Captain Ripley

I think Mario games can give a lot of insight into how camera perspective can change the design of a game. Consider Mario's most basic movement. He runs and jumps. In his 2D games, because of the camera being fixed to the 2D movement, Mario can run left and right and jump and that means the stages are often just long side scrolling corridors where the goal is to go far enough right until the player reaches the flag.

  Mario 64

Meanwhile, when Mario broke into 3D in Mario 64, the camera had to change to emphasizes the new movement mechanics and the third axis in the world. Mario can run and jump in any direction, so the camera now follows behind him from a 3rd person perspective. The level design of course follows along; instead of going from point A to point B, the stages turned into sandboxes with multiple open ended challenges. All this adds up to give players freedom of movement. Also Mario can fly.

This 3rd Person perspective in Mario 64 also meant that precision jumping would be more difficult because adding depth to games means you have to deal with depth perception. This meant killing Goombas by jumping on their heads became more difficult. To solve this issue, they gave Mario the ability to kick and punch enemies; future games will give him a spin that serves a similar purpose. This shows that different camera perspectives will have advantages and draw backs that need to be considered in the overall design.

  Super Mario 3D Worlds

In 3D Worlds, there is a dynamic fixed camera that follows the player's action, but is locked off meaning the player has a limited view of the stage. Puzzles, enemies, and challenges had to be built with these limitations in mind. Knowing that the player can't fully control the camera in 3D Worlds means that the developers have framed puzzles and challenges knowing exactly what the players will be able to see and what they can't. This allows for high levels of precision platforming that would might be unfair to ask of players in full 3D Mario (full 3D is less accessible to newbies because of the player driven camera). The fixed camera makes a lot of sense for this game considering it's multiplayer aspects. It's pulled back so that multiple players have space to platform, and the levels are linear so none of the players get lost and stay within frame. All of which makes for a more stable and comfortable multiplayer experience.

  Final Thoughts

I think it's a sort of chicken or the egg type of thing. There are design choices needed to be made before choosing the right camera perspective, but there are also design choices that can only be made after knowing what that perspective is. Like so many things in gamedev, one choice influences the others and vice versa.

Super Smash Bros had such an interesting philosophy during it's initial concept. It was in large part an examination and response to the fighting games of the time. A lot of fighting games, in competition with each other, we're becoming increasingly complex. This was great for hardcore fans and has given us fantastic game franchises like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and Soul Calibur.

However, the increased complexity meant that a complete newbie would have a much harder time playing these games. It meant that players would need to learn long complex combos to have a chance at winning and pushed the meta of each respective game out of reach of more casual players.

    "DragonKing: The Fighting Game"

This was the environment that the smash prototype was made, originally titled "DragonKing: The Fighting Game"

In an attempt to make something more accessible, some interesting design choices were made during development.

1. Health bars were removed and were replaced with an accumulating damage system that launched players further based on how much damage had been taken. This was meant to incentivize improvisation since your opponent would vary in distance moved depening on when they were hit, in which direction they were hit, and by how strong an attack they were hit by.

2. It was made as a 4 player party game instead of the traditionally 1 vs 1 fighting game. This would drastically change the dynamic of a match and necessarily create new strategies for players.

3. Lastly the stages were made into multi level dynamic stages meant to keep players moving. This was in stark contrast to most fighting games that kept players on flat even ground.

    Final Thoughts
   

It's funny to think that combos eventually did make it back into smash bros within the competitive scene, but I find it so interesting that an earnest attempt for accessibility and fun was able to create such an iconic game. It makes me wish AAA game studios besides Nintendo would take risks like this more often.