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Real-time/Console RPGs and Movement Speed (FUCK KOTOR AND BIOWARE)

LarryTyphoid

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Who decided that 90% of your playtime in any RPG should be fucking WALKING? In older turn-based games like blobbers, Ultima, and roguelikes, you can move as fast as your computer can go. In Fallout you click somewhere and your character will walk there very quickly. Traveling in these games is not a problem at all. But real-time action RPGs, ESPECIALLY console RPGs, just don't like this. In a game like Morrowind it's fine because you can buff your speed a shit load from the very beginning, and you don't move all that slow anyway. But BioWare games make me wanna just speedhack my way through fucking everything. I was thinking about replaying KOTOR since I never did a darkside playthrough, but you move so fucking SLOW. It's unbearable to walk anywhere. Later in the game you can get a speedup ability, but that's like 3 or 4 hours in. And the force speed ability is restricted by armor, meaning if you want an armored build, you have to walk everywhere slow as shit anyway. I guess you could get a party member like Bastila and just control her, but man, what a fucking pain for something so simple to fix. What was the first RPG that had you directly controlling a character in a real-time 3D space? Ultima Underword, maybe? That game has very fast movement speed. I bet KOTOR would be like 6 hours long if it had three times the current speed, which is what it should have.
 
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Codex Year of the Donut
https://www.cheatengine.org
ce-settings-863.png


if you use linux, it works fine in wine. Just launch it shortly after the game and then attach because it crashes maybe 1 in 3 times for reasons I haven't yet managed to figure out and submit a patch for.
 

Norfleet

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I'd say it's less about the speed of the walking and more about the need to make us micromanage every footstep even in a game where none of it matters because fancy footwork doesn't do anything anyway as all the projectiles just home in on you regardless of if you move or not.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
You are already running everywhere which looks silly when everyone else just stands or walks, if you ran 3 times faster it'd be like you'd be possessed by a overcaffeinated hamster - and KOTOR has like only 4 rooms per act, at that point you might as well remove the 3D spaces between fights altogether and replace them with Japanese Wizardry clone-like menus. And since combat isn't its strong point and you already removed any exploration the game might have, replace that with menus too for some turn-based card game or whatever.
 

JarlFrank

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
at that point you might as well remove the 3D spaces between fights altogether and replace them with Japanese Wizardry clone-like menus.
I mean, it's not like those 3D spaces are really 3D anyway. You can't even walk over the tiniest little hurdle, even if it's just ankle-high. No jumping either. It's a 2D game with 3D visuals.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I mean, it's not like those 3D spaces are really 3D anyway. You can't even walk over the tiniest little hurdle, even if it's just ankle-high. No jumping either. It's a 2D game with 3D visuals.

There are still different heights, so there are three dimensions involved, you just can't have two NPCs occupy both heights at the same time - kinda like Doom :-P. Also i think objects can be placed at any height and overlap, though in that case they can't move.

But i was referring to the environments anyway.

Also FWIW personally i never cared about jumping in these games, it isn't like these are platformer games anyway - for example Dragon Age: Inquisition had jumping (and other "platformer" stuff :-P) but aside from visuals it was a worse game in every aspect compared to Dragon Age: Origins. Or really worse than any game based on Aurora-derived engines (all of them had this limitation).

(AFAIK NWN2 had some hack that altered the collision heightmap as you moved around to give the impression of having bridges but i think it was fragile enough to not be used much)
 

NecroLord

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In Morrowind you can get the boots of blinding speed(will set your Speed to 200,but you will also need to negate the blindness effect). With Fortify Speed effect(either via Enchanting or Alchemy) you can increase your speed to an enormous level and to the point where it might even crash your game.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
A much more common issue when running too fast in Morrowind than crashes is that the automap often stops updating when you cross cells - or actually, it keeps updating but thinks you are at the previous cell so the map is updated at the wrong position :-P.

I tend to have the map pinned so it is always visible and when i notice that i quicksave+quickload to "unstuck" the map.

Also very rarely (but still haven't seen a crash from that) is that the collision assets or whatever do not load - it seems to happen when you fall and cross a cell at the same time, e.g. it happens often when running in Vivec at the topmost floors and jumping down on a bridge that crosses a cell - you end up falling through the bridge (or sometimes through the canton if you were to collide with that).

It is only a minor annoyance if you have levitation though.
 
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at that point you might as well remove the 3D spaces between fights altogether and replace them with Japanese Wizardry clone-like menus.
I mean, it's not like those 3D spaces are really 3D anyway. You can't even walk over the tiniest little hurdle, even if it's just ankle-high. No jumping either. It's a 2D game with 3D visuals.
That's mean. A lot of 2d games offer jumping.
 

Bruma Hobo

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This is what happens when you can no longer offer an abstract presentation because you must please graphics whores, the decline begun way before the 00's.

Abstract, fast, sleek step-based fun:
113925-PoolofRadiance.jpg

236406-ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar-apple-ii-screenshot-outdoors.png

NEO-Scavenger.jpg


Slow, cumbersome and boring real-time faggotry that leaves no room for imagination:
427991478_orig.jpg

1076deb22b3656e27743b25a2cb5e09b.png

stonekeep-1.png

:majordecline:
 

LarryTyphoid

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This is what happens when you can no longer offer an abstract presentation because you must please graphics whores, the decline begun way before the 00's.

Abstract, fast, sleek step-based fun:
113925-PoolofRadiance.jpg

236406-ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar-apple-ii-screenshot-outdoors.png

NEO-Scavenger.jpg


Slow, cumbersome and boring real-time faggotry that leaves no room for imagination:
427991478_orig.jpg

1076deb22b3656e27743b25a2cb5e09b.png

stonekeep-1.png

:majordecline:
To be fair to Ultima 7, it has plenty fast movement speed in the original. It's Exult that makes it way slower for some reason. I used to think that Exult's slow movement speed was the intended speed and that the faster movement in DOSBox was a result of running the game too quickly, but I set the cycles back to the recommendation on the wiki and it's still way, way faster than Exult. I have no idea why Exult slowed it down so much. In the original game horses are useless because it's barely faster than normal speed, but in Exult horses are useful solely because the normal walking speed is so slow. Even the combat seems faster in the original.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Abstract, fast, sleek step-based fun:

That first "abstract" screenshot shows detailed (for its time) individual rocks, ropes between the poles and sea. A proper abstract fun would be this:

LzX0ilv.jpg


Though even Wizardry had the start of decline, after all it had these...

bA4Tibu.jpg


...superfluous graphics for the monsters that were perfectly describable in text.
 

Darth Canoli

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Responding to Bruma Hobo and Bad Sector

236406-ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar-apple-ii-screenshot-outdoors.png


This kind of garbage graphics only happened because of the machine's limitations.

I get why it used to be like this, even played some text based adventure games back in the days (no graphics at all) but when I see some incel devs pulling that shit nowadays, I can't help but wonder how close to the walls they were rocked...
 
Last edited:

Bruma Hobo

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Abstract, fast, sleek step-based fun:

That first "abstract" screenshot shows detailed (for its time) individual rocks, ropes between the poles and sea. A proper abstract fun would be this:

LzX0ilv.jpg


Though even Wizardry had the start of decline, after all it had these...

bA4Tibu.jpg


...superfluous graphics for the monsters that were perfectly describable in text.


236406-ultima-iv-quest-of-the-avatar-apple-ii-screenshot-outdoors.png


This kind of garbage graphics only happened because of the machine's limitations.

I get why it used to be like this, even played some text based adventure games back in the days (no graphics at all) but when I see some incel devs pulling that shit nowadays, I can't help but wonder how close to the walls they were rocked...

Newsflash, you morons: Visuals necessary affect gameplay. Games with fast step-based exploration, random encounters, turn-based combat, and so on, look very odd when they have too detailed graphics and fancy animations, so you must necessarily choose.

For instance, random encounters in step-based first-person dungeon crawlers like Wizardry look really good, and no one ever complained about them in well-designed top-down games like Fallout:
f1c.jpeg


However, when a game looks like this:
ff8_winhill_location.jpg

suddenly random encounters become really awkward, and people start complaining about a lack of feedback, and rightly so. Then, its sequels either adopt a more abstract presentation, or get rid of random encounters entirely so they can keep their fancy visuals and please graphics whores.


Now, what do you think happens when games stop looking like Ultima IV, and start looking like Ultima VII, or Baldur's Gate? Well, for starters, having an icon representing a whole party no longer will fit the game, so designers will represent each individual character during exploration, and they will all move with fancy walking animations, turning the game into a slog. Then, vehicles like ships and horses, and fun spells like Blink, will start to look like shit so they also get axed. And then, even turn-based combat starts to look a little too unnatural, so developers will start to consider switching to RTwP. And once combat is in real time, controlling big parties becomes really awkward, so sequels will either offer smaller parties (Dragon Age: Origins) or become action games (Ultima 8). All of this because developers didn't embrace more abstract visuals like this:
X8cHvBV.jpeg


But of course, games like Expeditions: Conquistador won't ever please graphics whores, so that's out of the question.

Just look at Icewind Dale, a supposedly old-school hack and slash game with fancy graphics. Except that exploration is slow, combat is your usual RTwP garbage, and even looting corpses becomes a slog because a simple looting screen like in Pool of Radiance would look too awkward. This is exactly why everything is shit.
 

Darth Canoli

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Now, what do you think happens when games stop looking like Ultima IV, and start looking like Ultima VII, or Baldur's Gate? Well, for starters, having an icon representing a whole party no longer will fit the game, so designers will represent each individual character during exploration, and they will all move with fancy walking animations, turning the game into a slog.

Representing all the characters during the exploration phase is a design choice and not the best one.
Dark Sun didn't and it doesn't hurt the gameplay at all.
If can use any character's skills during exploration, you could just add clickable portraits somewhere to switch.

As for fancy animations slowing thing down, Fallout had this retarded feature where your character would holster his gun before opening containers (fixed by mods later) but besides that, I think it's alright to have some limited animations.
It starts to be a problem in huge cities when every NPC is animated, has schedules (fuck you ultima) and move around or just stands idle scratching his arse, because they also require animations when they're standing there.

So, the problem isn't the party but everything else and poor engine optimization.


But of course, games like Expeditions: Conquistador won't ever please graphics whores, so that's out of the question.

Just look at Icewind Dale, a supposedly old-school hack and slash game with fancy graphics. Except that exploration is slow, combat is your usual RTwP garbage, and even looting corpses becomes a slog because a simple looting screen like in Pool of Radiance would look too awkward. This is exactly why everything is shit.

Conquistador's cities were nice enough, if you ask me but outdoors were ugly as sin, particularly mountain areas.

RTwP has nothing to do with graphics, it's garbage, I agree and as far as looting goes, it's just the devs being too lazy or incompetent to implement QoL features like looting corpses all at once in an area or looting all the opened containers at once when leaving an area.
 

Ereshkigal

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Sep 4, 2019
Messages
125
As graphical fidelity increases, so does 'realism' of level design which increases the tedium of traversing. First example I can come up with: Deus Ex vs. Deus Ex HR. The first have maps that are pretty self-contained, somewhat tiny even though they tried to represent a realistic world, everything feels immediate — despite all that, it never breaks immersion because devs understood that systems and quality are the things that work best to help the player feel immersed. Now think of Shanghai in Human Revolution, a humongous map that feels like a bad visit to the dentist when you traverse it for the sake of 'realism' and 'immersion' (in this case, immershun, different from the original Deus Ex' immersion). In Shanghai you're burdened with these Fed-ex side-quests that make you go to opposite points of the map while having a character that is slow as molasses (also for the sake of 'realism' and 'groundedness'), the thing that OP here complains about. When you've thought a little bit, 60% of your playtime in Shanghai was spent running while doing nothing interesting other than being amazed by the scope of things (according to the developers' intention) and while I enjoyed the atmosphere of the map, at that moment I was wishing I could be in Battery Park instead, spending zero time doing virtual chores and going 2 fast 2 furious with the speed augmentation.

So yes, it's a fucking plague and what's worse, newer generations like it, perhaps because they didn't experience the good old times. Explains the proliferation of walking sims where the only objective is to 'immerse' yourself watching the pretty buildings designed by the artists. It doesn't help that devs have successfully convinced gamers and journos that slow = artistic.
 

Bad Sector

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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Darth Canoli i was actually sarcastic in my previous post, i obviously do not think one of the first and most influential CRPGs was decline when there were barely any CRPGs in the first place when it came out :-P

suddenly random encounters become really awkward

No? I mean ok, you may find them weird in the first 2-3 times, but you get used to the idea pretty much instantly. I never really had an issue with random encounters in 3D games.

Well, for starters, having an icon representing a whole party no longer will fit the game, so designers will represent each individual character during exploration,

That is a designer choice that shouldn't even be necessary. I'm not sure if it was that game, but some months ago i played the demo for Tales of Arise which has very high fidelity visuals (they are still stylized but clearly way more detailed and realism-oriented than what you'd find on a C64, Apple 2, NES, etc) and yet your entire party is "represented" by a single character when moving across the land. And really this isn't something unique to that game, you can find many games doing that at any point in time.

Then, vehicles like ships and horses, and fun spells like Blink, will start to look like shit so they also get axed

IMO if you think something deserves to be axed because you believe it looks like shit is really a problem on you than on a developer who implements such a feature with more high fidelity and/or realistic visuals.

Would i chuckle a bit if some developer implemented a blobber with KCD visuals that had your entire party hop on a horse ala Wizards&Warriors? Sure, i'd find it funny for a bit (like i did with W&W). But i'd certainly not want for the developer to not make such a game with KCD style visuals because of that - or any other weirdness that come from a blobber with high fidelity and realistic visuals. Personally i prefer real time combat for the speed (though for a free roaming blobber i'd prefer phase based combat like W&W) but if it had turn based combat i wouldn't stop to think that the enemies just stand there and wait their turn any more than i'd do the same for Wizardry 1, despite the enemies being much more clearly defined and visible with modern graphics compared to the primitive and largely text based presentation of Wizardry 1. At the end of the day these are games and games have their own rules, not every game has to both look and behave realistically - these two are independent of each other.
 

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