Quickstride, is it broken? A discussion on sprinting.

Earlier I was considering the idea of a sprint action, since running is rather slow. In real life, travelling at a steady jog is possible for a long duration of time. Running at full speed, however, is not something you can do for very long without getting exhausted.

Perhaps this is the reason the developrs, in their infinite wisdom, saw fit to make our characters jog everywhere rather than sprint. But then this leads to the question, on the basis of realism, shouldn't we also be able to run at full speed, even just for a little bit?

Not to inundate you with my every thought process, but at this point I realised "oh wait a minute, I already can sprint."

In case you didn't already know, Quickstride is an ability that allows you to increase your movement speed for a short amount of time. But the thing that prevents its effectiveness and makes it more of a hassle than it is sometimes worth is the fact that you have to first stop in your tracks, go into active stance, select the ability, come to a complete stop once more while you wait for the animation to go off, and then stop once more, go out of active stance and back into passive stance, and finally be off on your merry way.

So my point is: shouldn't there be a more efficient way of sprinting in this game for short periods of time?

Well I can't say the argument of realism is ever a sound one for games other than intense simulation games. People tend to cater it to what things they believe should be real, ignoring the things they don't care about. It's realistic to run but it's okay if realism is put aside when you get gored by a goat.

That's beside the point though. I totally agree that Quickstride is frustrating at best. It's handy to make a quick escape from a monster but outside of that it's mostly not worth using. A sprint mode that's usable only after you've been in passive mode for a given span of time would be nice, especially on those horrifyingly long local leve turn in adventures.

I usually use a combination of Quickstride and the Quickness from Lay of the Land to get everywhere around the world.

In my experiences though, I strongly recommend either implementing Chocobos ASAP or increasing the duration of Quickstride from roughly 20 seconds of sprint time to about 30 or 40 seconds, give or take. It runs out WAY too fast.

However, personally I only use this ability to get from Point A to Point B. Never to escape from battles.

Hello,

I created a similar Thread days ago and I agree that there's something wrong with Quickstride and many other actions.
There are a lot of other issues to fix before this one I guess but yea, definitely it would be great if it gets done someday.

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Originally Posted by ESAR

I think the easiest and would solve alot of annoyance would be to have that animations of putting weapons away not have you need to stop.

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Sure, I don't think it's that hard to do. The Crystal Tool Engine they are using is a very advanced one. I'm pretty sure they have a Blending Animations Tool. Your character can turn its head while running around and it's kinda blended animations. So blending the Run with the Draw/Sheath shouldn't be a big deal.

(it's not important so I don't need to debate on this but if they could keep the head turned while doing emotes that'd add to the realism. BUT this is by far a more than secondary problem)

I just don't see why you can only activate quickstride in active mode and also why it has to have such a stupid, time-consuimg animation associated with it.

You should be able to go from walk to run to sprint without doing anything other than those three things.

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Originally Posted by ESAR

I got it, what they could do is while your character jogs right now, he could go in and out of run, it could use stamina, but just happen automatically so that there is no need to press a button.

Run while using up stamina, once fully used, jogs again, when stamina refills starts running, rinse and repeat.

they could even change the joystick so that there were three positions that had different ways to move, walk, jog and jog/run.

I don't know, I think something like this would add a lil something to the game.

This idea however doesn't help my want to sprint in battle at all lol

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Or it could be that you just press x to go from walk to run and then x again to go from run to sprint. Pressing 'X' would just cycle through the three forms of motion, stamina notwithstanding.

Many things have been thought lightely in the original Game Design Document I think. It seems like at start, an action meant Active Mode.

So whenever you use an action you have to be in Active Mode. Which is not relevant to many actions. Why not just draw weapons when you attack with it (normal attacks and weapon skills) and leave it sheathed when casting spells or actions? That would make it so simple.

EDIT:

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Originally Posted by ESAR

in your honest opinion (and I'm not really educated on the subject myself, just curious) how do you thing the crystal tool engine compares to the cry engine III (Crysis 2)

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I often work with Unreal Engine 3, I don't know much about the CryEngine. All I'm going to say is a big "guess". CryEngine seems to have a better optimisation of textures as he looks like it can calculate larger and more detailed ones. Particles looks to act the same way. Where things change it's that CryEngine is designed for FPS and needs to be tweaked to create other genre whereas Crystal Tool seems to be designed for RPG's and does is great but needs to be tweaked to create other genre (which I'm absolutely not sure since I've never used it and will probably never do).

To me, CryEngine is more powerful and optimisation is greatly done as most computers can run their games. I prefer a Final Fantasy design though. I'm attached to the RPG-J style but the engine looks unstable.

Once more, all of this is a big guess as I work with Unreal Engine 3.

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Originally Posted by ESAR

in your honest opinion (and I'm not really educated on the subject myself, just curious) how do you thing the crystal tool engine compares to the cry engine III (Crysis 2)

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Crystal Tools is only superior in character models, I think. Judging by FFXIV, it might be better at creating high resolution textures too. But Cryengine3 seems the best over all. Just look at how crappy FFXIV renders water, and how none of the zones are seemless, and how foliage looks very two-dimensional and unrealistic except at high multisampling rates.

Cryengine is also more streamlined and stable across a range of hardware. The trouble with Crystal Tools is that SE is the only company using it, so it hasn't improved over repeated usage as has Cryengine 3. I would like to have seen what SE could have done with the Cryengine 3... maybe we would have had truly seemless zones, better water, swimming, jumping, etc etc. One thing is for certain, FFXIV would have released a lot sooner since there would have been more support from the engine providers and less technical issues which arise when companies decide to make their own engines. I suppose the upside is that no MMO will ever look exactly like FFXIV since all the others coming out us Cryengine or Unreal.

Quickstride is probably the main one, but theres a big list of abilities, imo, that should be able to be activated in passive mode :/. The animation, and entering passive mode again chews up a good 3-5 seconds from an already short lived ability.

I also think skills such as quickstride shouldnt draw your weapon. Putting it away again loses like 4 seconds.

Let me preface this by saying that all the delays mentioned bother me too but...

With that being said, Quickstride was probably never meant to help us get around easier. It was most likely meant to be used when we were already in active mode, and needing to ESCAPE something.

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Originally Posted by Enyyx

It was most likely meant to be used when we were already in active mode, and needing to ESCAPE something.

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That is stated in my original thread. The purpose you point, I do take it into consideration. We're just suggesting Quickstride to be handy as an exploration action AND useful as a defensive move. It's just suggestions and feedbacks related to our present feelings about this ability and about Active/Passive Mode in general.

My post from the other Quickstride thread:

Quick stride is almost the same as people walking by the time you go into active, activate, go into passive your at a dead stop and everyone's got a good lead eating up most of the timer just catching up.

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Originally Posted by Seyra

That is stated in my original thread. The purpose you point, I do take it into consideration. We're just suggesting Quickstride to be handy as an exploration action AND useful as a defensive move. It's just suggestions and feedbacks related to our present feelings about this ability and about Active/Passive Mode in general.

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And anyway, even as a defensive action, the 'charging up' animation (which doesn't even make any sense) prevents you from getting away by taking such an exorbitant amount of time to finish. By the time you've finished the animation, the mob you're trying to escape has already murdered you or something.