Fooling around with flight (discussion)

So I was bored after running my content for the day and started fooling around with my movement speed. I am flight and want to know why is it that we fall far faster than we can fly?

I did a stopwatch test from all the way to the top sky boarder all the way to the ground and have times results.

Flying all the way to the ground from the top: 19.37 seconds

Falling all the way to the ground from the top: 9.77 seconds

Almost ten seconds apart is a huge difference in speed. You are better off switching the speed between the two so we can travel around the worlds a bit faster. Supersonic needs a buff.

I wonder why we fall faster than we fly?

Think that's bad, why when in combat, is flight the slowest movement out of the three? You can walk faster by turning off movement than you can in combat.

Gravity? This is true for any movement mode afaik

Using flight is always kind of a soft throw. You just cant pickup fast enough with it in larger maps. The time between the animation and supersonic is just giant

In OP's defense, super speed and acrobatics kind of fall in or out of movement mode, so it's an unfair comparison.

That is annoying. It was a nightmare in PvP too.

Supersonic (speed wise) should technically surpass the speed of earth's downward gravitational pull correct? Meaning I should not be falling faster than I can fly if I am supposed to be flying at supersonic speeds.

I actually don't know why I even added real world science to a video game lol.

Devs could have made $10 off a flight variant where you twist around in the air instead of stick your arm out like a cardboard cutout.

And people say dcuo isnt realistic HA, its obviously taking into count your body weight (and it becoming essentially dead weight) and the effect of gravity on you

Obviously for the dramatic sensation of wind going past you as you fall, before you do a superhero landing. Deadpool is probably right, I bet that's hard on the knees.

I think the slow speed of flight is to put it on a sort of balance with the other movement modes. The defining quality of superspeed is (obviously) its speed - though not Flash-blink-and-you'll-miss-it fast else it'd be uncontrollable by the player. Acrobatics has it's flips, rolls, wall climbing, grapnels, etc. Flight is the only one that gives you the true move-any-direction-you-like-in-three-dimensions freedom, and I think *that* is meant to be its hallmark rather than how fast it is - and slower than you'd think of for the likes of superman for balance and not making it faster than superspeed.

Escape velocity is 25, 020 miles per hour. 40,270 kh. Our characters don't, in game, move remotely close to that speed.

If we were in reality, none of our movement modes would be faster than a fast car. Which is dumb, but obviously the devs didn't want us crossing the city in five seconds, which real super-speeders would be able to do if such things were real. There's only so much realism possible before a game breaks.

That all said, I have always very much wished we had a third gear of really fast speed in each movement mode. Fast, faster, fastest.

Speed of falling has zero to do with your weight.

A guy named Gailileo proved this sometime between 1589 and 1592. Aristotle was incorrect in believing otherwise. All objects in a vacuum fall at exactly the same rate. (Outside a vacuum, friction causes variances, of course, but flapping our arms wouldn't significantly help if you fell off a building. Useful tip!.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo's_Leaning_Tower_of_Pisa_experiment

It was a joke. . .

Sorry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

I think the reasoning was that we were poor copies of the original. Superspeed is like nerfed Wally post crisis or slightly less. Fast, but not able to vibrate freely through walls. So it make sense we wouldn't be faster than a car.

That is to say, it's probably also technical gameplay wise. lol I can't imagine we being able to control our character. It's bad enough in super speed, you catch a lamp post and you are suddenly spinning around it as it is. lol

I, like a number of other people, once upon a time made an estimation of the length of a game street and what it would be in reality, and put a stopwatch on how fast I could fly or run a given number of blocks, to get an estimate of what our in-game speed were be if it were all real.

The thing is, I did this many years ago, and don't remember any of the specific measurements I came up with -- though it's simple enough for anyone to try the exercise -- but I'm reasonably sure it was on the order of 90 miles per hour or so; not more than 120, I'm more sure. Which isn't even Quicksilver speed over at that other company; his limit has traditionally been no more than 500 mph.


I completely get why things are the way they are, but in my ideal headcanon version of the game, I'd wish for a higher third-gear speed. Something on the order of translates-to-200 mph.

But I don't expect to ever see this change made in the real game, if for no other reason than that a lot of content would need to be recalibrated to take that difference into account. But I also assume that the speed wasn't a choice pulled out of a hat and for whatever reasons the way it is was, I assume, chosen for reasons.

A true game classic.

I miss the days when we had the glitch so we could moon-walk.

For an object weighing a few hundred tons that entry speed is indeed close to being correct. For a 125-200 pound human/humanoid we would only fall around 90-130mph because of our lack in density and weight. Supersonic in this game is even slower than that unfortunately. I would be completely fine in they just switched our falling speed with our super supersonic speed in game.

Yeah, I've always noticed the difference too. Even back when first running the races, if I was going for platinum and there were rings in a straight line down, dropping always bought a second or 2 vs just staying in SS mode. It would be nice if it was equally as fast at least...if not faster (SS+Gravity should be > Gravity alone). But I guess if they put too much 'real' in the game...well, we wouldn't be flying at all.

I have always hated that.

You can't argue with the obvious appeal of flight, but in combat...it really sucks. Swimming in the atlantean areas is basically the exact same thing with different animations, so when I'm fighting Poseidon in the alert I turn off movement so that I can get around better and avoid the blue circles.

Same.