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SPOILER INFO
This article discusses a bug in Skyrim. No spoilers.
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One of the constant major irritations in Skyrim is the absurdly inadequate running speed of your followers. While the idea is that your followers are supposed to follow you, the reality is that at least 80% of cases when you're attacked while traveling outdoors, you have to have to face the enemies alone because there's no sign of your followers far and wide.
It's a long time since I gave up trying to solve that bug and just used a spell provided by EFF that summons your followers to you instantly. (Of course, you can just as well use prid and moveto player, but that's much more tedious when you have multiple followers.)
In my current game, though, I'm using the mod Nausicaa-S Tweaker which enables the player (among other things) to permanently change a follower's speed. (Target her and press F2, then go to the MCM.) I tried it on Lydia first and was shocked to find out that her default speed was 56%. I raised it to 115%, just to try what would happen. From then on, whenever I stopped, Lydia was by my side in a few real-time seconds.
I was more than baffled. Where had that 56% come from? Is it possible that the Skyrim app really set her speed at 56% of the player character's speed?
Well, I did a new search to find out if anything has been discovered about this immersion-killing bug in the meantime.
There are questions about it in forums such as this where one user says:
Is there a mod that lets your follower keep up with you?
I'm sick of followers being left behind with every step I take. [---] [I]f you try to run away normally, they will be miles behind.
There seems to be no proper solution. However, I happened to discover there is an SSE mod titled NPC's Run and Walk at Your Pace.
The existence of such a mod proves that the follower running speed has indeed been programmed incorrectly, and not even corrected in SSE!!
(There's also a classical Skyrim mod Followers Stay Close, but I'm not sure what it does.)
No wonder my followers couldn't keep up with me. Bethesda never gave them a chance.
How can Bethesda game developers be so epically mean? They can't fail to realize that a follower whose running speed is 56 units can't run along with the player character whose running speed is 100 units. Nobody in the world can be that stupid. Which proves they did it on purpose.
I therefore ask: why do Bethesda game developers deliberately ruin traveling with a follower for all those millions of Skyrim players, make them wonder why it's happening, possibly asking questions on forums, potentially wasting many hours on trying to find a solution, when it would have cost nothing for the Bethesda bastards to just write a number close to 100 instead of 56 in their program code? Why?? What could have possibly been the motivation of those loathsome scumbags for screwing followers up like this?
