Mokona Modoki

I recently purchased Borderlands through Valve’s Steam Store and was quickly confronted with a problem based on the reason I purchased the game in the first place. While I admit I hadn’t conducted additional research right up until buying the game, I had been under the impression that it was playable in third person view. Personally; First Person view is fine. My girlfriend however, prefers to play games in third person. I desperately wanted to play the game multi player and cooperative, so I set about looking for a way to get third person view working. After plenty of searching and looking about the internet, I stopped hacking the configuration files and realised something, Borderlands already has the ability to be played in third person! It’s just ‘turned off’ rather than disabled.

To enable the keyboard shortcut, edit this file:

~SteamSteamAppscommonborderlandsWillowGameConfigDefaultInput.ini

Be sure to make a backup copy of this file first.

Look for these lines:

-Bindings=(Name="PageDown",Command="Camera ThirdPerson")

-Bindings=(Name="End",Command="Camera FirstPerson")

Edit the lines to look like these:

Bindings=(Name="PageDown",Command="Camera ThirdPerson")

Bindings=(Name="End",Command="Camera FirstPerson")

That’s right! Remove the the ‘-‘ sign from the beginning of the line, which (if you read the top part of the configuration file, this will all make sense) disables the keyboard shortcut that enables third person view. Save your configuration file and relaunch the game. Once you are in the game, hit the ‘Page Down’ key on your keyboard and you will now be in Third Person View. To switch back to First Person View, hit the ‘End’ key on your keyboard.

Now for the catch. Oh yes, there’s a catch! As I mentioned above, this is all in the name of multi player, and that’s where this little trick falls down a little. If you want to use Third Person View in multi player, you might be out of luck. Like I said, it’s a catch. If the person who wants to use Third Person View, hosts the game; that person will be able to enable the Third Person View on their computer. I haven’t tested this extensively, as there are only two of us playing multi player, but I did notice that only one of us was able to enable third person view, ie, the host.

It is possible to edit the camera position of the third person view. You will need to edit the following file:

~SteamSteamAppscommonborderlandsWillowGameConfigDefaultGame.ini

Be sure to make a backup copy of this file first.

There is a section of this configuration file called:

[WillowGame.WillowPawn]

You can edit the following values:

CameraScale=5.0
CameraScaleRight=2.0
CameraScaleUp=1.0

CameraScale: How close the camera is to your character. The higher the number, the greater the distance

CameraScaleRight: How much left or right the camera is offset from the middle of the character. Higher numbers move the camera to further right, negative values are accepted and move the camera to the left.

CameraScaleUp: How far up the camera is offset from the middle of the character. Higher numbers move the camera further up. Don’t use too negative a number, the camera will end up in the ground!

This forum link here has a number of example values and screen shots to give you an idea of how you can position the camera.

If you have any questions or additional information to add, please do leave your feedback in the comments!