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Comment by zaptheimpaler | Hacker News Reader

Fluid & fun movement feels great and a lot of my favorite games have it - Doom, Hades, Ori, Celeste, Apex Legends, The Finals and more. To me it's an ingredient in a great game, not something necessarily unique to Silksong though.

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I hesitate to call Doom and Apex movement fluid. Well, it is fluid in the sense that it feels like you're on cart with exquisitely greased bearings and futuristic servos. FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that. That's not to say they don't control well, but they don't control naturally. Third person games can actually flow naturally, because you can animate things like turning around, changing direction, momentum, etc.

FPS characters have invisible crab legs.

Fluid and natural are pretty different concepts, perhaps "intuitive" better maps to what you mean? Humans aren't that fluid, certainly wouldn't be when it comes to vaulting, jumping etc.

Playing a game with realistic FPS movement like milsims is a totally different experience.

When it comes to fun and intuitive movement, I would say realism should go straight out the door. I want to feel like a cheetah chasing a goat across a cliffs edge in games. Personal preference but I feel like objectively more fun.

> FPS movement is inherently unnatural because no organism moves like that.

That seems like a strange comment in a thread about a 2d platformer. Nothing moves like a 2d platformer character either. So both don't move "naturally" and both feel good to many people?

Tell me more about how a game where I'm playing as some kind of demigod space marine who is fighting literal demons in literal hell has "unnatural movement". What, pray tell, is the doom slayers natural movement supposed to be? And how are we supposed to tell from behind our keyboard and mouse?

Bah. Doom2016 has some of the absolute best (meaning fun) movement in the business and it is the absolute definition of fluid.

Yes but the thing is, most people don't actually want realistic movement. They want to be Neo in The Matrix, not some average schlub that gets easily winded and jumps six inches high.

Lex Fridman's interview with Todd Howard goes into this in depth.

Funny, because the most fluid movement I have ever seen and experienced comes from a (25yo) FPS game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvAbbye-oCY

Oh man I forgot to mention Quake, but yeah rocket jumping on Quake was maybe my first experience with awesome movement and I spent a lot of time perfecting rocket jumping in Q3DM6. Quake might have even been the first 3D game or atleast FPS ever to have that kind of fast & skillful movement?

Never let realism get in the way of fun, to paraphrase GabeN :) The whole Earth gets taken over by demons from hell isn't super realistic either, that's not why I play it.

I see a mention of Celeste, I give an upvote. What a great game, and a perfect showcase of what the OP writes about too. The movement is Celeste is so fluid and expressive, which is super important because the game is crazy hard so the movement has to feel great, otherwise the game would be annoying to play.

Surprisingly overlapping set with games I’ve played and enjoyed a lot! Dead Cells was another that has a lot in common.

Yeah, agreed on all counts. I know it's divisive, but the movement in Doom Eternal was incredible. Double dash creating some amazing levels that would have been unthinkable in Doom 2016.

I'm a huge fan of pixel perfect platformers. Chalk Cuphead and Super Meat Boy up on the list of games with a very natural connection between player coordination and game mechanics.

Titanfall was one of my favorite games ever, largely because of the movement. (I even hated using the eponymous Titans, because they take away your ability to run on walls!)

Titanfall 1 and 2 are some of my favorite games of all time. I'm still chasing that high. It's a shame that Respawn went all-in on Apex.

That's why I struggled with Ori and the Will of the Wisps. They subtly broke the movement and some hitboxes, and I could never get the proper hang of it.

Blind Forest though? Chef's kiss

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