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There is nothing hard about 3D rotation, at least not for people successfully building a 3D open world game of that scope. Their characters can turn and you have a direction, there is no difference to walking in that sense.
If anything, assuming this is about NPCs, they didn't want to create animations for that and just turning them mid animation looked stupid.
As for the PC, automatically turning the player is honestly a bad idea in first person. It can be disorienting for some players.
Adding on to what you're saying: I think it's pretty clear that Morrowind and Oblivion are more focused on a first-person perspective for the player character with third-person being a bit of a secondary concern. As such, it seems to me like the focus of the third person animations is on matching what the player would see in first person, especially since they can switch between the two with a single button press.
For example, when the player holds the "A" key to move pure left while keeping their view straight, it certainly seems more natural from a first-person perspective that they're strafing left rather than turning their torso left with their head and arms awkwardly straining at a 90° angle (try this at home, it feels weird).
The alternative here would be for the character to actually turn their whole body left when you hold the "A" key in third-person, but then have their view (i.e. their head and arms) snap 90° to the right whenever you switch back to first-person, which seems odd and immersion breaking.
That being said, obviously it does look quite jank from a third-person perspective for a player to be strafing all the time, even when they're in non-combat scenarios. This isn't helped by aging animations, either.
As for thr PC, automatically turning the player is honestly a bad idea in first person. It can be disorienting for some palyers.
I'm referring to 3rd person. You can't see the character model in first person.
NPCs don't have a camera following them, so they can't run in a different direction than what it's facing.
These games are meant to be played in 1st person and 3rd person is just an after thought. In this case, yes, that's maybe just laziness or more likely they didn't have time for low priority stuff.
Some games do, some games don't. It's a design choice.
Also, Oblivion was released originally in 2007, and Morrowind in 2002. The consoles, game logic, and gfx were a fraction of what modern games can do, a lot of games (most, in fact) back then didn't have the fancy animations for all directions. There were likely other backend/engine limitations at the time that don't exist today, because CPU/GPU power.
ETA: as someone who has coded a 3rd person camera and animations in 3D to work in all directions, it really fucking sucks to do in a well-known engine with online search available from others that have done it before. Now imagine having to code everything like that from scratch into a custom game engine, being one of the firsts to figure it out. I'm also gonna guess other bugs were far more important than which direction the character is walking in TPV, being a Bethesda game and all.
3D rotations are awful and the reason why we can't have legs in Fallout 4.
Bang for buck.
Morrowind was made by a team of about 35 people. Sure they could have put the effort in but then you’ve got all those animations to make and test. How do they tie into stats? Do they look dumb at higher stat levels? Also they’ll use up a little more resources on console which was a big struggle (Morrowind literally had to reboot the Xbox mid game to free up memory).
I don't understand what you mean.
In Oblivion Remastered, in third-person, when you run in a straight line either left or right your character will do this kind of sideways/backwards jog instead of straight-up strafing like they'll do in Morrowind.
Imo either one makes sense when compared to real life, but maybe I've just been playing games too long?
In the original version of Oblivion, they run like they do in Morrowind.
It was until Skyrim that Bethesda properly implemented partially turning the character when running sideways or diagonally.
I wouldn't necessarily chalk it up to laziness or whatever. Imo it's just different games do different things differently. It doesn't break my immersion or mean the game is less fun to me.
1st person > 3rd person
Souls-likes suck.