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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Very few things are ever perfect on the first try. It takes a lot of experimentation to learn what works and what doesn't.

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.

Because the things that seem like obvious best practices now weren’t known at the time; they had to be developed and improved through iteration, like every other technology.

Video game cameras peaked here:
<img alt="A screenshot of the video game Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64 with rough low polygons indicating the age of the game. Lakitu, a weird reptile riding a small personal cloud, is holding a fishing rod with a camcorder at the end of the line. The camera is pointed at Mario, who we as the audience sees from behind as he is facing the Lakitu. In the background is a tall castle with a stained glass window depicting Princess Peach in profile." src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/6cd63b0a-9c29-4d0d-87f0-c2e33a9b12b7.jpeg">

I mean, they didn’t even have two analogue sticks to work with in a lot of early 3D games as well as a non-standard number of buttons (and most had up to half as few as is standard today). Some of the limits were just a lack of inputs to control everything you’d want the player to control.

Because making a dynamic 3rd person camera that works well is really complicated.

I dunno, but I know the guy that created the instant replay function in the ssx games, I could ask him if you want?