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.
You can just say resident evil.
I played OG Doom for years with keyboard only. Up/Down arrow for forward/backwards, Left/Right to turn, and then holding Alt to strafe. RIght hand on the arrow keys and left hand controlling strafe/run/weapon selection.
I don't honestly recall if mouselook was even an option back then, but I tried playing with those keyboard only controls recently and literally could not even. It's kinda wild how hard it is to imagine anything other than WASD-mouse for a FPS these days.
Mouselook was an option, but since the engine didn't have any options for looking up and down, it always felt weird to play with a mouse.
Was mouselook an option in version 1.0?
I believe they had a weird hybrid with mouse looking around and also moving forward and back.
It was definitely a time where they were figuring out how to make control schemes work, how to use two-button mice, etc. I remember playing Unreal (not Tournament!) with the numpad and thinking it was great.
wasd-standardization is one of the best breakthroughs in computer gaming in the last 25 or so years.
Mouse look was a thing in Wolf 3D, and similar to Doom, it did the whole forward/backward bit too. Really weird.
I don't know if it was in 1.0 but definitely before the final version. I tried it before 1.666 was around and chose to play keyboard only.
Yup, I know it was there later, just not sure if it was always there. I do remember that later versions had significant improvements to their setup utility (which may have included mouselook)
Or shudder tank controls for games like Grim Fandango
I like Grim Fandango