The first thing to note in Mass Effect is that the 3rd person exploration camera does not rotate automatically with the actor, meaning the actor can even look and walk towards you. Most 3rd person games do allow this during some kind of manual-camera-control mode but otherwise rely on automatic positioning and orientation of the camera. Those auto-follow 3rd person cameras have often been a nuisance in the pioneer 3rd person games because it is amazingly difficult to get this right. But that is no excuse for forcing that burden on the Players who are used to be supported by automatic cameras from most modern 3rd person games.
I am convinced that an auto-follow camera is much better than having to control the camera manually all the time, trying to follow with your character’s movement. This is an additional constant burden that the game forces me to do even though it could well over 90% deliver a satisfactory result without requiring me to adjust the camera angle manually. And as long as i’m still free to control the camera manually whenever i want to, i don’t see any reason why Mass Effect should not control the camera for me by default the rest of the time?
Even worse is that the orientation of the camera determines which interactive objects are highlighted in the game world, not the direction the actor is facing. This took me some time to figure out and i continue to intuitively align my actor with the interactive objects rather than turning the camera. I first found out about this not before about 5-6 hours into the game when i repeatedly was unable to activate elevators once i had stepped into the elevator. I still first turn my actor left or right towards the button before i remember that i’m supposed to turn the camera instead.
This is even more a problem with vehicle controls where the relative direction of the vehicle towards the camera determines wether pushing up on the analog stick means going forward or backward. This has caused me accidentally drive off ledges to my death about 3 or 4 times already after about 10 hours playing the game and would not have happened if the camera’s orientation would have followed my vehicle’s orientation. Why the controls of the vehicle actually have to reverse is a completely different matter altogether, rest assured that this will come up again.
Looking at the camera from a technical perspective, Bioware didn’t do their homework either. The 3rd person camera frequently jerks and jumps when moving through tight corridors or doors and especially when walking on stairs or slopes. This jerky camera motion is so bad it even induced mild feelings of sickness in me at certain locations of the game. Something that only happened to me in two of the most early first person shooters: Wolfenstein 3D and Marathon.
The only other Xbox360 game i know that has similar technical problems with the camera is the mediocre (at best) Sonic The Hedgehog (full-price version, not the Live Arcade games). Mass Effects jerky camera motion really needs fixing, it’s that bad, even terribly so compared to most modern games!
[...] in case you want to pick up on my own posts, they were about Mass Effect’s Manual Override, 3rd Person Camera and the dreaded Mako and can be found by clicking on the aforementioned links, obviously. The [...]
Funny enough, I think the problem here is not the camera but actually the fact that your character turns independently of the camera. Otherwise, it’s just standard FPS controls. They just seem odd because your avatar behaves like in a 3rd person adventure game rather than like in a FPS. But you couldn’t do the adventure game auto-follow camera in Mass Effect because shooting and casting spells is controlled by the camera, that’s why the camera is manual all the time.
But I totally understand what you mean, it felt odd to me the first time as well.
I too hate the camera controls in this game. They make me dizzy and I can’t play long. Great story & game but the camera control is awful. What’s worse is they don’t give you the option to lock the position. Should be player’s choice NOT dev’s choice.
Have you ever tried to press the A button while running around? It activates a “camera auto-follow” mode…