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.

  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
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    edit-2
    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.

    I think it's still quite strong as long as the dev does it with intention - and given that it's not the default, they almost certainly would. 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). You could hear stuff but not know where it's going to jump out because you can't control the camera, which is spooooky. There's no way you can like sneak up at a corner to scout out what's coming, you see what the camera shows you and if there's an ambush - well, too bad you gotta deal with it as an ambush instead of mimicking stealth archer/sniper gameplay.

    As for things being more open, some games are still quite linear like Dark Souls 3 can be (although the actual areas are expansive I guess its not a great example lol) and they do quite well with it. Itd be interesting to see something modern take advantage of a fixed camera again instead of open world de jure.