Originally Posted by
Makovorn
Yep, that pretty much looks like max distance for GW2. It used to be a lot closer, believe it or not. Your best bet is to look out for recent YouTube videos - preferably ones posted after the 3rd Beta Weekend Event. There are plenty of fan videos to choose from if you want to see how the camera works.
In terms of how GW2's camera (and the view you get) works compared to GW1 - GW1's camera had a lot of shortcomings i.e. not being able to look upwards, unless you stood on angled terrain or if you went into first-person mode (which GW2 doesn't have). However, it did have some advantages - the height of the camera bubble was placed in such a way, that when you looked directly forward, you could see the ground, the horison and the sky in one view, very comfortably.
I'm not sure if GW1's native FoV was actually bigger than GW2, but in GW2 it certainly feels more constricted - and this can be attributed to things like the scale of buildings and other objects in GW2 vs. GW1 and the height of the camera rig. At the moment, it's not easy getting a good forwards and slightly upwards view with GW2, because when you look straight ahead, as in dead-level, or slightly upwards (not much), the camera goes down very low. I call it the "snakey cam", because it feels like the camera is sailing on the ground behind your character.
The only option is to have the camera in a more top-down position. Look at any YouTube vid out there, and you'll find that probably 60 to 70% and more of the view you see during normal playtime, is of the ground - tiles, turf, grass ... whatever. But, when you look at screenshots, things tend to look very nice, because people will, more often than not, find that perfect piece of terrain and wangle the camera in such a way as to capture that perfect moment.
This is (unfortunately) not how the environment is perceived during normal play, but it's not all bad either. Guild Wars 2 is a gorgeous game - all it needs, is a touch more FoV to allow us to appreciate the beautiful environments even more, while simultaneously helping those players who experience very real, very legitimate discomfort with GW2's constricted FoV.
EDIT: Just a general reminder - even though the majority of MMO's are played with a 3rd person view, your view as the player will always be "in the first person". If you position your avatar in GW2 at i.e. location A, and you zoom all the way out, and then move your character a few feet backwards to i.e. location B and zoom in, the amount you see from edge-to-edge will be approximately the same. The FoV of the game from your point-of-view as a player, remains constant, regardless of zoom.