Why first person games don´t have inertia in player movement?

Gameplay
#1

Try to walk full speed in a direction then invert the direction of your walking. In first person games (Kingdom Come included) you can invert the direction of your movement… instantly full speed (walking) in another direction.

This fact don´t hold against full fictional games, like Borderlands or our good old Doom… but in a game that flert hard with reality, like Kingdom Come, this is verty lame. What is the point to do a game focused in reality and use some dinamics from 25 years old FPSs?

The player don´t need to have an oil-tanker inercia like, but this Wolf 3D-like movement also don´t help neither.

PS: Sorry for my pour English.

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#2

I’d say it is simply because of playability.
If you implement inercia, as you say, in 1st person veiw game. It will feel like riding a car. The character becomes uncontrolable.
This feature can be easily put into 3rd person veiw games because you can clearly see what is happening. But in 1st person game, that is not the case.

Even though realism is one of the main points of this game, it is in no way trying to be human simulator.
It is still just a game.

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#3

You said that it is still just a game, but to me at least that hardly says anything. In my opinion it would be better if you said why it would be less of a game, or less good a game if inertia was taken into account for movement.
Here is one way it would be good. Turning a corner while running quite fast when it’s wet. A real person can’t do a 90 degree turn and continue at full speed, so having people in the game have to slow down and speed up again or do a curved turn when running would be pretty good and make sense.
Another thing that you can do I think would be quite good in the game is that if you want to turn a corner and there is a wall in front of you then instead of just slowing down you can run into the wall to stop. You can also kick off a tree or something to turn if the situation favours it.

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#4

Interesting idea, but I am afraid it would not work in a game. When you want to walk in a game, you just press a button and a stuff which is going on in your brain when you walk in reality does not happen. You probably think that this feature would add on immersion but I think this would only annoy simply because you cannot trick your brain simply like this. But I might be wrong and change my opinion when I see it implemented one day

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#5

You have taken the last sentence of my comment from the context and twisted it into something else.

I have actually said why I think that this idea would not do. Because you would get uncontrollable character.
You see in reality you have hundreds of muscles to control your movement. In KCD you have wasd.
And that’s why I said it will be in no way a human simulator because it’s still just a game.

#6

Want to sort the problem? Only use the W key and turn by looking. I only use A & D rarely as there is no point really.

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#7

Witcher 3 has good weight to your character (although they did release a patch to implement an alternate walking animation they allowed you to make tight turns).

Point is, I love the weight to my character, and hate the tight turns.

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#8

But witcher 3 is 3rd person. I dont remeber anything like this implemented in FPV and there is probably good reason for it. OR jugulador has revolutionary idea…

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#9

KCD will be too (and by the devs, not mods). Watch and see. They’d be stupid not to implement it.

But, fair point. Third person character weight would feel different than first person, but, with that said, I’d still want some weight. The problem with first person is it’s important to differentiate between moving your head to look at something and your legs, and a lot of games disregard the former. Looking at something is akin to turning to face it.

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#10

Remember Prince of Persia? :slight_smile:

But seriously, I wait for this for years (since I played CS, lol) and thansk to VR it perhaps became common in games… in few years, but not now IMHO.

I think it would add a lot immersion and that it wouldn’t be that much annoying… surely not as much as lens dirt.

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#11

At the moment there is no NPC running.
Maybe they need additional animation, for smoth running, changing speed and direction. Because this happens not only with your foots. Your whole body makes different moves by changing things.

I´m not sure if it´s a good idea to do this with the player (like @ProkyBrambora says). I think you will get a motion sickness if the maneuver is to unpredictable for the brain. In real life it´s not a problem; you are compensating this with your “position sensors”. :smiley:

Another thing:
For me breaks the immersion by watching the NPC walking on the ground (or fighting). They don´t really step on the ground. I see them allways hovering a little.
This needs improvment!!
Every step shouldn´t end over the mud. Maybe WH can trick a little, and change the shoe model in the moment they touch the ground. It should look like stucked in the earth (maybe 5mm deep).
Shoes are in general to clean. And footprints in the sand/earth would be really nice!(END of wishlist :blush:)

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#12

I would like it (I voted for “I will play FPV but I dont mind the TPV option”)… but this topic shows us yet another complication we did not realize: having inercia in TPV would not be compatible with FPV. I mean there are hidden obstacles with including TPV which can somehow influence the final game so I do understand where are those first person ‘selfish’ advocates coming from.
But I think we will see TPV too.

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#13

Wenca posting agina? ohhh!!

But the thing about immersion is that you shouldn’t be disturbed by game mechanics to actually feel it. So if you have 1st person game without inertia you focus purely on the game and story.
But with inertia you will be again and again disturbed by not being able to turn and overall, you will be fighting the controls of the game.
Thats my humble opinion.

But ofcourse this feature might be designed so subtly that it would not really disturb anything, But I don’t think that Warhorse has time for developing such feature.

#14

Posting agina? Huh… sounds like serious sickness : -)

I agree with you, it wouldn’t be probably for everyone. I was just expressing my own personal preference. And as I said, I do not expect it now in KCD or in any game in nearest future except games for Oculus where fast change of the direction isn’t really anything pleasant.

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#15

I think it might be possible to have gradual acceleration without Henry feeling uncontrollable. Let’s suppose as long as you hold W down he keeps running at a certain pace, and when you let go of W he starts gradually slowing down as though he was not trying to keep speed but just keeping his legs up with his body to prevent falling down, and if you press S then he slows down more quickly as he makes an effort to slow down. Once you get used to the controls you should then be able to know what is going to happen when you do a certain WASD thing. You could take Henry for a test run to see how sharply he can turn corners and you should get used to it enough to reliably control Henry the way you want.

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#16

It make a lot of sense… but maybe games can use some level of inercia… ex: if you are just walking is easy to change direction, but with very soft inercia… if you are walking full speed ou lightly running you have some more, and if running full speed more.

You can sense this if you have a good camera movement. I don´t think that realism oppose fun… we walk and run every day… if inertia is realistic it may be much more intuitive than the actual “physics”.

A lot of people struggle when have the first contact with first person games… what if we are just familiarized to that kind of physics? Maybe they are not realty that friendly.

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#17

First of all… sorry to flood the topic… I don´t know how to multi-quote here. That said:

Recently I listened an interview with the physics director from Reiza and he said something interesting about simulation… that “people usually have a wrong concept that simulate something is make things more complicated”, and he uses the walking in ArmA series as an example. We walk around doors every day, but in this game it´s very not intuitive to do that… it is burocratic.

Inertia is a natural thing… you get used to deal with it literaly in every step of your life. Maybe the difficulty is find the right inertia to the game, but if implemented it can raise the level of immersion of the game.

Because I really think that the “ArmA walking” is a mistake, but I also think that a inertia free physic of Battlefield 4 is lame… it´s fun in games uncompromised with reality, as Team Fortress, Borderlands or Skyrim… but is a waste the producers of Kingdom Come use that much efforts to create a real compromised fighting system and then uncompromise exactly in one of the most important pillars of fighting that is movement. Why care about hit in a real way something that don´t move like in reality? Is the same sensation of shooting opponents in Battlefield… you are not fighting human soldiers… you are fighting leopards with guns lol

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#18

It is revolutionary… I don´t know if its good… also, I´m giving it for free LOL

But, seriously… I really believe that it is a good idea… and I believe that Kingdom Come guys are the ones who can do it, and this is the perfect game to have it… especially if they want it to go VR.

PS: And I don´t even start talking about gunsigthing… will leave that to another´s game forum lol

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#19

I think that a game can use it´s own degree of inertia… as it have this own degree of speed, like FIFA… someday, just to curiosity, calculate the speed (acceleration and full speed) of players… you will realize that the slowest players can easily beat Usain Bolt lol

But… ok… FIFA have reasons that make this speed work (like compress an 90 minute match in 6 minutes), but it still a little bit lame, and never a player that knows a little about football will be fully immersed in the game… and, that´s why they always need to jury rig some aspect of gameplay every year… that´s because when you try to be real in a not real way the system will ever collapse in some point.

I also don´t think that ArmA is the solution… cause in that game is harder to turn your soldier than do the same thing in a bloody battletank. But it´s aways about balance. First a game engine must support inertia… then the physics guys and the testers must find the balances… the speeds, equipment/body loads and fine tune all of it until it work.

About sense the inertia: There a lot of things much less usual, like feel pain (bullet or bazooka hit kind of pain) or jump very high, that games “force” players to assimilate. May the movements can be a little more loose… players will understand if the camera don´t stop just after you release the “W” or if you slip a little when run & turn. Just a little of inertia (less than reality… more than in Wolf 3D) can change a lot the gameplay… in a sword fight solves a lot of hitting problems, because the weapon handling can be more real and intuitive (yes… I believe that in games reality is always more intuitive… and intuitive = fun).

And, yes… animation is very important… more than modeling or texturing… Bethesda can say LOL

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#20

Just select the portion of text you want to quote and a contectual button " "quote reply " will appear. Repeat operation for multi-quoting :wink:

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