The biggest criticism for the just released PlayStation 4 exclusive Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is the game speed, which is just excruciatingly slow. It is so slow, in fact, that it has been a target of criticism, as many feel that it has been included as such simply to artificially increase the length of the game.
However, all of that criticism may be unfounded- responding to all of it, the developers revealed that there is a run button in the game- simply holding down R2 should lead to a gradual increase in your movement speed. It not being immediate, however, might be the reason that most players have not noticed it yet.
“A couple of weeks before the game went to final, Santa Monica did a last round of playtesting,” developers The Chinese Room said in a blog post. “At this point, the game included an autosprint. That meant that if you kept moving, you’d gradually ramp up to a run speed, specifically to deal with issues with how long potential back-tracking could take, given the game’s non-linearity. The problem was, playtesters wanted to be able to trigger it themselves. It didn’t matter about the speed, it was the psychology, the choice.
“So together with Santa Monica, we made a late call. 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 localised. Localisation takes about 24 hours, but because the UI is build in Flash, it would have to be changed, and that 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. It’s in the online manual, but not at the start of the game.
“We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn’t. 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.
“And sorry for those of you who already played and were frustrated by the speed. Hopefully it didn’t spoil the experience too much for you, and knowing you can get around faster if you need to will make you want to return to explore more. ”
Well, er… that just sounds like a very unfortunate comedy of errors. Still, I mean, I guess it is good to see that the biggest issue of the game does have a fix, that it is, in fact, not an issue at all.
