I jumped back into Starfield a few days ago to prepare for the DLC, and it got me thinking about a specific issue that appears in so many games.
When you are walking alongside an NPC and listening to their dialogue, your character’s walking speed is too slow to keep up. If you try to move faster, you end up rushing ahead of them. This forces you to walk a few steps, then jog to catch up, repeating the process until you reach your destination.
This problem has existed for generations, although many games have found solutions. Some automatically match your walking speed, and I remember a few games having a “press to match speed” button.
Yet, it still pops up occasionally, and I can’t help but wonder why. It seems bizarre that such a common and obvious problem remains unsolved, especially since it should be easy to fix. Surely, they could just program the NPCs to walk a bit slower to match the player’s pace if they don’t want to implement something more dynamic.
I suspect there might be a quirk in programming or game development that causes this issue to be so difficult to avoid. I’m hoping someone with development experience can shed some light on why this happens so frequently.
Cyberpunk 2077 gave some NPCs a radius where, once you enter it, you automatically match their speed. It blew my mind the first time I saw it, and I wish more games would implement something similar.
Yeah, it was super frustrating at launch because that circle feature didn’t exist back then. You could stack movement speed bonuses that affected sneaking, walking, scan-toggle walking, jogging, and sprinting differently.
With certain speed mods and perks active, trying to walk alongside an NPC never felt right you would gradually speed up and pull away from them. Then, you’d resort to toggling scan mode to slow down, but that turned your screen green, which was not ideal.
If the NPCs walk as fast as you, people who are not sticking with them the whole time won’t be able to catch up. Some players might lose focus during an escort mission and glance at something else for a moment.
Game designers typically set NPC walk speed to match the length of the dialogue and the distance you need to cover to reach the next location. This walk speed often doesn’t account for your character’s normal walk/run speed, as that’s determined for different reasons, like gameplay and player interaction. That’s why there’s often a mismatch.
You would never catch up if they walked at your maximum speed, if they walked at your minimum speed, it would take an eternity. The answer is to never include bad quests in your game.
It reminds me of escort quests in WoW. We must escape. But let me walk at a leisurely pace and attract every mob within a five-mile radius. I might be paraphrasing, but they are always too slow to run and too fast to walk truly painful.