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.
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.