Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture arrives on PlayStation 4 today, and it appears to be well worth checking out. One thing that might stand in the way of your enjoyment, however, is the game’s movement speed. As it turns out, there is a sprint button in the game, though at no point does it tell you that (yet).
Developer The Chinese Room’s creative director, Dan Pinchbeck, has addressed the movement speed issue in a new blog post, revealing that holding down the R2 button allows you to move more quickly. The game fails to mention this because it was a late addition; Rapture originally included sprint as an automatic feature that kicked in when you walked forward for a few seconds.
Pinchbeck explains that Sony Santa Monica playtested the game not long before its code was finalized and found that players wanted control over when they sprinted.
“So together with Santa Monica, we made a late call,” he says. “We replaced the autosprint with an R2 trigger hold, keeping the gentle ramp up to main speed. This then needed testing, because it potentially threw out all of the pacing we’d been working on for the last year, plus could cause issues with accidentally parkouring into places you couldn’t escape from, creating game-breaking bugs. All this took time.
“And then suddenly launch was right on top of us, and something had been missed. The controller icon in the options menu was missing the sprint instruction, and it hadn’t been localized.”
While localization takes only a day, changes to the UI–built in Flash–would require longer. “[T]hat would mean a full round of testing before creating a patch–about 4-5 days through the global QA pipieline, which we’re doing now, but wasn’t ready in time for release.”
As a result, those who navigate their way to the game’s online manual will be aware of the sprint button, but those who only do what the game explains won’t be aware of the sprint button, at least until that patch arrives.
“We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn’t,” Pinchbeck continues. “That was a bad call, and we’ve paid for it in the reviews. But the most important thing is that we get the word out to players, so here we go–although we’d love you to take your time and explore Yaughton at a slow, steady pace, if you need to backtrack or get around more quickly, hold down R2–it’ll take a few seconds before you are running fully, but it will speed your movement up.”
Whether sprint is enough is another matter. GameSpot’s review notes the slow movement speed, and even after trying out the sprint button, our reviewer found it it’s “not a huge improvement.” Even so, Rapture is still worth a visit.
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