Is "running adults" in games ever gonna stop being a thing?
When do you every see people irl running around to get places? Let alone adults. Or in some cases decrepit old men or women, guiding the player somewhere, sometimes running what feels like it would be a marathon to them?
Perhaps this is something many "video games are not art" critics take into consideration when looking at videogames as something "not art worthy"? I can see the childish nature of it all.
So what can be done? And why do characters run everywhere? Because locations are too far away? Then make them closer if possible, and check your scales. But you want the world to be big? Then think about means of transport people in that world would actually need, and let the accompanying NPC make use of them when guiding the player.
"But it's a good moment to expose some story". Then do it while walking, and allow the player to teleport to the final location, along with the NPC, from anywhere they might be when the conversation ends, and not just from determined locations in your world. (Because fixed teleportation locations make sense!).
"Teleportation from anywhere" should be a thing. Places in IRL still take time to walk, if to scale, and if story is exposed at that time, when it ends, the player can just teleport to where he's supposed to go, instead of seeing two grown men running through a city to get somewhere.
Besides, have you ever tried running and talking at the same time? It's not exactly as chill as videogames make it to look.
I think it's just a general accepted thing, that people in videogames run everywhere. Might come from the fact that not every dev can work around not having running around adults and npcs.
But that it can sometimes feel silly, it definitely can.