Did anyone else play Avara, ever? I didn't play a whole lot of it, but it was my first online gaming experience (I was 10 or 11) and It has always stuck with me. To me, at least, it seems like a very unique, even idiosyncratic, game. The default view was first-person and third-person camera was a modeled drone that hovered behind your mech and could be shot down, removing your ability to have third-person view. You could even make the drone stay in a fixed place and you could continue moving your mech around the map. This was basically never-used in multiplayer, though. The one thing people used the camera for was as a platform to jump on top of and either snipe from or use to climb to areas that would otherwise be impossible to reach.
I would also like to throw in that Escape Velocity is very good, I could go on and on about it, but I won't, except to say that, if you are curious, you can still get the shareware version from Ambrosia's site.
Because of my parents refusal to allow a video game console in the house and my dad only having a Mac; Ambrosia Software was kind of like my Nintendo growing up.