Everyone (who is blaming NWNs) are blaming the NWN camere because that's only thing they can come up with right.
For example, the most horrible camera easily goes to Silent Hill fixed angles. And japanese survival horror angles in general. If anyone has played Forbidden Siren, that game had this thing with telepathy where you could transfer your point of view to the monster. This is sort of in STALKER as well and there it is no problem, but that's because you are supposed to be totally zoned everytime it happens in the Ukranian ruins. In FS, on the other hand, it is a prime game mechanic and shouldn't be so fricking frustrating to use each time. Even thought the other survival games don't ahve this, they try to be artsy with the angles, but end up just giving the payer odd shots of player characters running to walls instead of dispatching monsters.
Another game with a horrible camera was Force Commander. It was obvious that the devs wehre proud of their 3d enviroment and free camera movement, but that didn't really transfer well to teh actual use. You could never find a good angle to order your troops so instead you ended up not using the camera movement options at all and staid on the default RTSy-angle. That speaks of wasted effort to me.
Most Tomb Raiders have had horrible camereas as well, but the age of the first parts has to be counted in. Not so for Ninja Gaiden which was my first thought even before reading the start post. There's just something severely annoying when you constantly have to keep centering the camere behind Ryu instead of using that effort to win fights. Sure, wind jump gets you straight to next enemy and outside combat it is nearly unnoticable, but if you don't keep pushing that center button in combat, the camera keeps jumping around and giving you weird angles all tthe time due to Ryu's constant(if you fight as you should, heh) quick movements. The aquaducts with their closed spaces were extra horrible. Remember the bug room?