Running Adults in Videogames

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Is "running adults" in games ever gonna stop being a thing?

When do you every see people irl running around to get places? Let alone adults. Or in some cases decrepit old men or women, guiding the player somewhere, sometimes running what feels like it would be a marathon to them?

Perhaps this is something many "video games are not art" critics take into consideration when looking at videogames as something "not art worthy"? I can see the childish nature of it all.

So what can be done? And why do characters run everywhere? Because locations are too far away? Then make them closer if possible, and check your scales. But you want the world to be big? Then think about means of transport people in that world would actually need, and let the accompanying NPC make use of them when guiding the player.

"But it's a good moment to expose some story". Then do it while walking, and allow the player to teleport to the final location, along with the NPC, from anywhere they might be when the conversation ends, and not just from determined locations in your world. (Because fixed teleportation locations make sense!).

"Teleportation from anywhere" should be a thing. Places in IRL still take time to walk, if to scale, and if story is exposed at that time, when it ends, the player can just teleport to where he's supposed to go, instead of seeing two grown men running through a city to get somewhere.

Besides, have you ever tried running and talking at the same time? It's not exactly as chill as videogames make it to look.

I think it's just a general accepted thing, that people in videogames run everywhere. Might come from the fact that not every dev can work around not having running around adults and npcs.

But that it can sometimes feel silly, it definitely can.

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Vehicles would be awesome. 👍

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Vehicles would be awesome; seeing NPCs getting into a vehicle and calling the player to climb aboard, taking them wherever they're guiding him/her to would be next level.

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Try running while holding a sword for instance... i get your point, and agree... At least, characters could be allowed to run just a little bit, before getting tired and having to slow down to catch a breath.
Good observation!

!PIZZA

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(Edited)

"At least, characters could be allowed to run just a little bit, before getting tired and having to slow down to catch a breath." yep.
Have some !PIZZA, regain some stamina!

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(Edited)

I feel like elder scrolls managed to achieve the right sort of balance with that sort of thing. I find that the discovery of landmarks you can fast travel to any time you like is a pretty satisfying exploration loop. It's even better when you install a mod that lets you immediately jump out of a dungeon instead of being forced to trawl through an area you've already explored just to get to the exit. A lot of games developers are very guilty of doing this and it seems to be just a general oversight in level design. Depends on what sort of game you're going for though, I do agree that when it comes to movement it's a bit silly to have them running for miles and miles when even pretty fit people would never be able to do that.

Also I see a lot of people going on about vehicles, but what about jetpacks and flying monsters? :D

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"Also I see a lot of people going on about vehicles, but what about jetpacks and flying monsters? :D" that fits into the vehicles category, now, doesn't it?
now, it depends on the sort of game you are making to have a jetpack - in elder scrolls, for instance, it would be just silly lol

fast travel as a satisfying exploration thing (being able to fast travel to a point after discovering it) is all fine and dandy, but why fast travel to a determined point? what are the fast travel points anyway? a magical portal? that assumes there's magic in the game. if it's not a magical portal, then why not allow fast travel from any point on the map to wherever we want to go? it's fast travel, as in "skip ahead the travel if you'd like".

regarding npc's that escort us, and that was my initial point, which incidentally ties with fast travel, for these situation where the npc takes us somewhere, we should be able to fast travel to where they are taking us, if we want, having previously visited the area or not. (all this so we can have npc's that don't run around everywhere, like idiots, or even when they apparently shouldn't be able to. "i am a 90 year old man, sitting on the floor, almost dying of some disease, clearly unable to walk without taking ages to move. i want to show you a dungeons of some sorts before i pass away. let me show it to you." proceeds to run for 3 minutes to the dungeon). f that. let us fast travel if we don't want to walk along the barely moving npc!

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