The new slow walking (Destiny)

by General Vagueness , The Vault of Sass, Friday, August 22, 2014, 12:22 (3755 days ago)

Here's the last and most positive thing the beta left me thinking about.
I tried out slow walking in the Tower a few times during the beta and no one seemed to join in and only maybe one or two people noticed, but while I walked around I tried different things and I came up with some other non-standard movements that might be cool. These are all current to the beta, so maybe they won't be in the full game, but I think it would kind of be a shame if they weren't in the game. I don't intend for anything to replace slow walking, necessarily, I just think these are interesting and maybe worth using.
Like most games that use analog sticks, your movement in Destiny depends on which direction you push the stick assigned to movement and how far. Like most modern games that use an analog stick, your character has different animations for different degrees of pushing the stick. There are only so many of these though, and there are only so many different speeds your character can move at. Destiny has more speeds your character can move at than it has different animations for movement (it seemed like 12-15 speeds), so the game tends to use one animation for several speeds and just change the speed the animation plays at.

• Interestingly, there seem to be three movement animations, walk, run, and one that's between walk and run, which I'll call jog, and jog only shows up for one specific speed, which helps its uniqueness.
  
• If you go a few speed notches below full forward, just above jog, your character uses the run animation but doesn't move as fast as a usual run, so you could call it slow running, and it arguably looks silly.
  
• One speed notch below jog and you use the walk animation but move faster than a usual walk, and it also arguably looks silly, sillier than the slow run, I'd say. I call this speedwalking.
  
• The most major thing I found is if you use the lowest or second lowest speed and you turn yourself with the other stick you'll sort of glide around without any movement animation. That description or probably any description can't do it justice, and I'm not sure seeing it on my screen even did it justice, I think we should all see it done by a third party. Unfortunately I couldn't record myself, and I didn't get around to typing this and posting it during the beta, so I don't have video of it and I don't know of anyone that does. There's also the issue that you can only move in one direction, or one general direction, for so long, before the changing view makes you stop and then move back the other way, so if you want to move any significant distance using the glide you'll have to change the position of the view stick, or just stop moving, and break the glide, if only momentarily. Just gliding around in one area could be worthwhile though.

Well there you go, some movement options; what do you think, could any of them be the new slow-walking?