Meanwhile, I am trying to upgrade my Driving skill in Crackdown. It’s really hard, because I keep running down pedestrians by mistake.

I don’t think speed is the primary factor. I think commitment is the primary factor. Commitment requires the player to choose a path for most of their “known information” about a level. So if you’re playing something where you can see a long way in advance, your commitment has to be really long. If you’re moving split-second speed, you only have to commit for a moment before what you know about the level is completely out of date.

(I wrote a long essay on this a long time ago, but I should re-write it soon…)

In essence, it’s easier to make fast games have juicy movement. But there are actually a wide variety of games with beautiful movement that are slow. Robo-Rally is my favorite and clearest example. A lot of building games such as Sim City and Alpha Centauri have “movement” in that you are actually leaving your permanent mark on the level. It’s very slow, but all about commitment as you cannot “take back” a move very easily. Marble Madness and similar games can be fast, but it’s more about wrangling with inertia. Portal is all about movement, and it’s usually very slow.

When it comes to first-person games, the player can see a considerable distance. That means that in order to make movement fun you either have to move quite fast or commit for a very long time. Portal beat it by raising movement speed to infinity in certain situations.

I hope this is clearer.

If you have time, would you mind just quickly summarizing what you’re referring to with regard to Final Fantasy (as I haven’t played any of them, embarrassingly)?

And do you happen to know of anybody who’s discussed how to implement good movement in games? I’ve had a hard time figuring out what makes motion feel good, but to my great concern, all the games I can think of with good movement are rather fast-paced (with the possible exception of the Splinter Cell games). Do you think speed is the primary factor in making good motion?

I don’t mean that all games need to be based around motion. I simply meant that games with really great movement tend to be the ones you hear about, while the ones with bad movement tend to vanish. The same principles can be used to make motion good without actually making the whole game about motion. For example, Zelda and recent Castlevania games have awfully solid movement even though fun movement is not the big focus of the games.

(Also, it could be argued that the same principles can be used to alter entirely unrelated elements such as leveling, as recent Final Fantasy games show.)

Anyway, hope you don’t mind me commenting.