#strafing

How low can I go without my sweet pads contacting the soft soil?

I genuinely don't understand the discourse that Resident Evil 4's controls are outdated. Do real-time strategy players freak out when they play XCOM? What about Civ vs. Cities Skylines? And maybe I'm wrong here, but hasn't Yakuza 7's turn based combat been hailed as a fresh new direction for the series after all the previous games focused on live battles?

Now I know those examples aren't all directly analogous to Resident Evil 4, but the discourse around how it's bad because Leon has to stop moving to shoot is just that dumb to me. You can tell me it's not “realistic,” because real people can run and shoot at the same time, but a 25 foot tall El Gigante or a bearded centipede man aren’t super realistic, either.

Plus, what about all those shooters out there that model a gun's accuracy as how wide your bullets spray? In those games you're encouraged to stop moving in order to improve your accuracy. Despite being able to move and shoot at the same time, some games are so aggressive with this bullet spray thing as to severely punish you if you fire from the hip without slowing down and lining up a shot.

Realistic or not, that's sort of how guns work. If you actually want to hit the thing you're shooting at, you plant your feet and aim carefully. How many experienced marksmen do you see strafing and firing at the same time?

Even the olympics! A place where the best marksmen of all time compete! Even in events that combine a race to the shooting location, they stop moving before they fire their weapons!

And Resident Evil 4 is an extremely systems heavy game! The whole game is based on mechanics of timing your actions to specific enemy states and animations. There are multiple enemies where you have to make sure to shoot extremely specific parts of their bodies, either because that's the only way to kill them, or because you're setting them up to do something else. You wouldn't want to be moving during those situations anyway, because Resident Evil 4 is also a game that can punish you for taking the wrong shots. I know that can be used to describe a lot of games, but RE4 is more rigid about it than most.

And I mean, let's look at Gears of War, a series that was blatantly inspired by Resident Evil 4. In Gears, you can strafe and shoot at the same time -- but a lot of your shooting is done from behind cover, where you're locked down and can't easily move and shoot at the same time. Not because the technology isn't capable, not because it's an old game or whatever, but because it's a game mechanic you have to learn to deal with.

It's the same thing in Resident Evil 4. You stop moving to shoot your guns. That's the mechanic. The game was built that way on purpose. Broaden your horizons.

1945 Big Beautiful Doll strafing train - Heinz Krebs

Bogged down with family-stuff for the weekend, so not much to report.

Here are some notes on the movement system I imagine for the game. A low-effort sideways dodge-jump in combination with a slow and short elevating jump should make for some interesting gameplay, but also be very accessible to new players (ie. you don’t have to be perfect at strafe jumping before challenging people online, like in Quake).

It should also make elevation more “valuable”, because the jump you use to scale blocks and cliffs is slow and cumbersome in comparison to the sideways long-jump.