Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture recently launched on PS4, and while reviews have been quite positive, there has been one glaring issue that most reviews have touched upon: incredibly slow movement speed. While the game is intentionally a slower paced, exploration based experience, the size of the game world has seemed almost punishing with what appeared to be a lack of a sprint option. As it turns out, however, sprinting is possible in the game…the developer just forgot to tell you about it anywhere in game.
Developer The Chinese Room’s creative director, Dan Pinchbeck, recently took to the company’s blog explaining the oversight. According to him, the game originally had an autosprint mechanic with which walking for long enough gradually turned into a run. After more playtesting, players stressed that it was better to give them the option to sprint whenever they felt they needed it, rather than automatically triggering it. To compensate, a last minute decision was made to set R2 as the sprint button on the controller. Because of how late the addition was, localization issues as well as how long patches take to be implemented would have made a complete fix impossible in time for release.
“We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn’t,” said Pinchbeck in his blog post. “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.”
Does the existence of a sprint mechanic make venturing back into the rapture more appealing to you? Let us know in the comments! For all things gaming, keep checking back with Gamespresso.