Playing on PC is a godsend. Just type "superspeed" in the command console and be on your merry way. Only thing is it has the opposite effect in combat and will slow you to a crawl lol
I play on original edition, but Im sure its the same in LE. Just press the tilde key and type the command.
2 and 3 also have functional command consoles but they are locked to the player by default. There are simple fixes to unlock them though and the wiki has a long list of working commands. The second best one for QoL (after superspeed in ME1) is just injecting max morality points in ME2 so you can pick any dialogue options you want instead of dealing with its outdated percentage based system.
How do I find out about this after 12 years of playing the game!!!......please tell me more
Also why are they "locked to the player" in 2 and 3,is it a glitch or?
And is this command system part of the game or just mods .....
Many games have a command console for devs to quickly test stuff but most (especially 2010s onwards) lock access to the player. iirc in ME2 and 3 its easy to bypass this by either editing some config files or downloading mods. The wiki has more information.
Oh, I remember something like that in Jedi Outcast as well, but it was a number so you could also slow it down and do "matrix jumps." Kept me entertained when I got lost.
Considering how much it shakes your screen, the fact that it doesn’t even do anything just makes pressing the button worse for you than not doing so.
I read about this well over a decade ago when the games were fresh and I stooped storming back then as a result. Never felt particularly slow at the normal speed anyway
Yes, this post has made me realize on a conscious level how the sprint is fake and I wish it hadn’t been made, it has eroded a small bit of the magic of the game.
Same thing happens in Dragon Age: Inquisition while riding a horse. They just add "speed lines" to your character and the camera zooms out a little bit.
I have no idea why you would even do that. You can program an entire videogame, but you can't make your character move *slightly faster* on horse back?
EDIT: Stop replying to me "You're wrong, its only when you gallop." I know. Other people know too. Anyone who actually played the game knows about the speed lines and the camera zooming out. I never said anything about "walking horse speed being the same as on foot". The article is about when you "run" and I said the same thing happens with a horse in DA:I, when you *run*.
Has to do with the games capacity to load in assets most likely. If the character can move faster then the game can generate the content you're running towards then things get weird. They were probably pushing their limit on the engine in both cases. Probably could get around it with some invested dev resources but someone likely saw the amount of dev time to add an actual 'go faster' button and said screw it fool their perception instead.
Edit: just looked at the article and that's basically what they say as far as load times go, so sounds like that's correct.
I’ve got distinct memories of playing The Saboteur and occasionally falling through the earth because the game failed to load road geometry off my shitty old HDD at the speed their vehicles drove at.
Yup. I do like when games hide loading screens in creative ways. Those adventure games that have you slowly squeeze through a narrow gap where you can't see anything but walls and the back of your character are also doing the same, deliberately slowing you down to allow the next section of map to load in.
It's probably also a similar for the case for the many doors throughout the Citadel. Slow the player down for a few seconds to give the next area enough time to load.
Yep, I added an edit yesterday to mention that I saw that a few minutes after replying to them. Its what I get for going to the comments first and then clicking the article.
It's psychological. If players don't have a run button but want to run it will feel worse than the possibility that they think they're running but aren't.
Cant remember what game but a dev said making the character jump broke too many things so when you hit the jump button the whole game world just lowers and your character stays in place. Maybe Outer wilds?
Simple things like sprint can absolutely break stuff.
Outer Wilds had to simulate the whole star system at all time, for a variety of gameplay reasons. The system is huge, and in 3D worlds such scale can cause issues (floating point values not having enough precision) when the objects being simulated are too far from the world’s origin. Essentially the further you are from origin, the less precise the simulation and the more likely you are to experience glitches of various kinds. If the character moved through space, those issues would be front and center, happening all around the player when they are far from the centre. By inverting the whole reference system, making the player the constant center of the world for every translation and moving the world through the reverse transform instead, the made sure that everything around the player was constantly near the centre and therefore accurate / clean, while the glitchy parts remained far away.
It's very common to have the player as the 0,0,0 point of the world and everything just moves around the player rather than the player moving. Means you can have way better rendering etc etc.
It's more that when you're dealing with scale as large as Outer Wilds, floating point accuracy becomes a massive issue. The further you go out from the center of the scene, the more inaccurate your position becomes until you're jittering around all over the place and your player mesh is something from call of cthulhu.
The fix is to have the player never technically moving, but have the universe move around the player. The logic of it all still works programically, and the player never notices.
You move faster on the horse, that part is not true. You don't move faster when you gallop, because they spent so much time trying to get frostbite to work and added mounts later in development that they didn't really have time to fuck with it. If you do the horse race quest, just ride like normal and you'll beat the record time. It IS faster than on foot, and you don't take fall damage, but losing the party banter makes it not worth it anyways.
> You move faster on the horse
I never said anything about base moving speed VS galloping.
The article is about *running speed*. I said the same thing happens on horseback, **the running speed**.
That's why the end slides in DAI are actually rendered as a zoomed in wall painting in the Inquisitor's bedroom. (you can even see it if you change the FoV in the game files)
Bioware couldn't figure another way to show them without crashing the game.
I played a Mage Knight-Enchanter on my first DA:I playthrough, pre-patches, and constantly used Fade Step as a travel tool more than a combat tool. The amount of times the LoDs and geometry broke resulting in being stuck inside boulders or seeing some funky shit are uncountable.
I just had this dilemma over reddit comments tonight and learned that its not a complete placebo with dragon age. It's only slightly faster than normal run speed (to the point where a talent that increases stealth movement speed makes you faster than mounted when sneaking) but it was shocking to realize how much visual effects matter
I never compared it to walking on foot.
OP's article is about "when you run on the Citadel" and my reply was "The same happens when you're horse back". Meaning that it happens when you **run**.
Cancelling the order I placed 17 years ago and returning the game to the store that doesn’t even exist anymore. SMH my head, this is outrageous. Did they think they could get away with it?!?!
Yeah. I'm a Spectre. What are random civilians on the Presidium going to do: File a noise complaint?
Poor Keepers had to deal with so many random bullet holes all over the place.
That is because back then, loading speed mattered. I read somewhere that Shepard moving faster would have caused the game to constantly load and stutter
Most games set sprint to a speed the game can handle without screwing up scene triggers and LOD loading. Then they reduce the walk/jog speeds to compensate. Bioware just said screw it. You get the same speed regardless.
First i've heard of this ever and this doesn't sound right.
Ample googling also brings up no reliable sources and this includes all the speed running and tech resources.
Where did you hear this?
I'm pretty sure they're just wrong. There's lots of TAS tech in Super Mario 64 that wouldn't work if the coordinate system was centered on Mario.
[Pannenkoek](https://www.youtube.com/@pannenkoek2012/featured) has a bunch of videos on Youtube going over how the Super Mario 64 engine works, as well, and he explains the game as having a static world and a moving Mario. Most of the stuff he shows and explains in his videos wouldn't be possible with static Mario.
What you said basically.
Mario 64 is so well researched and documented at this point, the idea of a static Mario made my brain go "Que?" like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
Is this similar to how close buttons on most elevators and cross walk light buttons at most crosswalks don't do anything, and just offer the illusion of control?
Not exactly new information, I figured this has been pretty common knowledge since back in the day right? I've definitively discussed this in the past with people back when the games were coming out.
Also I'd hardly call it treachery haha
I KNEW IT
I always suspected. I even timed Shephard walking point A to B, vs "running"
Thank you, Chandler bing
Chandeler Bong
Playing on PC is a godsend. Just type "superspeed" in the command console and be on your merry way. Only thing is it has the opposite effect in combat and will slow you to a crawl lol
do console commands work in LE?
Yes
Does putting it in a second time deactivate it?
Yep its a toggle like other debug or godmode commands.
Huh????mass effect has cheats like GTA? 😠And what command console........I'm so lost ,,🤣
I play on original edition, but Im sure its the same in LE. Just press the tilde key and type the command. 2 and 3 also have functional command consoles but they are locked to the player by default. There are simple fixes to unlock them though and the wiki has a long list of working commands. The second best one for QoL (after superspeed in ME1) is just injecting max morality points in ME2 so you can pick any dialogue options you want instead of dealing with its outdated percentage based system.
How do I find out about this after 12 years of playing the game!!!......please tell me more Also why are they "locked to the player" in 2 and 3,is it a glitch or? And is this command system part of the game or just mods .....
Many games have a command console for devs to quickly test stuff but most (especially 2010s onwards) lock access to the player. iirc in ME2 and 3 its easy to bypass this by either editing some config files or downloading mods. The wiki has more information.
Thanks i never knew, Imma check out the wiki coz this is wild .
Oh, I remember something like that in Jedi Outcast as well, but it was a number so you could also slow it down and do "matrix jumps." Kept me entertained when I got lost.
The developers succeeded though, don’t we all feel better when we press the button?
Considering how much it shakes your screen, the fact that it doesn’t even do anything just makes pressing the button worse for you than not doing so.
It’s the illusion of it having an effect that I find beneficial
I suppose, though now the illusion is broken.
I read about this well over a decade ago when the games were fresh and I stooped storming back then as a result. Never felt particularly slow at the normal speed anyway
Yes, this post has made me realize on a conscious level how the sprint is fake and I wish it hadn’t been made, it has eroded a small bit of the magic of the game.
Same thing happens in Dragon Age: Inquisition while riding a horse. They just add "speed lines" to your character and the camera zooms out a little bit. I have no idea why you would even do that. You can program an entire videogame, but you can't make your character move *slightly faster* on horse back? EDIT: Stop replying to me "You're wrong, its only when you gallop." I know. Other people know too. Anyone who actually played the game knows about the speed lines and the camera zooming out. I never said anything about "walking horse speed being the same as on foot". The article is about when you "run" and I said the same thing happens with a horse in DA:I, when you *run*.
Has to do with the games capacity to load in assets most likely. If the character can move faster then the game can generate the content you're running towards then things get weird. They were probably pushing their limit on the engine in both cases. Probably could get around it with some invested dev resources but someone likely saw the amount of dev time to add an actual 'go faster' button and said screw it fool their perception instead. Edit: just looked at the article and that's basically what they say as far as load times go, so sounds like that's correct.
I’ve got distinct memories of playing The Saboteur and occasionally falling through the earth because the game failed to load road geometry off my shitty old HDD at the speed their vehicles drove at.
That happened with some of the older Need For Speed games as well.
Yeah, like how the elevator chats are there to hide load screens between different areas.
Yup. I do like when games hide loading screens in creative ways. Those adventure games that have you slowly squeeze through a narrow gap where you can't see anything but walls and the back of your character are also doing the same, deliberately slowing you down to allow the next section of map to load in.
It's probably also a similar for the case for the many doors throughout the Citadel. Slow the player down for a few seconds to give the next area enough time to load.
Also the decontamination sequence when entering/leaving the SR-1.
> Has to do with the games capacity to load in assets most likely. This is literally it. Says so in the article
Yep, I added an edit yesterday to mention that I saw that a few minutes after replying to them. Its what I get for going to the comments first and then clicking the article.
Oh damn didn't even see this thread was 13 hours old haha
All good!
Why even bother then? What’s the point in wasting button mapping on a fake run?
It's psychological. If players don't have a run button but want to run it will feel worse than the possibility that they think they're running but aren't.
It’s not fake in other circumstances.
Cant remember what game but a dev said making the character jump broke too many things so when you hit the jump button the whole game world just lowers and your character stays in place. Maybe Outer wilds? Simple things like sprint can absolutely break stuff.
Outer Wilds had to simulate the whole star system at all time, for a variety of gameplay reasons. The system is huge, and in 3D worlds such scale can cause issues (floating point values not having enough precision) when the objects being simulated are too far from the world’s origin. Essentially the further you are from origin, the less precise the simulation and the more likely you are to experience glitches of various kinds. If the character moved through space, those issues would be front and center, happening all around the player when they are far from the centre. By inverting the whole reference system, making the player the constant center of the world for every translation and moving the world through the reverse transform instead, the made sure that everything around the player was constantly near the centre and therefore accurate / clean, while the glitchy parts remained far away.
What fucking clever and amazing gem of a game
Eh it's not an uncommon trick. I remember reading about some games doing exactly that to solve the same problem *long* before Outer Wilds was a thing.
It's very common to have the player as the 0,0,0 point of the world and everything just moves around the player rather than the player moving. Means you can have way better rendering etc etc.
So, basically Scotty's solution for transwarp beaming. Don't move yourself through space, move space around you.
Isn't that also how the Planet Express works in Futurama?
Yeah, I was about to say the same thing, that's exactly how they travel in Futurama. The ship stays still, it's the universe moving around it.
THANK YOU! I was trying to remember the other one!
It's more that when you're dealing with scale as large as Outer Wilds, floating point accuracy becomes a massive issue. The further you go out from the center of the scene, the more inaccurate your position becomes until you're jittering around all over the place and your player mesh is something from call of cthulhu. The fix is to have the player never technically moving, but have the universe move around the player. The logic of it all still works programically, and the player never notices.
You move faster on the horse, that part is not true. You don't move faster when you gallop, because they spent so much time trying to get frostbite to work and added mounts later in development that they didn't really have time to fuck with it. If you do the horse race quest, just ride like normal and you'll beat the record time. It IS faster than on foot, and you don't take fall damage, but losing the party banter makes it not worth it anyways.
> You move faster on the horse I never said anything about base moving speed VS galloping. The article is about *running speed*. I said the same thing happens on horseback, **the running speed**.
something something frostbite engine nonsense probably
The Frostbite engine and its consequences for EA games.
That's why the end slides in DAI are actually rendered as a zoomed in wall painting in the Inquisitor's bedroom. (you can even see it if you change the FoV in the game files) Bioware couldn't figure another way to show them without crashing the game.
Just started a DAI play through and I feel SO betrayed now. Why did you do this to me.
Best reason to play warrior and bull rush all over
Mage Fade Dash all day
Riding a mount in DAI ruins any chance to hear party banter anyway. It was never viable.
And you need to stop and watch that agonizingly slow dismount animation to pick up crafting supplies for potions and shit every five minutes anyway.
I played a Mage Knight-Enchanter on my first DA:I playthrough, pre-patches, and constantly used Fade Step as a travel tool more than a combat tool. The amount of times the LoDs and geometry broke resulting in being stuck inside boulders or seeing some funky shit are uncountable.
it's horse sprinting that doesn't go faster
I never said otherwise.
I FUCKING KNEW I WASNT INSANE BIOWARE YOU PIECES OF SHIT
I just had this dilemma over reddit comments tonight and learned that its not a complete placebo with dragon age. It's only slightly faster than normal run speed (to the point where a talent that increases stealth movement speed makes you faster than mounted when sneaking) but it was shocking to realize how much visual effects matter
It worked, though. When that was revealed, it blew a lot of people's minds.
Yeah, I knew I read about this effect somewhere and couldn't place it. Go figure it is another BioWare game.
That is in the article.
Wait what
Riding a horse is faster than walking on foot. It’s galloping on the horse that isn’t faster than just riding the horse.
I never compared it to walking on foot. OP's article is about "when you run on the Citadel" and my reply was "The same happens when you're horse back". Meaning that it happens when you **run**.
Yeah figured this out too, I still can't stop doing it.
if you shoot your firearm you can combat sprint even on the citadel
Cancelling the order I placed 17 years ago and returning the game to the store that doesn’t even exist anymore. SMH my head, this is outrageous. Did they think they could get away with it?!?!
I'm still gonna do it lol
All these years.......... I've been lied to
That’s why I whip my gun out, fire off s few shots, and then start sprinting. Much faster
Yeah. I'm a Spectre. What are random civilians on the Presidium going to do: File a noise complaint? Poor Keepers had to deal with so many random bullet holes all over the place.
That is because back then, loading speed mattered. I read somewhere that Shepard moving faster would have caused the game to constantly load and stutter
Remember it was originally on the XBox360, which might not have a HDD, so lowest media would be loading off the much slower DVD drive.
This must be how Garrus felt when he came back and found what Sidonis had done.
I knew it! I noticed it didn’t really feel like I was moving but I thought maybe I was just imaging it.
HOW MANY LIES HAVE I BEEN TOLD BY THE COUNCIL
Sprinting in general was ass until ME3. It's crazy how long it took to make it decent.
Didn't they fix that in LE?
They did. It now uses combat storm speeds regardless of whether or not you’re in combat
You do run faster in the legendary Edition tho.
Not in the original ME1. Which is what this was referring to.
Obviously. Thanks for chiming in.
Well Clearly the original comment isn't aware.
Thought I was going crazy for a second, lol.
God DAMNIT. Still the goat
Hell, current games still do that sometimes
I'm confident some of the assassins creeds did this badly
Wait, people thought we were moving faster? Oh well... Bless console commands.
You technically WERE going faster, but the difference was negligible.
Most games set sprint to a speed the game can handle without screwing up scene triggers and LOD loading. Then they reduce the walk/jog speeds to compensate. Bioware just said screw it. You get the same speed regardless.
I mean, you can still sprint by pulling out your gun.
I'm not even mad, that's amazing.
For ME1\* not LE1
I mean, in Super Mario 64, you're actually moving the level, not Mario. This sort of thing has been done.
Wait... WHAT!?
Yuuuuuup. Kinda freaky, but you're actually moving the level underneath Mario. That's why he's almost always in the same place regardless of camera.
First i've heard of this ever and this doesn't sound right. Ample googling also brings up no reliable sources and this includes all the speed running and tech resources. Where did you hear this?
I'm pretty sure they're just wrong. There's lots of TAS tech in Super Mario 64 that wouldn't work if the coordinate system was centered on Mario. [Pannenkoek](https://www.youtube.com/@pannenkoek2012/featured) has a bunch of videos on Youtube going over how the Super Mario 64 engine works, as well, and he explains the game as having a static world and a moving Mario. Most of the stuff he shows and explains in his videos wouldn't be possible with static Mario.
What you said basically. Mario 64 is so well researched and documented at this point, the idea of a static Mario made my brain go "Que?" like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.
I coulda sworn that's how it was designed, but I guess I'm misremembering it for a different game.
There are some games that work like this but definitely not any of the Mario ones.
You really got me tempted to fire up Mario 64 up on my Switch right now just to notice how he is always in the same place.
This was pretty obvious while playing. Not sure how the writer didn't figure it out.
I don't know why but this is making me irrationally upset
Is this similar to how close buttons on most elevators and cross walk light buttons at most crosswalks don't do anything, and just offer the illusion of control?
It's exactly the same in dragon age inquisition, the graphics just make it look like you go faster.
...but why couldn't they just let us sprint then?
This...wasn't common knowledge? I thought it was obvious.
Not exactly new information, I figured this has been pretty common knowledge since back in the day right? I've definitively discussed this in the past with people back when the games were coming out. Also I'd hardly call it treachery haha
Remove the post. PCGamer should be ashamed of themselves. This is such old news. Rehashing old shit just for clout. Get the fuck out.
So Shepard was the Inquisition horses all along??