It was new technology, 3D was a fairly new concept in gaming in the mid 90s. But it took so long to get properly implemented. You have super mario 64, gex enter the gecko, lemmings 3D. I am wondering if it was a business decision and not the devs who pushed for a free roaming camera, since it was clearly not a satisfactory result gameplay wise. Because at the same era, you have games with fixed camera angles that are much better experiences overall.
I rarely had an issue with moving the camera.
I remember utterly hating games with fixed angles from the day. It felt so restrictive and infuriating when something out of camera site caused you to die/fail.
From my memory of the time, I think it was a few things.
The ability to do 3d in games was new, and without a lot of experience in what made for “good gameplay” devs were trying new things and seeing what works. Similarly, if you go back even further into console and PC gaming history you can find some game that use what, looking back, would be considered terrible control layout and/or gameplay mechanics. Sometimes because the company just wanted to ship something, sometimes because best practices hadn’t been established.
The ability to do 3d was new and the free roaming camera was an easy way to show off the systems capabilities. Especially for early first party games, there was a huge effort to show off how much more advanced the new console was compared to the competition. I can remember marketing that focused on showing that you could look all around these virtual worlds (Mario 64) or how awesome the graphics processor was by highlighting the parralax effect of the background images (Castlvania 4).
Controllers were also evolving at this time. The SNES and original PlayStation controllers just had a D-pad and like a half dozen buttons to control all your movement and actions. The addition of analog control sticks, and the N64’s bizarre controller were really the first shot at having the variety and quantity of controls to make rapid changes of player perspective and actions feasible at the same time.
Combine all of that with some publishers just putting out blatant cash grabs, and you have a whole lot of new territory to map and a target audience that doesn’t really even know what it wants yet.
Similarly, if you go back even further into console and PC gaming history you can find some game that use what, looking back, would be considered terrible control layout and/or gameplay mechanics.
You can just say resident evil.
I played OG Doom for years with keyboard only. Up/Down arrow for forward/backwards, Left/Right to turn, and then holding Alt to strafe. RIght hand on the arrow keys and left hand controlling strafe/run/weapon selection.
I don’t honestly recall if mouselook was even an option back then, but I tried playing with those keyboard only controls recently and literally could not even. It’s kinda wild how hard it is to imagine anything other than WASD-mouse for a FPS these days.
Mouselook was an option, but since the engine didn’t have any options for looking up and down, it always felt weird to play with a mouse.
Or shudder tank controls for games like Grim Fandango
I generally point to controllers first and foremost. It’s incredibly difficult to get good 3D movement without two analog sticks. The N64 only had 1. The Playstation’s were optional, so those games were in a weird spot where the sticks were ignored or treated as a bonus option (often with the D-Pad being mapped to the left stick and the right stick just not getting used at all).
But it’s not just that simple. I’m replaying the PS1 version of Spyro the Dragon, and while it’s not perfect the camera usually does a good job of following Spyro while he still feels great to control with either a D-Pad or a stick. I could map the shoulder buttons to the right stick and get camera controls that way, but for the most part it’s not necessary. According to legend they hired a guy who had previously worked on flight control systems for NASA to help with Spyro’s controls. Little things like the movement speed, camera height, and the distance from the player character make a huge difference, and Insomniac clearly put a lot of effort into those details that other devs didn’t.
Some games still managed to do a decent job in spite of these limitations, and the power of emulation can help a lot. A couple years ago I played throught the PS1 Armored Core games. I tried to play them as they were originally intended, with the movement and camera controls split out across the D-Pad and shoulder buttons. But after a while I gave up and re-mapped them to the sticks. But having my right thumb on the right stick makes it harder to use the face buttons, so I mapped those to the shoulder buttons. Once I got it all sorted out the games controlled wonderfully.
I’ve recently been playing through God of War (2018), and one of my biggest complaints is how bad the camera and movement is. Everything feels slow and clunky, and the camera never lets me see what I want to. It’s too close to Kratos and his thick ass takes up too much of the screen. The graphics and art direction are great but I can’t appreciate it because I can only move the camera in a very specific way, and often the game either softly guides the camera towards where it wants you to look it just full-on takes control away from you and it’s really annoying.
Another game I’ve been playing is Bloodborne. Once again they give you no control over the distance from your character and have a very limited vertical angle. One of the strengths of Bloodborne (and most FromSoft games) is the use of vertical space in both level design and combat design, but the limited vertical placement and angle of the camera makes it a pain in the ass to actually see what you need to.
The single stick was a huge limitation. A really good example for that is Zelda Skyward Sword. By the time that game came out 3rd person 3D had been around for three console generations and more than a decade already, so there was more than enough time to figure out how to do this.
Yet the camera was still one of the biggest obstacles in the game. It happened so often to me that the camera got stuck in some stupid angle and I had to use their clunky manual camera aim option to see what I needed to see.
BotW’s dual-stick camera on the other hand had close to no issues at all. Having a full stick dedicated to just controlling the camera really solves the problem.
PC, which is in many ways the gold standard platform for 1st and 3rd person games, has a very similar solution with the 2-axis mouse control being reserved for camera control.
Automatic cameras are always worse than manual ones, because guessing what the player wants to look at just works worse than allowing the player to control it directly.
Oh man, this brings me back. I played Alundra 2 back 2002 or so. The game was advertised with a “360-degree camera,” but it was more like an eight-angle camera. And the enviroments often didn’t support this in a good way, like you had to look at a room from a certain angle for it to make sense on screen. Looking back, the camera was pretty terrible, but at the time, I didn’t mind so much
Please do not enter the gecko
Unless the gecko consents.
Very few things are ever perfect on the first try. It takes a lot of experimentation to learn what works and what doesn’t.
There were also fixed camera games with some horrible designs. Resident Evil was one that I remember. There’s tradeoffs for developers. Fixed camera means you can make it look better having to only worry about one perspective and you could bake-in a lot more fidelity. A movable camera in a tight space is complex to design around and even modern games have issues in tight spaces. Back then, nearly every game was in tight spaces.
Fixed Cameras (that is, cameras with a pre-determined location according to the player location, meaning the camera can move like in Silent Hill, not just a Static Camera like in Resident Evil) are basically a requirement for Survival Horror. This is why I say nearly all modern “survival horror” games are actually just Action Shooter games. Modern Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Alone on the Dark, etc. All Action Shooters now.
One of Survival Horror’s biggest elements is that the peak optimal way to play is intentionally avoiding combat (except mandatory bosses). Most true Survival Horror games have combat that feels bad. It either has low visibility, or the player animations are slow, etc. Tools that the developers use to try to discourage the player from engaging in combat while at the same time thematically fitting in to the genre. Compare this with modern action horror games: the combat feels good. The aim is easy, the animations are fast. The player will want to engage in combat more because that is part of the design for mainstream audiences.
Fixed cameras also build anticipation in the player and create a more memorable playthrough experience. Everyone that played Silent Hill 1 remembers this scene forever:
Both Dino Crisis 1 and Silent Hill on the PS1 used this style of camera to great effect.
The fixed camera was a staple in 3D horror games. I think it started with Alone in the Dark (1992)? But there might even be something earlier that started it.
I think it was trial and error. When people tried Mario 64 for the first time, it was VERY challenging because we’d never really done it before. It didn’t take long to get the hang of it, but I remember myself and others just spinning around in circles at the Walmart demo unit because we had no ideas how to navigate in 3 dimensions.
