Assume I'm asking about a modern 3D-ish game with a 3rd person perspective here, because: 1) in 1st person perspective they are one and the same, 2) I don't think anybody is crazy enough to want to have character-relative controls in the flat rectangular words of
Pac-Man or
King's Quest 1.
Having played
Broken Sword 4 demo and
Prince of Persia: Sands of Time lately, I started, not for the first time, to wonder how can some people honestly prefer camera-relative movement over character-relative one. If you ask me, the moment I have to go back to an earlier savegame in PoP, because it hasn't occured to me that a button responsible for performing a particular action may change
halfway through that action (ie. I'm still turning the same wheel, but the Prince must now move towards the camera instead of away from it), the control system loses any right to call itself "intuitive".
Of course, the real question we should be asking is why won't the games make all players happy by just letting us choose between the two. As a matter of fact, both games I mentioned here do feature
a bit of character-relative gameplay, so the developers must have agreed that it sometimes is preferential. Yet, they haven't decided to offer us a choice, something
Grim Fandango (despite having almost no action- or timed sequences) got right eight years ago.
