please walk into the office of the people responsible for the paperwork that is responsible for setting up the committee that is responsible for recommending possible changes to the committee that informs the play test department that initially suggested this and tell them to fuck off, click to sprint is fucking terrible and controls in modern video games fucking suck and I hate it all
I got so mad at the thought of another game with click to sprint that I didn’t even finish reading your post I just slammed that fuckin reply button no regrets
anyway yall are assuming that sony gives the slightest fuck about the fact that their controllers don’t work. they saw that nintendo didn’t give a fuck and they decided they wanted in on that, locking the hardware down from third party development is a conscious decision that is informed by having shitty hardware, there is no accident here.
I can guess as to why not but couldn’t you make a full-tilt analog move sprint and smaller movements walking? Is it just relegated to MGS3 with pressure sensitive buttons?
If you don’t make a point of it you can expect people to understand 2 movement speeds on an analog stick, full-tilt and minimal. 3 if you want to get fancy. So you can expect that people are going full tilt most of the time, or would be if their deadzone was calibrated properly to the decay of their hardware but you’re nice so you’ll read it as full anyway.
Of course there’s nothing wrong with not having a sprint button (the modern Assassin’s Creed games do this), but there’s something nice about giving the player the option to press a button for go juice. Without it, people ask, can’t I go faster? With it, people hit the button and know they’ve told the game to step on it.
And this is pretty minor, and another way of saying, there’s not much of a functional need for sprinting in modern character games because all the precision of movement they ask for can be handled in the analog stick and intelligent mantling/climbing/stopping rules, varying max speeds in indoor and outdoor-tagged areas, and enabling faster speed over time.
Since it’s not functionally necessary the sprint button gets last dibs on controller space so it’s come to live on the stick click. But if it only exists for the pleasure of hitting the button, it doesn’t help that it feels so bad to hit the button.
I like holding a trigger to run, like in AssCreed and it’s clones. If you’re not shooting then stick run and jump on the triggers. It feels good to have to hold down the trigger to gain speed. Likewise in the Arkham games it feels good to hold the trigger to go into crouching sneak mode.
You’re not really doing anything but because you’re holding the trigger it feels like you’re doing something. Much better than hitting a button once and then forgetting about it as you run until you stop, which is the common stick button behavior.
Really they should have updated the controllers to have more buttons on the underside of the controller and put all the stick button actions there.
Everyone’s moving away from hold trigger to run or crouch because we realized we were asking people to do it for hours at a time, and that’s not very friendly even if RSI is only a dim object on the horizon
If it weren’t for that, yeah, I’d be there with you, the squish of a trigger fits well to the questionable responsiveness sprint usually has, coming out of a dodge roll or attack or a jump. You’re confident the game won’t forget about it because you’re still putting tension on it, whereas with stick click I find myself hitting it several times because it wasn’t ready to buffer the input.
This and our discussion about the PS5’s trigger resistance makes me think about another way of handling incorrect input.
(backstory on buffered input: naively, you wait until the cursor or character has finished their previous action before reading new player input, and reacting. But this makes it feel stiff, so you read input for a certain time before the window’s ready and store it until it can be used. Of course, the buffer window itself isn’t known to the player and different games have different buffer windows from a tenth of a second to half a second and it might be different for different moves. You haven’t solved the problem of player intent mapping to virtual logic bundle representing a body but you’ve salved it)
What if you had an input that was blocked by your character’s body and the trigger pull was at maximum resistance to indicate it? If you want to pull the trigger to swing but you’re dodge-rolling and you can’t so the trigger can’t be pulled and then it’s free and you feel it open underneath your finger? Does that increase virtual proprioception or is it too cute a metaphor?
i really like the idea of a precision platformer with the accurate controls of celeste or something, but the slow-ass character of a cinematic platformer.
