Personally speaking, I’m the kind of person who enjoys walking around a lot in that thing called “real life”, first discovered by the ancient Greeks after one of their V.R. simulators ran out of batteries. Subsequently postured on for centuries.
I enjoy walking around for the sense of exercise and exploration I can get as I might just take a new turn and see something I haven’t seen before.
Not the case with video games.
In games, I prefer to run. Unlike real life, I can’t tire out so easily in a video game, and my virtual body’s threshold is almost limited, provided the right conditions are met.
In life, my destination is something of casual interest. In games, it’s a pressing point of urgency; something I need to hurry to or get away from.
The ability to run is one of those weird little things that can easily get overlooked entirely but is crucial to design. A character can move too fast or too slow, disrupting progression time and realism, or making the experience tedious and leaving the player unnecessarily vulnerable.
When a character is too slow, though, it really is the worst. Sometimes one has to wonder if such speed was implemented during an eleventh-hour epiphany that the game was too short. “Quick, make the character hobble! That’ll double the game’s length!”
Parasite Eve, back in the PSX days, was always one of my favorite offenders. No matter how urgent to situation, protagonist Aya Brea never broke out beyond a brisk jog. It’s as though nothing bothered her enough to do that extra little bit of exertion, even when the precinct she worked at was under attack.
AYA
(Urgently)
There are monsters in the precinct!
(Beat, calmly)
Well, better not strain myself.
Even later in the game, when a giant monster that could kill Aya on contact was chasing her, she could never urge herself to run any faster. It’s like she just didn’t care.
Another problem with running speed suddenly comes out when the character is placed in relation to an environment. Two examples suggest the character is supposed to acquire some sort of vehicle, though one isn’t initially available while another isn’t always readily available.
My primary example would by The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, an obscure title only played by a handful of people.
After clearing the first dungeon, the player is granted the right to leave the forest and emerge into the main of Hyrule, where further adventure surely awaits! But first, in order to pursue said adventure, he must cross the dreadful and tedious Hyrule Fields where nothing interesting ever happens.
While Link could get a horse to ride in the second half of the game, it should be noted that first the horse was entirely optional, so a player could run through the entire game zipping back and forth across that tedious field map, over and over and over again.
In this case, while Link’s running speed wasn’t technically faulty (it was correct to the proportional size of the dungeons and towns), foot travel became increasingly tedious on the Overworld, suggesting that either the location should have been smaller or at least more interestingly structured (as past Zelda games provided a maze of forests and canyons with all sorts of twists and turns).
Since Ocarina, following titles Majora’s Mask and Twilight Princess have incorporated considerably better map design and quicker acquisition of accelerated traveling, so it seems the designers were aware of this pitfall as well. But, as Ocarina is debated as the best Zelda and considered a classic regardless, it is valid for debate.
I found a similar illusion of space in Jak 2 some years ago, where I still swear to this day that Jak loses running speed whenever he’s in the city environments of the game. Most likely it’s an illusion resulting from the size of the location, but I pretty much needed to steal a car to get around at any point, because doing anything less than that was tedious.
Of course, traffic was structured in such a way in Jak 2 that driving was like playing dice with your life, so you were in trouble no matter what you did.
Another element of running which is underused but should be used cautiously is the possibility of a character tiring out.
For the sake of immersion, this is a great device. Insofar as I’ve seen, it’s only really been utilized in horror games, and perhaps it should remain that way. After all, imagine a game where Dante or Solid Snake had to stop for a breath every two minutes. Or a game where Mario refused to jump, saying “A-hold on a minute! I’m-a exhausted!”, which is much funnier if you picture it with an Italian accent.
Two instances where tiring out has been used can by found in GameCube classic Eternal Darkness, and the Silent Hill series.
In the case of Eternal Darkness, it was used intelligently but not necessarily well. Which sounds weird, but I’ll explain it (as opposed to ending this article on a cliffhanger, which would just make me a jerk).
In Eternal Darkness, pretty much everyone you play as can be categorized as a “normal person” to one degree or another. After running around for a bit, they will tire out and need a moment’s rest. This also becomes true with melee fighting: swing that heavy sword too often and your guy needs to catch his second wind.
It’s a fairly realistic touch of design you don’t see in many games, and for the most part it works. It’s not so obtrusive that it breaks the design or makes things unbearable… until later in the game.
The game is essentially built around a few environments which are visited and revisited in various time periods, each return bringing the character deeper in than the previous one had gone. This results in some massive rooms and long stretches of running to get around, and is particularly bad in the missions in the Roivas Mansion, since the underground ruins open with a massive foyer which the character tires out in before they get across to the door on the other side.
After zig-zagging back and forth across these ruins and having to stop so someone can catch their breath, it gets pretty bad. It gets worse in the last chapter, since Alex has to essentially re-do everything her grandfather did in his chapter, meaning you’ll have to do all this zig-zagging twice.
Silent Hill by contrast, handles it a little better. For better or for worse, characters don’t tire out from swinging their weapons but can get exhausted from running and thus lose running speed until they get a chance to recover.
Most of the problems with Silent Hill (collectively speaking) present them when you’re traversing the streets of the town itself, more than in the interior locations. SH2’s James in particular didn’t seem to have much stamina, and would tire out repeatedly during a long trek up a highway road to reach a museum which surely has all the answers to locating his letter-writing-dead-wife.
By contrast to this, some games throw running speed to the wind. Japanese style role playing games in particular seem to sometimes favor this, most likely since running isn’t necessarily as an action mechanic in relation to the more hazardous elements of gameplay, since the field maps are handled independently of the combat sequences- that is to say, no one’s shooting at you when you’re free to run.
Back in the Sega CD days, I played a game called Vay whose main character moved with standard 16-bit sluggishness. Until you hit the run button of course, in which case protagonist Sandor would suddenly dart around like a Chihuahua on speed. He moved ridiculously fast, to the point that you often had to double back just in case you missed something.
More recently, Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey takes a similar approach. Main character Kaim in this case actually moves at a decent speed normally, but hold down the run button and he goes considerably faster (yet with no change in visible stride or overall animation).
Both of these are cases where the mechanic seems implemented more for the player’s sake than for the game’s design. Both games represent turn based RPGs with random battles on the field maps- meaning as long as the experience distribution is handled correctly it doesn’t matter how fast the characters necessarily run.
I’ll just close by saying that the implementation of running mechanics and how they function varies from game to game. This, along with the body’s threshold for physical abuse, is probably one of the things thrown to the wayside more than anything else. But, like the aforementioned analogy (and probably others) games wouldn’t be so much fun if running were handled more realistically all the time.
Basically, running should be handled kinda like porridge- you don’t want it too fast, or too slow, but just right. (Yes, I’m actually closing this on a Goldilocks and the Three Bears reference)
Tags: Eternal Darkness, Jak 2, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Lost Odyssey, Parasite Eve, Silent Hill, Vay
