There’s a fun moment in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots where, if you position the camera over Snake’s head while standing in a location from the first MGS, Snake will deliver the following line:
Ah. Overhead view. Just like old times. Now you’re talking. Overhead view. That’s more like it.
It’s a reference, of course, to what had been the default camera style of Metal Gear Solid for quite some time, as well as many action games from earlier eras. But where I really think this style of fixed, or at least independent, camera angles shined was in old school 3D horror games. And in recently playing two older horror titles–the first Silent Hill and Resident Evil 0–I’ve found myself quoting Snake, sharing his enthusiasm for what those classic camera angles deliver.
The pivot in recent decades that’s seen every big-budget action game, horror or not, need to be third- or first-person started, I suspect, after Resident Evil 4 made such a huge splash in 2005. iIt was certainly not the first game to use such a perspective, but it marked a huge, and hugely successful, departure for RE as a series–so successful that it may have made more fixed camera angles start to feel dated and obsolete. I think we’ve lost something in that mass transition, a special kind of experience that made for some unique cinematic moments. And nowhere is this more apparent than in horror games. Consider this early moment from Silent Hill:
The way the camera pulls back from Harry and twists over the alleyway adds to the unnerving sense that you’re entering some kind of strange reality; there’s a sense of control that’s taken away from you as the player. Moments like this aren’t possible when the camera is tethered to a character’s back like it is in modern games; it certainly wouldn’t feel as seamless and dreamlike if a modern third-person action game just yanked the camera control away from the playerEven in describing this moment, I’m using a kind of language I rarely do when talking about in modern games: What the camera is doing, how it frames the scene.
But this lack of control over the camera also adds to the horror. In replaying SH recently, I’ve noticed that without that control, the foggy alleyways of Silent Hill and the dark rusted spaces of the Otherworld also feel less in my control, amplifying the fear and adding a bit of directorial intention behind how a scene was framed.
The original Resident Evil games demonstrate this well, too. Take this scene in the first RE. As Chris descends the stairs, the camera remains at the top with a Dutch angle (a term we’d rarely use to describe an interactive scene in a modern action game). It makes the stairs feel more ominous. It conveys a feeling of descending into the unknown that wouldn’t be there without an independent camera that intentionally framed the action in a certain way.
I also love how camera shifts change the sense of place in these games. Again, original Resident Evil games do this all the time and to great effect. Early on in Resident Evil 0, Rebecca encounters a massive scorpion. Standard stuff for RE. But first, in a cutscene, she hears it outside of the train she’s exploring. And just before you leave the room, the camera shifts to a position outside the train, where we can see Rebecca through a window. The audio also shifts to place you outside of the train. You can hear the wind, the drops of rain pelting the plate glass of the window. You can’t see the monster yet, but you know it’s out there; it’s a preview of that outside space where you know the monster is lurking, waiting to pounce, and it conveys a cinematic sense of space, one that stretches beyond the location of your character.
Don’t get me wrong: I love a good third-person shooter with a freely rotatable camera. But there’s a cinematic language that we just don’t see as often in games anymore with the death of fixed and independent cameras. It makes me wish that in addition to first- and third-person perspectives in the upcoming Resident Evil: Requiem, there’d also be a classic, cinematic style camera as well.
