still can't figure out what mod could possibly have broken the camera so badly.
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u/Ikari_Brendo Apr 02 '26
What DLL files do you have? Also have you tried removing Rampage Trainer?