Released earlier today on PlayStation 4 in North America and Europe, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture (check out our review) does, in fact, include a sprint option. Simply hold down R2 and it builds to sprint speed over a couple seconds.
Receiving a lot of feedback in early reviews about the walk speed and lack of sprint, Creative Director Dan Pinchbeck went on The Chinese Room’s website to confess that “there was a mess-up. And we’re really sorry about that.”
Pinchbeck explained:
A couple of weeks before the game went to final, Santa Monica did a last round of playtesting. At this point, the game included an autosprint. That meant that if you kept moving, you’d gradually ramp up to a run speed, specifically to deal with issues with how long potential back-tracking could take, given the game’s non-linearity. The problem was, playtesters wanted to be able to trigger it themselves. It didn’t matter about the speed, it was the psychology, the choice.
So, with Sony Santa Monica’s help, they decided to replace autosprint with an R2 trigger hold, but this new feature needed testing so it didn’t break the game. When launch rolled around though, he says, “Something had been missed. The controller icon in the options menu was missing the sprint instruction, and it hadn’t been localized.” Since localization takes 24 hours, and a patch would take 4-5 days through the global QA pipeline, it wasn’t ready in time for release.
Pinchbeck continued:
We probably should have announced the run button before launch, but we didn’t. 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.
If you purchased Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture in Europe before 10am BST and didn’t receive the PlayStation Plus discount, you’ll be reimbursed, PlayStation Europe confirmed.
[Source: The Chinese Room]
