LogInIt never gets old.
BioWare
Sometimes players move too fast, and developers have to come up with some tricks to make sure everything works the way it's supposed to. It seems like this is BioWare's favorite trick, as first, we learned that the horse in Dragon Age: Inquisition actually moves the same when you sprint and when you don't, and now the studio's former cinematic designer John Ebenger revealed that the same was done for Mass Effect when you run on the Citadel.
"No change in speed, just in the FOV of the camera to give the illusion you’re moving faster. Can’t remember if that stayed true for 2 & 3 or if load times were better by then."
And this worked, many players have been fooled all these years and still are: after learning about the Inquisition horse, I tried to test it, but it looks faster to me even when I know all this information.
So why do developers do that? There can be several reasons, but for Mass Effect, I believe it was a matter of the PC not being able to process the world around the player in time with their movement. The same was done for GTA 3. One of the programmers explained that the team couldn't fit the whole map in the PS2 memory. "Streaming involves loading models from the DVD as the player moves around. This was the hardest technical challenge during the development of GTA 3 and was coded by Adam Fowler."
So they intentionally made the player slower. If sprinting worked "right", you'd see low-detailed buildings and missing textures.
Hopefully, this won't be the case with Dragon Age: The Veilguard, which should arrive this fall.
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