Is there any value in allowing characters to walk rather than run in an isometric RPG?

[Hace El Oso]

Spoiler

What a great game that was:

Spoiler

 

[Zombra]

If a slow, careful character finds all the gems in 5 hours, and a reckless sprinting character takes 20 hours, which one wasted their time?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

If a slow, careful character finds all the gems in 5 hours, and a reckless sprinting character takes 20 hours, which one wasted their time?

We're not discussing character time, we're discussing real life time. That was the argument from the start.

 

[Zombra]

I'm talking about real life time.

 

[Zombra]

Glop_dweller's hypothetical game where things are literally harder to see if you're sprinting interests me. rusty_shackleford your outrage at this idea is hilarious. "Then I would have a gameplay incentive to move slowly sometimes, but .... gotta go fast!!"

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Glop_dweller's hypothetical game where things are literally harder to see if you're sprinting interests me. rusty_shackleford your outrage at this idea is hilarious. "Then I would have a gameplay incentive to move slowly sometimes, but .... gotta go fast!!"

we already had that game, it's called underrail and everyone hated how slow you moved

 

[mediocrepoet]

Spoiler

What a great game that was:

Spoiler

I'd forgotten about this game, but it's coming back now.

 

[Glop_dweller]

I'd forgotten about this game, but it's coming back now.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I dislike the look of the characters sprinting everywhere like they have superhuman endurance and are about to crap their pants, but I tend to prefer it just for the convenience instead of having the watching paint dry experience of waiting for everyone to traverse the map. I think this would be one reason that it might make sense for designers to condense areas if they were going for a more immersive and roleplaying heavy game. Ironically, doing this would cause the game to lose out on the immersive aspect of large, interconnected areas that can make a game feel like a simulated world.

I contrast this with my dislike of having weapons drawn at all times, even when in town, or talking to the king, etc. There it's just retarded looking, doesn't usually make sense in the world, and there's no trade off to make it worthwhile, it's just dumb.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Runners are suspicious, it's like they are always fleeing from something (communism). You don't want to be a commie, do you??

 

[Faarbaute]

If traversing the gameworld amounts to nothing more then busywork, then it's going to be preferable to run all the time, as opposed to walking or God forbid crouching or crawling.

Think of it as Trash Walking™, analogous to Trash Combat. It needs to be over quickly, or better yet bypassed entirely with quicktravel. But then that raises another question, dosen't it?

Why design a game like this in the first place?

 

[octavius]

It's nonsense because you don't like it. Your character demands sleep!

Now you're just being sardonic.

If you think it's OK to skip sleeping, why isn't it similarly OK to skip moving slowly?

Why nor skip running too and just hit the Awesome Button?

 

[rusty_shackleford]

It's nonsense because you don't like it. Your character demands sleep!

Now you're just being sardonic.

If you think it's OK to skip sleeping, why isn't it similarly OK to skip moving slowly?

Why nor skip running too and just hit the Awesome Button?

Why not skip moving slow and just crawl at 1% speed to really enjoy the roleplaying?

 

[octavius]

Why not skip moving slow and just crawl at 1% speed to really enjoy the roleplaying?

And what role would you play if you moved at 1% speed? A sloth? A snail?

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I don't have any problem with character walking if there is no danger or other reasons to run. I find character continuously running stupid and gamey. It breaks my immersion.
I played Underrail to completion with the default walking speed.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Why not skip moving slow and just crawl at 1% speed to really enjoy the roleplaying?

And what role would you play if you moved at 1% speed? A sloth? A snail?

What role do you play as someone who moves extremely slowly everywhere?
Or someone who does not spend 8 hours sleeping? Your character must be very tired!

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't have any problem with character walking if there is no danger or other reasons to run. I find character continuously running stupid and gamey. It breaks my immersion.
I played Underrail to completion with the default walking speed.

My immersion is ruined when my character does not sleep for 8 hours of real life time.

 

[Joined on the 4th of July]

rusty is triggered by walking because he expects everyone to have mobility scooters

 

[Peacefriend]

Zombra, what about hit points, or inexplicable limitations on party size?
Let's say you watch a movie, and one guy stabs another in the neck, and someone comments, damn, that took out 40% of his health! Or, a team for a heist is being put together, and in the middle of the meeting all the criminals hear a cosmic voice boom in the room: "You must have 6 CHARACTERS in your party. The universe decrees it so."
Isn't that even more bizarre?

If imagined in real life or a movie, those are much more bizarre than always running, but noone has trouble accepting them as video game idioms that you gloss over once you're familiar with them.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I have had old computers that tried to run more modern games (at the time) and when your frame rate is in single digits to 0-9 the game becomes pretty pointless. Oh, you might play it for a little bit but meh. If that's how you want to play then I suggest you find shittier hardware and figure out how to underclock or slow your machine to a standstill. Maybe run a few hundred or thousand programs while playing.

It doesn't matter what another person enjoys in their gaming it is what YOU enjoy. There are probably some good watch the paint dry games and such out there. You can probably slomo some tv movies or shows as well. See if you can make that 30 minute show last a good 8 hours or more. Watching people sleep is creepy esp for hours be it a game or real life. Way too creepy.

 

[Corbin Dallas Multipass]

I don't have any problem with character walking if there is no danger or other reasons to run. I find character continuously running stupid and gamey. It breaks my immersion.
I played Underrail to completion with the default walking speed.

We're not all masochists who hate ourselves though. Now I do hate you though (Not really, you're probably ok)

The slow walking in underrail probably wouldn't have been such a big deal if you didn't have to do so damn much walking around. 2/3 of the game was walking back somewhere you'd already been!

 

[Lord_Potato]

If the game already have walking animations for npcs, what's the issue adding it for player controlled characters? I prefer personally walking over constantly running around everywhere like I'm a zoomer on crack.

Walking certainly looks more dignified. And running with 30 kilograms worth of equipment on you (the weight of armor, shield, weapons, supplies) should certainly drain PCs' stamina and make them vulnerable during unexpected combat encounters.

 

[Gargaune]

Tired of running everywhere, but in too much of a rush to walk everywhere instead? The Infinity Engine has a solution for you! Introducing...

P-P-P-POWERWALKING!

Both fast and immersive, it's like walking and running at the same time! Call 555-BLDR-GAIT to get your POWERWALKING today!

 

[Zombra]

Glop_dweller's hypothetical game where things are literally harder to see if you're sprinting interests me. rusty_shackleford your outrage at this idea is hilarious. "Then I would have a gameplay incentive to move slowly sometimes, but .... gotta go fast!!"

we already had that game, it's called underrail and everyone hated how slow you moved

You misspelled Wizardry 8, a game I thought you liked, where Search Mode doesn't work if you are running.

Underrail is absolutely not an example of a game that gives incentives for being slow. You don't conserve stamina if you choose to walk slow. You don't search better if you choose to walk slow. You don't learn more secrets if you choose to walk slow. You can't choose to be fast or slow, you're just slow. I also hated Underrail for this btw. No one wants a game to be just slow all the time for no reason except Nifft Batuff who I agree is kinda weird.

And what role would you play if you moved at 1% speed? A sloth? A snail?

What role do you play as someone who moves extremely slowly everywhere?
Or someone who does not spend 8 hours sleeping? Your character must be very tired!

I already explained why this analogy is stupid and wrong. Oddly there was no reply.
It's OK if you can't argue your case. It's even OK if you didn't bother reading my post. But please don't continue repeating an argument you're not prepared to defend.

Zombra, what about hit points, or inexplicable limitations on party size?
Let's say you watch a movie, and one guy stabs another in the neck, and someone comments, damn, that took out 40% of his health! Or, a team for a heist is being put together, and in the middle of the meeting all the criminals hear a cosmic voice boom in the room: "You must have 6 CHARACTERS in your party. The universe decrees it so."
Isn't that even more bizarre?

If imagined in real life or a movie, those are much more bizarre than always running, but noone has trouble accepting them as video game idioms that you gloss over once you're familiar with them.

Hi Peacefriend!

First of all, beware of "whataboutism". There's no law that says that every single case must be answered satisfactorily in order to answer a single one. The case for walking stands regardless of whether other things in games are problematic! But you raise some interesting points.

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Party limits are not a great example. They only appear on the screen as part of the game interface ... critically, in the game world, the characters aren't aware of them. There is no godlike voice speaking to the heroes (it may speak to YOU, the player, to try to keep the mood, but that's a very different thing). You'll also notice the PCs don't have dialogue saying "What is this sorcery called 'Options Menu'? What grave numerological sorcery means '1920x1080'?" No one has to suspend their disbelief just from seeing 6 people walk down a road.

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Hit points ARE a great example of something that looks incredibly bizarre on the screen: people getting shot, stabbed, burned, blown up etc. and continuing to dance, fence, run, jump, and otherwise act like nothing happened. This long-standing trend is an unfortunate artifact of the transfer of tabletop RPG ideas to the video game format. Time for a history lesson!

In the beginning, "hit points" absolutely did not represent sheer structural damage capacity. No one thought a fighter was getting hit in the neck with a heavy axe and laughing it off.
From Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook, 1st Ed., 1978, p. 34:

A certain amount of these hit points represent the actual physical punishment which can be sustained. The remainder, a significant portion of hit points at higher levels, stands for skill, luck, and/or magical factors. A typical man-at-arms can take about 5 hit points of damage before being killed. Let us supposed that a 10th level fighter has 55 hit points, plus a bonus of 30 hit points for his constitution, for a total of 85 hit points. This is the equivalent of about 18 hit dice for creatures, about what it would take to kill four huge warhorses. It is ridiculous to assume that even a fantastic fighter can take that much punishment. The same holds true to a lesser extent for clerics, thieves, and the other classes. Thus, the majority of hit points are symbolic of combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural powers), and magical forces.

But video game makers didn't have the ability to portray these subtleties. The best they could do was to draw a sprite of a stick figure holding a sword, and maybe make it twitch a pixel or two when its turn came. Possibly the defending stick figure would have a red dot appear on it to represent a "hit" (which, remember, didn't really mean a "hit", just a whittling away of whatever ineffable quality allows a protagonist to escape death). Over time, game artists "improved" upon these abstractions without realizing they were changing their very meaning. This naturally evolved visually into what we have today: magnificently animated acts of violence, culminating in gallons of blood fountaining out of the target on every "hit", which in these games are represented by literal, lethal-looking hits.

So is there a parallel? Absolutely there is, and if we were to have a similar conversation about hit points, I would take a similar position in how I think games should look and play. Combat should not look like people getting stabbed 100 times and being fine, only to blink and disappear when being stabbed the 101st time. They should be moving, parrying, repositioning, slowly tiring and being less and less able to defend themselves, maybe taking a scratch here and there but basically being fine, until that single, final blow that finds an opening and really hits them for the first (and last) time. Nostalgia aside, who wouldn't prefer that? Obviously, for this to happen, all game studios everywhere would have to radically rethink their approach not only to the visuals of their games, but the mechanics themselves. For example, to survive a fireball a character would have to move or take cover, not just stand there and lose hp. I would love to see RPGs and games in general move away from bulletproof heroes and hit point bars. In fact I tend to greatly enjoy the few games where death comes swiftly in just a few hits.

But we are not having that conversation, and hit points are not a problem that can be fixed overnight. What we're talking about here is simply allowing characters in games to run sometimes and walk other times. This simple feat has already been accomplished in hundreds of games, and it should be absolutely noncontroversial for new games to continue to include it.

 

[Harthwain]

I could see a value in walking if you'd do something like Hitman, where acting suspiciously is going to gain unwanted attention. Another example is Gothic, where pulling out your sword would earn you a beating, because people don't like someone drawing their weapon. Another reason could be stamina management - you can't sustain running over a long period of time without some sort of drawback. So, yeah, there is a plenty of potential value in allowing walking, but it needs to be considered carefully.