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.
From my memory of the time, I think it was a few things.
The ability to do 3d in games was new, and without a lot of experience in what made for "good gameplay" devs were trying new things and seeing what works. Similarly, if you go back even further into console and PC gaming history you can find some game that use what, looking back, would be considered terrible control layout and/or gameplay mechanics. Sometimes because the company just wanted to ship something, sometimes because best practices hadn't been established.
The ability to do 3d was new and the free roaming camera was an easy way to show off the systems capabilities. Especially for early first party games, there was a huge effort to show off how much more advanced the new console was compared to the competition. I can remember marketing that focused on showing that you could look all around these virtual worlds (Mario 64) or how awesome the graphics processor was by highlighting the parralax effect of the background images (Castlvania 4).
Controllers were also evolving at this time. The SNES and original PlayStation controllers just had a D-pad and like a half dozen buttons to control all your movement and actions. The addition of analog control sticks, and the N64's bizarre controller were really the first shot at having the variety and quantity of controls to make rapid changes of player perspective and actions feasible at the same time.
Combine all of that with some publishers just putting out blatant cash grabs, and you have a whole lot of new territory to map and a target audience that doesn't really even know what it wants yet.
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