And can we have some more classic fixed camera angle survival horror games where the main gameplay loop is trundling from room to room while looking for keys, please kitty-cri

Ideally with tank controls party-sicko

Though it wasn't just survival horror that used them in the PS1/PS2 era, they were used in action games, RPGs, adventure games... I will admit the now standard over the shoulder camera and stick controls are a much better fit for anything more action-focused and that dealing with PS2 era 3rd person camera and control implementations can be difficult today like when I revisited War of the Monsters recently.

Not anything needs to be an action game however, and anything with a more leisurely pace can benefit from the cinematic, directed feel you get from fixed cameras, eg. survival horror and RPGs.

I was thinking about this while playing the recent Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse remaster. It exists in a weird place where it looks and plays like a PS2 game but has a over the shoulder camera but basically gained nothing from it except a loss of atmosphere and the interiors feeling more cramped and boxed in.

Maybe a part of why they went away is that playable areas now tend to be much larger and open than they used to be in the PS2 days and not neatly segmented into closed off relatively small spaces that are easier to capture in a few camera angles.

  • TheronGuard [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Resident Evil did it because of a bug originally but they kept it because it was a strong aesthetic choice and let them just render the background as a fixed image rather than a 3d polygonal space or whatever - or at least that's what I heard and half-remember lol. I know they for sure did that with older rpgs like Baiten Kaitos, which makes the backgrounds look absolutely beautiful for less processing time. Although, I guess processing isn't as much a concern today given last gen and current gen consoles are pretty beefy.

    To be clear, I didn't mean fixed camera angles AND pre-rendered backgrounds, though the two were definitely synonymous at first. Silent Hill and Dino Crisis on the PS1 already had 3D game worlds with semi-fixed camera angles that allowed things like seamless tracking shots of the player as they moved through the environment.

    It's definitely disempowering which is great for horror games, it's more cinematic because the dev controls EXACTLY what you're seeing at any given point (you'd never miss something important cause you whip panned by it in first person).

    Speaking of the Project Zero/Fatal Frame series, when the PS2 games wanted to show a spooky ghost, they would cut to a new camera angle that showed the ghost off, but the player character remained on screen and control didn't need to be taken away from the player, making the cuts feel more seamless since you're already used to camera angles changing constantly

    In the fourth game they stop the game and cut to a zoom in on whatever they need to show you