How Games Make "Boring" Movement Seem Interesting 

good afternoon gamers! for people asking about games, someone went through and listed all of em. if this helps, you can thank vergil1us. 0:03 Neon White 0:06 Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury 0:11 Halo Infinite 0:16 Guilty Gear Strive 0:19 Monster Hunter Rise 0:22 Ori and the Blind Forest 0:26 Neon White 0:29 The Pathless 0:33 Webbed 0:39 Blue Fire 0:46 Monster Hunter Rise 0:55 Neon White 1:01 Super Mario Odyssey 1:05 Final Fantasy 7 Remake 1:13 Life is Strange 1:16 Control 1:19 God of War 2018 1:21 The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim 1:22 Red Dead Redemption 2 1:25 Resident Evil VIII Village 1:29 The Last of Us 1:36 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 1:39 Firewatch 1:43 A Plague Tale - Innocence 1:50 Disco Elysium 1:54 The Forgotten City 1:56 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 1:59 The Stanley Parable 2:05 Ape Out 2:09 Hades 2:12 Superliminal 2:19 Doom Eternal 2:24 Prey (2017) 2:28 Disco Elysium 2:33 Horizon - Zero Dawn 2:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 2:40 FF14 2:47 Red Dead Redemption 2 2:53 God of War 2018 2:55 The Witcher 3 2:59 Elden Ring 3:02 Ghost of Tsushima 3:06 Nier: Automata 3:10 Portal 3:16 Life is Strange 3:22 The Witcher 3 3:27 Alan Wake 3:32 Prey (2017) 3:34 Grand Theft Auto V 3:35 BloodBorne 3:36 Red Dead Redemption 2 3:40 Assassin's Creed - Origins 3:44 God of War 2018 3:51 Resident Evil 2 Remake 3:58 Uncharted 3 4:06 Resident Evil 2 Remake 4:09 Death Stranding 4:12 The Last of Us Part 2 4:19 Resident Evil 3 Remake 4:26 Limbo 4:32 - 4:49 The Witcher 3, God of War 2018 4:50 Ghost of Tsushima 4:56 Red Dead Redemption 2 5:02 Resident Evil VIII Village 5:12 Unsighted 5:17 A Plague Tale - Innocence 5:25 Alien - Isolation 5:30 Death Stranding 5:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 5:40 A Plague Tale - Innocence 5:48 Resident Evil VIII Village 5:56 Resident Evil 2 Remake 5:59 Little Nightmares 2 6:04 Resident Evil VII 6:10 Resident Evil 2 Remake 6:19 The Pathless 6:23 Death Stranding 7:19 Final Fantasy III 7:24 Apex Legends 7:28 Final Fantasy VII Remake 7:31 Ghost of Tsushima 7:39 Resident Evil VIII Village 7:46 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 7:50 Death Stranding 7:55 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 8:00 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 8:09 The Last of Us 8:10 The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time 8:13 God of War 2018 8:19 The Last Guardian 8:24 Life is Strange 8:28 A Plague Tale - Innocence 8:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 8:40 Red Dead Redemption 2 8:46 The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess 8:50 Prey (2017) 8:53 Horizon - Zero Dawn 8:59 The Quarry 9:02 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 9:11 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 9:19 The Suicide of Rachel Foster 9:21 What Remains of Edith Finch 9:23 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 9:24 Call of The Sea 9:25 Event[0] 9:27 Dear Esther 9:33 Gone Home 10:23 Alan Wake 10:27 The Suicide of Rachel Foster 10:33 Alan Wake 10:37 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 10:43 Resident Evil 2 Remake 10:51 Life is Strange 10:55 Death Stranding 11:00 Red Dead Redemption 2 11:03 Firewatch 11:06 Ghost of Tsushima 11:11 Death Stranding 11:14 Red Dead Redemption 2 11:18 The Last of Us Part 2 11:25 The Quarry 11:34 Uncharted: Lost Legacy 11:42 Firewatch 11:47 Horizon - Zero Dawn 11:52 Resident Evil 2 Remake 11:56 Red Dead Redemption 2 12:06 Firewatch 12:16 The Last of Us 12:25 Yakuza 0 12:29 The Last of Us Part 2 12:38 Horizon - Zero Dawn 12:41 God of War 2018 12:49 Red Dead Redemption 2 12:56 Final Fantasy 7 Remake 13:01 Horizon - Zero Dawn 13:09 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 13:16 Gone Home 13:22 Death Stranding 13:59 Marvel's Spider-man 14:02 Death Stranding 14:17 A Plague Tale - Innocence 14:29 God of War 2018 14:31 The Last of Us Part 2 14:34 Firewatch 14:40 Gone Home 14:44 Life is Strange - True Colors 14:45 God of War 2018, Death Stranding 14:50 Dear Esther 14:55 Life is Strange 14:57 Kentucky Route Zero 15:01 Elden Ring 15:04 Fallout 4, Uncharted - Lost Legacy 15:07 Call of The Sea 15:14 Marvel's Spider-man 15:20 Neon White 15:26 Death Stranding 15:30 Spyro Reignited Trilogy 15:31 Marvel's Spider-man 15:32 Mirror's Edge 15:34 Gone Home

For me, sound design goes a long way. The sound of footsteps through grass and splashing in water, the wind in the trees, animals in the distance, etc. can make walking very immersive. This also works with tension in a major way.

the segment about tension is so true that it's the reason I cant play most horror games my friends wonder why I'm so terrified when "there's literally nothing happening" and I'm like "I KNOW THATS WHY IM SO FREAKIN SCARED"

My least favorite thing is games where running has zero impact on gameplay but the game limits how long you can run anyway

I think a very important game to bring up in this discussion is Pathologic. The entire game is spent walking from place to place, possibly avoiding danger from time to time. And you are on a schedule so the tension is always on, if you don't make it to a place in time, the game still goes on, you just have to deal with the consequences.

The baby Raz lives with: *Takes their first steps* Raz: _riveting_

"Even if I'm doing something that isn't actually faster, I do what _feels_ faster. Or at least what feels more interactable." The perfect quote on what makes an engaging movement system.

My problem with the “being chased by something that can kill you” thing is that if I DO die, all the tension is gone for my next attempt, even for horror games. I become more annoyed by the danger than afraid of failing or dying

I'm convinced that the main purpose of having two movement speeds is to absolutely destroy my hand by making me hold down shift for the entire duration of the game. Thankfully a lot of games let you set it as a toggle instead, but it can really exacerbate wrist pain and prevent me from enjoying a game 😞

It's a bit of a silly example, but when I was playing Hollow Knight, despite the amount of backtracking being potentially very boring, I noted that I was having fun walking around because I was enjoying how I could hack and slash at various objects in a very spammy way: chopping down grass, bending lamp posts, cracking eggs, etc. It was mindless, but something about that was satisfying and an effective distraction that kept me immersed. I bet that for some games, it might not even be destroying the environment that's needed to distract, but just having the world react to them, like grass bending and ruffling around their steps.

Those sections where you are forced to slowly walk in a game that usually has faster movement are pure pain. I'm rarely actually interested in the exposition dump that gets thrown at you in these situations, so I'm forced to just sit around with the single action of pushing the joystick forward available to me.

I think there's something missing from the conversation here. Movement isn't simply something to distract players from - at least, not always. Movement is also a primary way you interact with your surroundings. It can define your relationship with the game environment. Some of the best movement in games I've played has included feedback from the environment. Whether that's the way rain affects grip in death stranding, or the gravity of a planet affects how far you can jump or step in Outer Wilds, or how the speed of running/rain/slope can affect how quickly you can stop in Miasmata. In all of these games, the way you move teaches you about the game's environment and world. Sometimes it seems that walking can be a dialogue system between you and the world. Just as every choice in a dialogue tree informs your outlook and character going forward, so can every step in a game (where the movement system is well designed). In Outer Wilds, a planet feels small when the gravity is less; it also feels alien, and makes you curious. And this may just be me, but when playing Death Stranding, half the time I play it just to interact with the environment - just to walk through it. I will walk instead of using vehicles just to feel the ground at my feet. Hell, I barely even run. I plan my routes based on where I can find a nice place to sit and relax along the journey - and it's so easy to see them, like they're laid out for you. If I was playing it with the mindset of distracting myself from the movement, I wouldn't be playing. I dunno, I've seen a lot of people talk about their frustrations with the game, but I have rarely fallen. It might punish your mistakes if your goal is speed, but in my experience it actually punishes haste. Those who take their time, and their pleasure, will enjoy the walking. It teaches you how to approach the environment; how to approach the game too. I think we could do more listening and learning where movement systems are concerned.

Movement that ive always found the most satsfying is the one that just "makes you experience the character". For example in Mgs V I find Snakes movement soo good. He moves so fast and methodically, and the sounds of all your gear rattling around and your boots violently hitting the ground just sells you the fact that you are here on a mission.

obviously assassins creed has a complex movement system, but back in the older games even running around on the ground was intuitive because there were different ways to run to maximize speed, which was made more complex by the fact that if you run into people you slow down or fall, made just getting through a crowd in the street an interesting experience

List of games with timestamps. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. 0:03 Neon White 0:06 Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury 0:11 Halo Infinite 0:16 Guilty Gear Strive 0:19 Monster Hunter Rise 0:22 Ori and the Blind Forest 0:26 Neon White 0:29 The Pathless 0:33 Webbed 0:39 Blue Fire 0:46 Monster Hunter Rise 0:55 Neon White 1:01 Super Mario Odyssey 1:05 Final Fantasy 7 Remake 1:13 Life is Strange 1:16 Control 1:19 God of War 2018 1:21 The Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim 1:22 Red Dead Redemption 2 1:25 Resident Evil VIII Village 1:29 The Last of Us 1:36 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 1:39 Firewatch 1:43 A Plague Tale - Innocence 1:50 Disco Elysium 1:54 The Forgotten City 1:56 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 1:59 The Stanley Parable 2:05 Ape Out 2:09 Hades 2:12 Superliminal 2:19 Doom Eternal 2:24 Prey (2017) 2:28 Disco Elysium 2:33 Horizon - Zero Dawn 2:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 2:40 2:47 Red Dead Redemption 2 2:53 God of War 2018 2:55 The Witcher 3 2:59 Elden Ring 3:02 Ghost of Tsushima 3:06 Nier: Automata 3:10 Portal 3:16 Life is Strange 3:22 The Witcher 3 3:27 Alan Wake 3:32 Prey (2017) 3:34 Grand Theft Auto V 3:35 BloodBorne 3:36 Red Dead Redemption 2 3:40 Assassin's Creed - Origins 3:44 God of War 2018 3:51 Resident Evil 2 Remake 3:58 Uncharted 3 4:06 Resident Evil 2 Remake 4:09 Death Stranding 4:12 The Last of Us Part 2 4:19 Resident Evil 3 Remake 4:26 Limbo 4:32 - 4:49 The Witcher 3, God of War 2018 4:50 Ghost of Tsushima 4:56 Red Dead Redemption 2 5:02 Resident Evil VIII Village 5:12 Unsighted 5:17 A Plague Tale - Innocence 5:25 Alien - Isolation 5:30 Death Stranding 5:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 5:40 A Plague Tale - Innocence 5:48 Resident Evil VIII Village 5:56 Resident Evil 2 Remake 5:59 Little Nightmares 2 6:04 Resident Evil VII 6:10 Resident Evil 2 Remake 6:19 The Pathless 6:23 Death Stranding 7:19 Final Fantasy III 7:24 Apex Legends 7:28 Final Fantasy VII Remake 7:31 Ghost of Tsushima 7:39 Resident Evil VIII Village 7:46 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 7:50 Death Stranding 7:55 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 8:00 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 8:09 The Last of Us 8:10 The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time 8:13 God of War 2018 8:19 The Last Guardian 8:24 Life is Strange 8:28 A Plague Tale - Innocence 8:36 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 8:40 Red Dead Redemption 2 8:46 The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess 8:50 Prey (2017) 8:53 Horizon - Zero Dawn 8:59 The Quarry 9:02 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 9:11 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 9:19 The Suicide of Rachel Foster 9:21 What Remains of Edith Finch 9:23 The Vanishing of Ethan Carter 9:24 Call of The Sea 9:25 Event[0] 9:27 Dear Esther 9:33 Gone Home 10:23 Alan Wake 10:27 The Suicide of Rachel Foster 10:33 Alan Wake 10:37 Hellblade - Senua's Sacrifice 10:43 Resident Evil 2 Remake 10:51 Life is Strange 10:55 Death Stranding 11:00 Red Dead Redemption 2 11:03 Firewatch 11:06 Ghost of Tsushima 11:11 Death Stranding 11:14 Red Dead Redemption 2 11:18 The Last of Us Part 2 11:25 The Quarry 11:34 Uncharted: Lost Legacy 11:42 Firewatch 11:47 Horizon - Zero Dawn 11:52 Resident Evil 2 Remake 11:56 Red Dead Redemption 2 12:06 Firewatch 12:16 The Last of Us 12:25 Yakuza 0 12:29 The Last of Us Part 2 12:38 Horizon - Zero Dawn 12:41 God of War 2018 12:49 Red Dead Redemption 2 12:56 Final Fantasy 7 Remake 13:01 Horizon - Zero Dawn 13:09 Uncharted 3 - Drake's Deception 13:16 Gone Home 13:22 Death Stranding 13:59 Marvel's Spider-man 14:02 Death Stranding 14:17 A Plague Tale - Innocence 14:29 God of War 2018 14:31 The Last of Us Part 2 14:34 Firewatch 14:40 Gone Home 14:44 Life is Strange - True Colors 14:45 God of War 2018, Death Stranding 14:50 Dear Esther 14:55 Life is Strange 14:57 Kentucky Route Zero 15:01 Elden Ring 15:04 Fallout 4, Uncharted - Lost Legacy 15:07 Call of The Sea 15:14 Marvel's Spider-man 15:20 Neon White 15:26 Death Stranding 15:30 Spyro Reignited Trilogy 15:31 Marvel's Spider-man 15:32 Mirror's Edge 15:34 Gone Home

One of my favorite things in video games is movement. Flying around at 500mph while jump sliding in titan fall 2 is so fun I dont even need to be good at the game to have fun.

I think the boating segments in god of war are an amazing example of talking while travelling you'll get stories that don't really affect the narrative of the game, and whenever you get off the boat, Mimir will pause and make a comment about finishing the story later Once you go back to the boat, he will pick up a little bit before he left off, and it feels natural Then there's stealth games like Dishonored and Hitman, which I think offer a similar solution to horror games with tension. Despite walking in hitman being relatively slow, I've never found myself thinking that it was boring, with people that could spot you put in various places Subnautica, while not usually walking (though some sections of walking were super tense in below zero), also adds a lot of tension whenever you're in an area you know to be dangerous (which can be almost anywhere). Some pda voice lines also multiply that tension tenfold

Final Fantasy XV's walking and running animations make it for me. The transition between running, walking and stopping are so smooth. Characters step aside suddenly when you bump into them. Every party member actually looks like they're running as fast as they can, judging by their natural arm movement. No human runs as fast as they can, sometimes even unnaturally fast like some games have their characters run, while almost having their arms only wave back and forth, while only barely leaning themselves forward. It's exceptionally important for the game considering the amount of time you spend walking. The characters also talk a lot during walking, and everything is 100% voiced. The game's animations in general are super natural, some head movements during conversations aside.

For me, one thing that really helps to make long runs or walks in games less boring is just having some nice eye candy to look at. If the environment around me is gorgeous to look at, then I kind of don't really mind spending a bit of time appreciating it as I travel.

Razbuten, how do you decide on a video idea? Do you come up with them while playing games, do you have a premade list of game elements, or something else entirely? You always make very insightful videos, and as a developer I have found them very helpful, but they are often on topics I don't even think about while making/playing games!

One thing you missed is keeping players engaged by having them go through an area with a lot going on in the background. Maybe you're walking through a city and suddenly hear an acapella performance taking place right ahead of you, elsewhere you pass a quarrelling couple, a man with a megaphone announcing the latest propaganda, an air balloon launching off. Maybe you leave the city, on the way you see a waterfall way in the distance that is unreachable, or you see an airship pass by high above, little things like that can give the player something to watch and take in while they're hitting the forward button.

I love travelling in "Kingdom Come: Deliverance". On hardcore mode without fast travel, you can spend tens of minutes just travelling. But the scenery is so beautiful that I can just play to game to feel imersed into beautiful medival Bohemian empire.

Was just talking about this with a buddy yesterday. He's making a puzzle game similar to Antichamber and others and just adding sprinting, camera zooming, jumping, and little things to tool around with make the game much more fun to play. Kind of like little fidget spinners to play with while you're thinking about a puzzle.

One thing I feel I have to bring up is Guild Wars 2. It's an MMO, and like most other MMOs, it has mounts. However, in all other MMOs a mount will do little more than make you move faster, or occasionally, fly. GW2, however, went a step further, as its mounts not only let you move faster, but ALSO let you do other unique movement styles. The Raptor gave you a long jump. The Springer gave you a high jump. The Skimmer flew over the surface of the water. The Jackal blinked forwards a short distance. The Griffon flew, but in a way that required you to flap your wings and use the momentum gained from diving to shoot very fast over the land. The Skyscale worked like a helicopter, but could only hover so far before is slowly moved downwards. And the Rollerbeetle zoomed over the ground using momentum, picking up speed downhill and slowing down when going uphill. Regardless of any other pros or cons, GW2 did a FANTASTIC job revolutionizing the idea of mounts, and I hope other MMOs take note of it.

This is a fantastic video on something I'm always thinkg about. People--especially critics--dismiss walking sections all the time. But it really can be done right. Where the gameplay influences emotion (like you rightly point out), rather than the story just demanding players just walk through an area just because the controls no longer allow a run option. Great work and I hope this blows up because I think this conversation is filled with people who are overly quick to dismiss the mechanic.

I love how whenever you started talking about tension while walking, the firewatch out started playing in the background. good attention to detail raz. amazing video as always!

One thing I love about the Yakuza series is that walking is always a viable and efficient form of movement. The cities you explore throughout the series are full of substories, stores, and beautiful sights, so walking around has its own reward. On top of that, it makes each city feel like a real place, since you can walk across a part of town in a matter of minutes. Fast travel taxis are limited and cost money, so while occasionally they're quite useful, walking usually works better. Lastly, you can sprint in many of the games, but even then the game limits it at first until you upgrade it, encouraging players to take in the experience early on yet letting late-game players blast past everything they've already seen. And since you mentioned detailed movement, the latest games expanded walking animations. Kiryu will often adjust his coat, check his watch, or stretch his arms a bit while moving around. I've always loved the series for how it makes towns come to life, especially with Tokyo, since it returns in every game. There's always something new to look for, and the town evolves between games, almost making it a character in this grandiose story.

For story-driven games with a big world, I think ORAS worked well with its inclusion of Latias. Basically, instead of fast travel, you jump onto Latias and fly over the map. You get the fast movement without breaking immersion or player interactivity. With games championing larger and larger worlds, I think the best thing to do sometimes is to let players make it smaller.

The point about working dialogue into travel has me wishing I was a game developer so I could play with that possibility. Imagine a Witcher or Elder Scrolls game where you can ask your travel companion to talk about their life while you're walking or riding - or where you can hire a bard to travel with you and play songs along the way. The possibilities are endlt for games with escort missions, so long as the programmers make it less painful to match the pace of the escorting group. Frankly, I think that the best way to manage that with an escort mission would be to offer players the option to toggle a paced mode on or off that automatically slows the player's speed when they are getting too far ahead, so that they don't have to worry about pausing and waiting every dozen yards or so: you can just keep tilting forward and your speed would vary based on your relative position to the companion. You would have to be able to toggle it off if you want to check ahead on the path, but otherwise I think it would dramatically reduce the frustration you mentioned about getting too far away and not being able to hear the NPC. I appreciate you pointing out that the most satisfying experience is always when these elements are balanced: I can easily get sucked into the experience when managing the stamina meter in BotW, but I find that gets tiring after a while as I run out of areas that are unfamiliar in the game and I don't encounter those perfect moments you describe.

What I got out of this video is that Death Stranding, which is a game about moving from Point A to Point B literally over and over and over again, manages to make moving from those points over and over again just so engaging and fun in all the right ways. Like seriously, you kept talking about how to make “boring movement” interesting and I was like “oh Death Stranding does something like that” just over and over again. Basically I think Death Stranding is an amazing game, and this was a great video

Something that I never noticed until I played Mass Effect 2 and Mass Effect 3 back to back is how massively improved the game is just by being able to roll and sprint longer. In ME2 Shepherd can maybe sprint for 5 seconds before the game forces you into a lazy jog.

Hey, quick suggestion, if it’s possible could you have a list of the games that were used for footage. Some of titles were not mentioned for games that look really interesting that I don’t particularly know the name of. Thanks!

Congrats on the abstinence from BoTW and Outer Wilds!

I never thought of walking in games so deeply, makes sense why I drop so many games as I'm bored of it.

Absolutely perfect video (I promise I’ve already watched)

As someone who aims to get into the game dev industry in a couple of years, I'm really glad I stumbled on this video: you have such a well though opinion on what is, frankly, an overlooked mechanic by many indie or even AAA studios. Thank you for sharing!

Just Cause 3 solves this problem by giving you a wing suit. Super easy to stay engaged with movement when the tension involved is the very real possibility of faceplanting into a building or mountain.

You've done "When to stop a game", I'd like to see "How to start a game" or something along those lines. Tyvm for all the work you put on these videos!

First off, I love your videos because a lot of what you say I have thought or had conversations about with my friends. When you are flashing a whole hosts of games across the screen, I wish the title was somewhere to be seen. You know so much and have played so much, but from my perspective I maybe know the game or played the game 60% of the time, and the other 40% I wish I knew so I could play it. Other than that, keep doing what you're doing. Love the content and just want to play more from these videos.

You should put a list of shown games in the description. A lot of these look pretty cool, and I'm kinda upset that I can't look them up.

I really don't play many videogames, but I enjoy your content of theoretical analysis and breaking down different aspects of this artform so much, that I recently played some of your favorite titles. Mostly story based games, because I simply don't "enjoy" the manual challenge of gaming. But it is very cool, that I was introduced into this whole new world because of you! Thank you for that.

Honestly, I feel like in most games I play the thing that pulls me along is "resource gathering" or something similar to it

The sheer number of quality games shown in this video, with different types of movement that match with the content, is really impressive. Great video design and editing!

Now that was cool. When you were talking about “walking progresses the story“, I thought of Firewatch. I looked up from what I was doing and saw a Firewatch clip. Then a couple seconds later, when you were talking about “walking too fast or slow so it’s hard to hear conversations“, I thought of RDR2. Great video man!

Honestly, first person walking Sims are my favorite genre of game. If done right narratively, they can be one of the most engaging and immersive games ever

my favorite essays are ones that point at something painfully obvious that I never look at and go, look at how interesting this thing is! this video nails it.

as soon as you mentioned narrative being a tool to expedite the players movement, i immediately recalled the event of midnas darkest hour, from twilight princess, and i was very happy to see a clip of that make it in. love the video !

You're actually my favorite video game essay youtuber. Your talking feels so natural and compelling and you always put so much time and thought into your videos. Much love

As someone who is currently trying to develop a game that is basically slow walking through its entirety in a no tension environment, I've found that little interruptions along the way help a lot with enjoyability and retention, like a lonely dog, or a colorfull house amidst a grand vast ocean of monotone houses, stuff like that, great video btw

I've always loved the parts of Breath of the Wild where you just walk in empty spaces. Often these moments look - and especially sound - beautiful! I could never articulate why these moments made me love Breath of the Wild so much, but your description of these moments made it click. The idea that these are times where the game is asking you to reflect. Spot on!

Hey thanks a lot for this video! It’s exactly what I needed before continuing to work on my game. I absolutely needed a quick lesson on this kind of stuff.

i just discovered you channel and i love it. you break games down to thier core concepts and constructs. me as a game designer, you have helped me realize a lot of different things that make a good game a good game. youve taught me a lot so far

Being able to take in the surroundings is a big part of walking for me. I'm playing GTA 3 on PS2 (after having played San Andreas previously), and it's really noticeable that you can't swing the camera around with the right stick. It makes walking much less fun as I have to stop to see what's around me when I'm trying to explore.

While I think the merits are implied in your discussion of other types of movement mechanics, I think games that rely on WHERE you go can also break up the monotony of movement. This is especially true of stealth games which give players diverse options for approaching a target, each with their own implications, even when getting there is some iteration on a sneaking/running/climbing/teleporting sequence

You always put so much effort into your videos it's incredible. I would love to see a video about final bosses next!

made me smile to see another video of you pop up on my recommended videos

I was expecting to see The Long Dark, a game that got... well.. none of that right, at all. The walking is part of the struggle. You FEEL the pain of it. Walking is pain, and punishment, but it's also survival. You TRUDGE.

Love that most of the topics handled are obscure but can make the game many times better. Cant wait to see more!

I'm really happy to see you do a video on movement! It sounds weird but it's one of my favorite aspects of games and can make or break the experience for me. You hit the nail on the head for why games like Resident Evil are able to be so engrossing for me: the tension, the immersive animation and sound, the quiet moments where I'm figuring out a puzzle or reflecting on story beats. I want to point out that in some games/genres, tension is accomplished through other means too! In the survival genre, Subnautica has a lot going for its movement. Of course you almost have 6 degrees of freedom. The O2, food and water meters essentially put constant timers on your movement like you brought up in your video. This works much better than it does for timed sections of other games though because it synergizes with the exploration of the open world and the crafting system. By crafting upgrades to your movement or new vehicles you essentially expand your playable area. That and how the different forms of movement are more qualitatively different from each other than the usual horseriding creates a lot of decision making. Subnautica uses other tools you went over, like Moments and tension from setting or monsters. Meanwhile, The Long Dark is my other favorite survival game and its movement is a lot more basic, but I actually tend to be less bored holding W in that game than in Subnautica. I think it does three things really well: it ratchets the timer tension up to 11 with brutally punishing temperatures, it makes stealth matter, and most importantly it makes players pay attention to the environment. Your movement matters in The Long Dark because the game is balanced around your slow pace. Like a walking sim, walking is the main way you'll interact with the world since resource harvesting, crafting and combat don't take very much time. However walking in TLD involves a whole tree of decisions including your survival meters, avoiding threats, and getting more information on what's in your environment so you can plan your next move. Similarly, Hunt: Showdown's movement is much slower than its flashier competitors like Apex Legends and much less involved and immersive than its hardcore peers like Escape from Tarkov. Yet I think Hunt's movement is amazing! Because the sound system is so fleshed out, choosing to walk, run or crouch makes a big difference in being detected by AI or other players. The AI is designed incredibly well to put pressure on the player and force them to move or shoot. The level design, both in and out of compounds, is top notch and helps to make movement choices matter whether you're in a firefight or running from one end of the map to the other. It's very satisfying to go from giving AI a wide berth to running straight through them because you know you can use a certain part of the level to lose them, and of course this makes a competitive difference too. Essentially this falls under the umbrella of tension, which I often think of as pressure, but I just wanted to demonstrate that your principle works for more than just AAA story-driven games that you mostly used as examples in your video. Sometimes it takes different forms that synergize better with the goals and other mechanics of the game.

You are quite possibly the best video game video essay RU-vidr I’ve ever consumed content from. You can make a 17 minute video of a topic that seems boring into an interesting video. I’m bad at wording things so yeah, but have a great day and keep making great content!

Dang good timing, I just started Death Stranding the other day and I'm loving it so far

I love the vibes option when games do it, because it also acts as a dip in the tension arc. Like I get to chill and look at a pretty scene and listen to nice music between fights for my life. It's nice.

Lol, i love this channel so much. When i spend time thinking in a subject you came with a video exactly about it. You read my mind everytime, sir

You're such a good RU-vidr, thanks for the stuff you do and for the comments you answer to.

I'm here from twitter to confirm that I, would indeed, watch you talk about anything

While We are Talking about games that make Walking Interesting I'd Like to talk about My Time with Morrowind. While You can Eventually craft magic that lets you jump the entire map in seconds, The Vast amount of the time I Was walking from one place to another. I really Love how the lack of a fast travel system had me planning out the fastest way to travel on the Boat/Silt Strider "Bus Routes". It made traveling around the Island of Vvardenfell the Easiest, with going further inland taking more time. Around the Midgame you start to unlock the "Propylon" Teleporters, which was something you Had to make happen and helped with getting around, but didn't just take you Exactly where you wanted to go. I'd also Like to mention how much I enjoyed slowly gaining skills, They made playing as a late game player so much more rewarding to me because I saw how big the world was When I was Slow, and I loved reaching a point as a character where I could Cross it quickly.

This is an amazing video with a lot of efforts put in it! I love your channel.

I love all the time and effort that you put into your videos! It makes everything that little bit better.

couldn't help but think about the movement in stealth games like thief. The sound of footsteps being different on different floors makes it pretty engaging

Personally my favourite movement in a game is the first ori game, it just feels so fluid, and cool

Another Razbuten video another great time, thanks for lighting up my day!!!

Dude I absolutely love your content! Keep it up man your doing great!

Personally, I’m a massive fan of the Spider-Man games and one thing that they do while your not swinging around is create bustling and interesting environments to discover on the floor, fans to take selfies with or give hugs etc. so even when you’re not being awesome and swinging through the air, there’s something to do on the street level.

I feel like level design and challenge also plays a role in this. It's why climbing is boring in Uncharted but I really like the platform challenges in a Prince of Persia game.

Really great video, Raz!!!

What's super cool about your channel is that even when you're talking about things I have no idea about or don't care about, you make it interesting and make me care! That is super cool!

Walking and listening to character's dialogues has always been most engaging for me. No matter what mechanic the game developers come up with it gets mundane over time even if it evolves periodically throughout the game in some way. Dialogues however let the storylike progress and make the game feel more as a game, rather than a movie, as I'm actively performing some sort of action while the 'cutscene' is playing. Dialogues, if done well, are a staple human thing that never gets boring.

If you carefully plan the pace of walking, the ability to run or crawl, add physics to make movement more realistic and immersive,and work on your environments for them to be visually appealing you can heavily improve your game. This topic is more important that it seems, since boring movement might lead to boredom and come between you and enjoying your game. I love the movement in Spider-Man PS4 and Miles Morales because moving is quick and the environment and swinging make traversal very interesting and even fun.

This was a great video!

Good video! I think you touch on it toward the end, but positive forms of tension are useful too. Mystery, intrigue, something to pull you forward. Even on replays, good architecture concepts help make this feeling repeatable.

Razbuten: walking is boring Also Razbuten: I hate fast travel

I feel like good walking is done by having nice environments. So walking is just scrolling through the nice visuals.

Amazing video! Never thought of this and you talked about it fantastically!

"...at some point I either accidentally cut off a character mid sentence by hitting a new zone..." This happened to me in real life today. *IMMERSION*

The dialog cuting out part annoyed me a lot of Guardians of the Galaxy. If you wanted to hear the end of any conversation you had ot stand still because doing anything might cut it off

Love your work! I’ve been thinking about stuff like “urgency” in open world games and how it seems kind of dumb. The story of calls for me to hurry to the next quest mission however I don’t actually have to. Do you have any examples of urgency done well in the open world? Thanks.

For a year now I've been brainstorming how to make a video about walking mechanics and how some games just dumpster fire the whole ordeal and here's Raz with my exact idea. I hate youtube. But also amazing video Raz the quality here is as great as ever! Glad you're back to it with the new babby!

1:10 I regularly enjoy walking around in video game worlds like this. It's so immersive, and there's so much to look at and explore that you may otherwise miss if you're just sprinting around the map all the time.

As weird as it may sound, walking in SMT V was pretty enjoyable.

Long dark goes the opposite way and purposely leans into the slow and steady vibe of walking. Really gives it a calming and lonely atmosphere. It can go the opposite way when supplies are low, with the hope being that wherever u chose to search has what you need. Then it's this sense of a slowly running down clock

This was a good video and a great departure from the "I don't like these games because" road you seemed to be going down. I enjoyed this.

I'm so glad you mentioned the tension random encounters create, it's part of the reason I love old console rpgs so much. Whether you're going deeper into a dungeon or escaping it, every time you move to another tile you're risking so much. Or when you're trying to get back to safety in the overworld on super low resources and you're just praying. I like dungeons in those games so much since they're like little mazes with different paths there to hold secrets or to throw you off, meaning every step is a meaningful decision. Until you get super over leveled for an area.

"... nor even mention Jet Set Radio Future ?" JSTR was such a joy to play and run around. The mechanic to keep you active felt as though it was just your skater having genuine love for skating and constantly pulling out tricks... with the characters being unable to stop continuing that dance whenever standing still.

I feel like the issue you keep coming back to in this video is that a game can try to use lots of narrative/artistic smoke-and-mirrors to disguise shallow movement, but players will see through it pretty quickly. I think this applies to a lot of mechanics beyond movement. In general, I don't think there's any reliable way to make a shallow game "seem" deep without just actually introducing interesting mechanical gameplay. A lot of the best media (interactive or otherwise) benefits from being revisited multiple times so you can dig into all the subtle little nuances of the work. If you do that to a game that tries to paper over shallow mechanics with flashy presentation or detailed storytelling, you're quickly going to realize that there was never any nuance in the first place.

The light commentary on Gone Home was interesting to me. For context I live in a rather old and large house, and walking around alone with dim or dark areas has become something I am quite used to (I don't bother turning many lights on at night). When playing Gone Home (which I loved), I didn't ever feel any sense of dread or danger, it was just peaceful exploring for me. I guess I never put thought into it or made the connection until seeing your video.

Thank you for the non auto generated subtitles! Great video too!

Good day Raz, thank you for releasing another amazing video

I was really surprised I didn't see a SINGLE BotW clip during this! I mean, I know how much you love the game, it's my all time favorite too! Anyway, great video, really interesting to think about and exciting to see another one of your videos!

Satisfactory does a great job with locomotion. Other than walking, you can run, swim, zip line, slide, built an item that makes you run faster and jump higher or build other items that allow you to fly or hover. There's jump pads. Hyper tubes. Items that stop fall damage from any height. You can run, then crouch-slide into a long jump. And then you have multiple vehicles that all handle completely different. The nice part about it is that because the game is about building factories, you can basically design your own parkour course. I have fun in that game just running around sometimes.

aww yea, every time I see you have a new video, I always know I will enjoy it. 👍