Contextual Lock-On Targeting
Contextual lock-on targeting binds the camera and the character to a chosen enemy, keeping both facing each other so that movement becomes circling and attacks land where intended.
Pressing the button asks the game to pick a valid target nearby, usually the nearest thing in view, and to hold the camera behind the player looking at it. Movement input is reinterpreted as strafing and circling around that target, and attacks, blocks and thrown items are aimed automatically. System also does tutorial work, since what a game chooses to lock onto tells the player what currently matters.
Nintendo EAD introduced Z-targeting in Ocarina of Time in 1998, having found that sword combat in a free 3D space was nearly unplayable with the era's cameras. Reference point was reportedly the way two fighters square off, a relationship rather than a set of angles. Solution folded the camera problem and the aiming problem together, which is why it spread so quickly to games with no swords in them.
Legibility came at the price of a certain flattening, because a locked fight is effectively a two-dimensional duel on a circle, and games with many attackers must decide how to switch between them. Whole subgenres accepted the trade and built on it, notably the FromSoftware lineage, where locked duelling is the entire combat model. Games that reject it, keeping free aim in melee, are still treated as making a statement.
Lineage — traced back to a root
Every mechanic in this dataset resolves to an ancestral chain. This one is 7 steps deep, beginning with Object Collision As Verb in 1962.
Descends directly from
Carried forward by 24 later games
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Also called: z-targeting, lock-on, target lock