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 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.
My beef with BOTW is I can’t use my sword/shield/bow while looking at what I want to look at. It’s either or. I wish those could be remapped to the R/L
Might be something you can do on Switch 2 pro controller with GL/GR at least?
I can’t speak for BOTW but the remap capability in the NSO Classics is such a massive improvement that I’m finally playing N64 games on it.
I kind of hold out hope that maybe maybe it’s a sign Nintendo is finally pulling it’s head from its ass when it comes to letting us change controls.