Note that in real life you almost never strafe. Just look at any footage ( or a movie ) of soldiers/police. No strafing. Games made us believe that we need it.
Certainly the developers knew about it in general, or they wouldn't have put the controls in. My contention is that even they hadn't yet fully internalized just how useful it is. By the time of Quake it's clear that it had gotten to the hardcore, and by now of course it's just part of playing 3D games. But it took time for everyone to realize it. 3D was a pretty big jump. I'd say that the "bug" that strafe + forward was faster than either alone, which was pretty common for a long time in 3D games, reflects that. There's no reason to have that bug or leave it in if you have deeply internalized strafing as a viable option. It happened precisely because it was viewed as an exceptional case rather than the way that almost everyone would be running around all the time.
I'd also observe that biologically, "strafing" is fairly hard, and the idea that you can strafe at the exact same speed you can run forward, safely, for long periods of time, is absurd. What we have instead is faster turning than keyboard controls offer, and more flexibility in general, but not literally the ability to "strafe" at 90 degree angles. It's an adaptation to limited 3D environments. (Strafe + forward gives a more realistic 45 degree angle of shoot to movement. I think in reality that would still be a fairly extreme thing to maintain all the time, but it's closer to realistic. 90 degrees is just absurd.) As it is implausible, it is perhaps not surprising it took a while to become popular.
If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
If you strafe, you move perpendicular to view direction. If you combine strafe and jumps (the idea is this: jump, change view direction to perpendicular to jump direction and then strafe => jump+strafe => you'd move faster in the original direction).
Yeah, strafing and walking backwards at least you can do. How would you crouch and go prone for example?
And I wonder how good you would be able to aim with Omni, that's gonna be a deciding factor.
"Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement."
This strategy is known as straferunning, and was previously thought to be effective only in 90's era first-person shooters, particularly Goldeneye. Maybe Putin is also a 00 Agent?
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