I believe zooming is necessary indeed. It has been discussed ad-nausea before VR and people arguing in real life your eyes can’t zoom, sure.
But IRL our eyes can discern much finer details than the size of a pixel in a 27" monitor in front of us, even more so if we have to counter-balance the game performance (lack of) in reducing the rendering resolution (TAA scaling). And in VR, it is worse unless you’re using at least a G2 or a Pimax 8KX.
However, please also understand the game is not designed for zooming. It is designed to be seen at 1:1 zoom ratio and this shows:
- zoom in 2D photogrammetry and you can see low level LOD (aka melting buildings).
- zoom in 2D terrain and you can see how ground textures LOD are blurry.
However at 1:1 it seems globally “correct” and in fact this is not dissimilar to JPEG compression: it is meant to be seen 1:1 in exploiting the human psycho-visual limitations to compressing images. However zoom any JPEG and you see compression artifacts you wouldn’t see otherwise.
Unless the core simulation is addressing the LOD problems first, I wouldn’t expect a useful zoom feature either: