Videogame Characters Walk too Slowly, amirite?

[Danny Ocean]

I don't know if it's just me, or if everyone else really does walk that slowly.

So I'm playing Skyrim, staring at the back of my Orc character.

He's got hamstrings like freight trains, calves like railway springs, and buns that could crush a cricket ball.

So why does he saunter along at the speed of an obese 15-year-old? I've got places to go!

It's so awkward when it takes seconds upon seconds to cross a room-- and it's not just Skyrim!

What do you think?

 

[carnex]

Actually average game character walk at around 10 mph which is your average running speed. When you run you actualy go berserk. In Quake 3 you could achieve equivalent of 50mph when strafe running.

 

[Treeberry]

I thought the running speed in Skyrim was adequate but I agree to a point in reference to other games. People like to harp on about how amazing and scary the Project Zero/Fatal Frame games are but the speed of movement is hair-tearingly slow! I've noticed that a lot more 'realistic' games tend to have characters with lead weights for shoes though.

Hehe. If you get bored of running in Skyrim you could always become a werewolf or vampire lord and transform...

Wait...seconds upon seconds? That doesn't sound too bad. Unless I'm misinterpreting it.

 

[doxydejour]

Generally they're OK, except in later generations of Pokemon before you get the Running Shoes. Knowing your character will soon be able to have the ability to run, but are currently stuck at a plodding pace, makes it more frustrating.

 

[OneCatch]

I don't know if it's just me, or if everyone else really does walk that slowly.

So I'm playing Skyrim, staring at the back of my Orc character.

He's got hamstrings like freight trains, calves like railway springs, and buns that could crush a cricket ball.

So why does he saunter along at the speed of an obese 15-year-old? I've got places to go!

It's so awkward when it takes seconds upon seconds to cross a room-- and it's not just Skyrim!

What do you think?

It's because of a few things:

1. Rooms and roads and buildings are often made larger than life in games to make them easy to navigate. Just try making an average suburban home or office to real-life scale in the TES construction set and then see how painfully small and irritating to move around it is compared to most in-game buildings.

2. Peripheral vision - Humans can see around 180 degrees, sure, but our actual focal point is rather small. Games tries to emulate peripheral vision by setting a relatively wide fixed field of view, which messes with our estimates of speeds[footnote]http://ftp.mpik-tueb.mpg.de/pub/kyb/bresciani/papers/pretto09.pdf[/footnote]. You can see the difference in any game which allows significant FoV adjustment, and indeed a lot of games will make a 'sprint mode' seem faster by dynamically changing the FoV for the duration of sprinting. Minecraft does it, so does RAGE, I'm pretty sure Crysis and FarCry 3 also. Probably CoD and Battlefield too - it's about as ubiquitous as the headshot squelch is nowadays.

3. Some games are downright ridiculous when it comes to walking speed. And TES is a particularly egregious offender - in something like Splinter Cell or Tomb Raider where methodical and cautious exploration is the name of the game, a slow walk is fine. For a massive openworld exploring game, no so much! My Speed attribute tends to see much early advancement in TES games, this phenomena [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comicsandcosplay/comics/critical-miss/9245-Skyrim-Tales] be damned!

 

[shrekfan246]

I'm of two minds on this, particularly when it comes to games like Skyrim, and it's a problem I mostly notice when the game requires you to follow or escort an NPC - Character movement speeds are inconsistent with NPC movement speeds.

Particularly in RPGs, the situation often arises where the player character or party runs faster than any NPC in the game (with the exception of certain enemies depending on the style of RPG), but if there's an actual walk cycle, then that also happens to move slower than any NPC.

I know it's by necessity of game design, but you can trek from Markarth to Windhelm in all of, what, ten or twenty minutes? Max? It kinda ruins the scale a bit once you think about it in terms like that, because I want to experience a big, epic adventure, but it's so easy to go from on end of the map to the other. People can bash World of Warcraft all they like, but at least it got the scale pretty much down pat for a video game; Traveling from Stranglethorn Vale to the Eastern Plaguelands on foot will take you a damn long time, and you'll see a lot of really cool things along the way.

Er, to get a little back on point... I dunno, I'd certainly like faster actual walk cycles. The plodding, sauntering pace the player character always moves at is just unrealistically slow, even I walk faster than that and it takes me twenty minutes to walk a mile. But normal movement speed? If anything, I would think it's generally slightly faster than it absolutely needs to be.

 

[Zhukov]

Really?

Seems to me that most video game characters are hyperactive mega-atheletes who walk at jogging pace and can do so for their entire lifetime without ever taking a breather.

 

[Danny Ocean]

I know it's by necessity of game design, but you can trek from Markarth to Windhelm in all of, what, ten or twenty minutes? Max? It kinda ruins the scale a bit once you think about it in terms like that, because I want to experience a big, epic adventure, but it's so easy to go from on end of the map to the other.

I think that you want the scale to be just so that the journey to a location isn't simply step 1. of whatever it is you're doing there, but could in fact be an effort in itself. So you'd sit down to play your game and think, "Right, today's task: get to X." And you'd have to plan and stuff. Proper hiking/travelling.

I don't know if there's a way to make it fun for people who don't already like hiking, though. Maybe auto-manage some aspects of it?

Wait...seconds upon seconds? That doesn't sound too bad.

It is! I just got up and walked to my door. About 5 meters, and it took me 2 seconds. In Skyrim it would take longer than that to cross a room that feels the same size or smaller.

@Onecatch good explanation though, cheers.

 

[MeTalHeD]

Fallout New Vegas...

I loved the game. Finished it many times. I then played Skyrim which, while still a tad on the slow side, had a sprint button and upgradeable stamina. There are even enchanted items to boost your stamina (haven't seen any boots of speed or anything like that yet though).

I then spotted Fallout New Vegas on sale, bought it for Steam and decided to give it another go.

I couldn't stand how long it took for me to get from town to town. I also played in 3rd person view and it looked like my character was stuck in a perpetual slow motion running sequence.

Dammit, Skyrim! You ruined one of my favourite RPGs by being marginally better!!!!

 

[RJ 17]

I just finished a playthrough of Dragon Age: Origins (as part of preparation for the release of DA:I...still gotta play through DA2 and then play through both games again as a different character making different choices as I had long since deleted my previous save games to make room for other stuff) and one of the first things I noticed/remembered (as it has been an age since I've played Dragon Age *drum rimshot* =P) was that your character in that game halls ass! Like they're running at a full-blown sprint at all times. So fast, in fact, that your party is constantly having to play keep-up lest they be left behind.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Really?

Seems to me that most video game characters are hyperactive mega-atheletes who walk at jogging pace and can do so for their entire lifetime without ever taking a breather.

I dunno about that. I find most game characters have jogging speeds equivalent to a human's sprinting and can seemingly go on forever, but actual walking speeds tend to be ridiculously slow.

I swear Skyrim's walk speed is about a tenth the speed of its run. It makes it so much more tedious to dramatically walk into rooms and shit.

 

[Flammablezeus]

I don't know if it's just me, or if everyone else really does walk that slowly.

So I'm playing Skyrim, staring at the back of my Orc character.

He's got hamstrings like freight trains, calves like railway springs, and buns that could crush a cricket ball.

So why does he saunter along at the speed of an obese 15-year-old? I've got places to go!

It's so awkward when it takes seconds upon seconds to cross a room-- and it's not just Skyrim!

What do you think?

I agree, the walking speed in Skyrim is ridiculously slow. I find it incredibly awkward to walk that slowly in real life. Then on the other hand, the jog speed in it was ridiculously fast, seeming much faster than I can go at full sprint. Then, when you go full sprint, you're pretty close to the speed of a horse in game. Most games seem to be alright with it. Out of the games I've played, the ones that seem to get walking, jogging and running spot-on were GTAIV and RDR. Rockstar are really at the forefront of bringing realism into games (although I haven't played GTAV yet, so for all I know that could have been dumbed down in the same fashion as Far Cry 3 was.)

 

[Voulan]

I've found walk cycles to be very slow, but I've also seen running cycles to be much faster than ordinary NPCs. Which makes sense, but when you're doing an escort mission or are following an NPC somewhere in a quest it can get really irritating. You constantly outrun them! And it doesn't look very cinematic when you're only able to run in short bursts so they can keep up with you. Skyrim is one such example of this.

Actually I can think of a game where you have quite a fast walk cycle - Assassin's Creed II. I remember one mission where you have to walk with your mum to visit Leonardo's house, and she walks so slowly that I had to keep stopping and waiting for her.

All I'm saying is that when you need to travel with an NPC, make them match your speed. And don't do the thing in Skyrim where they suddenly forget what they're doing so they just stop and stare after you as you run for a good five minutes without realising they're not there anymore and you have to stop and wait for them to sprint towards you from a great distance.

 

[clippen05]

I don't know if it's just me, or if everyone else really does walk that slowly.

So I'm playing Skyrim, staring at the back of my Orc character.

He's got hamstrings like freight trains, calves like railway springs, and buns that could crush a cricket ball.

So why does he saunter along at the speed of an obese 15-year-old? I've got places to go!

It's so awkward when it takes seconds upon seconds to cross a room-- and it's not just Skyrim!

What do you think?

Unless you are on PC and using the walk button or on console and only pushing the control stick up a tad, I felt the characters in Bethesda games move quite fast. If you go into third person, you can see that they are doing a brisk jog. Its not easy to run everywhere, you know. So, I guess it was done for... immersion?? I mean they are wearing a lot of heavy armour and carrying 200lbs of sweetrolls, I'd like to see how fast you'd run with that encumbrance!

But seriously, they are moving at above normal human walking speed, its just most of us are impatient when it comes to videogames so it seems pretty slow.

 

[Danny Ocean]

Unless you are on PC and using the walk button or on console and only pushing the control stick up a tad, I felt the characters in Bethesda games move quite fast. If you go into third person, you can see that they are doing a brisk jog.

I am talking about the walk. The title of this thread is "Videogame Characters walk too slowly."

I had a good look at the skyrim walk animation. He barely puts one foot in front of the other. I don't know about you, but even when I've been hiking for hours with a 25kg+ backpack I still manage to plod a good half-meter with each step. And that was when when I was young, 5'6" and had barely any muscle on me- nothing compared to the 6'5" obscenely muscular giants of Skyrim.

I just worked it out. When I'm not rushing, I walk at about 4.6mph. That isn't particularly fast, but it's a damn sight faster than the Skyrim dude.

The jog and sprint animations are too fast, and the walk animation isn't a walk at all. It's a shuffle.

 

[Username Redacted]

Actually what bugs me more are console games (and to a lesser degree PC games) that haven't figured out how to differentiate run from walk. Tilt the analog stick forward to walk. Extend it to its maximum throw to run. Simple as hell and yet we still frequently see 'Run' buttons in all sorts of games. With PC games IMO it's very annoying when Run/Walk and Stand/Crouch involve holding down the Shift of Control keys rather than those states being toggle-able. Memo to developers: knock this shit off.

 

[InkySpines]

Fallout NV is indeed painfully slow. On the other hand, Dragon Age often feels like you are flying around light as a feather.

It depends on the nature of the the gameplay to whether it feels appropriate or not. If you see your avatar as an abstraction of stats and capabilities, particularly in a fantastical setting like RPGs or sci-fi (World of Warcraft is an excellent example), or as a representation of a real person. Having Master Chief fly around like a bullet doesn't bother me because it fits with the high sci-fi nature of the setting, whereas Commander Shepard is from a more grounded setting, so the thump-thump-thump of her limited sprinting abilities felt satisfying to me in the first 2 games, but went jarringly out the window in ME3.

I realize this was done to bring the series into line with the CoD mainstream, but the 'Modern' 'Military' Shooter is the most egregious violator of this idea. NATO soldiers in full kit cannot move like that, and damn few people can move like that continuously in their gym clothes. Gameplay trumps realism in this case, as you are not so much playing a soldier as a disembodied ghost rifle and fast movement makes for a more interesting game, in some cases at least.

 

[Artina89]

If there is a run option I will tend to use that, it is true, I hate plodding along knowing I have the option of running instead. I suppose it depends on the game you are playing I guess.

 

[Bad Jim]

Unless you are on PC and using the walk button or on console and only pushing the control stick up a tad, I felt the characters in Bethesda games move quite fast. If you go into third person, you can see that they are doing a brisk jog.

I am talking about the walk. The title of this thread is "Videogame Characters walk too slowly."

But why would you walk instead of jog? In real life, it's because jogging everywhere is exhausting. In a game, there is no such drawback and you only walk when you specifically need to move slowly, so above all else, the game designer needs to make you walk slowly.