Cover Without the Wait

What: Taking cover used to wait for the game to agree. The pause was short and every bit of it was noticeable: press toward a wall, wait, snap. It made cover feel like something requested rather than something done. The character moves the moment the player asks now, and if the game disagrees it puts them back cleanly instead of stranding them halfway. The harder question was not speed. It was how the game knows the player meant to take cover instead of just walking past a wall. My first answer read which way the character was facing and which way they were moving, with a pile of exceptions to stop it grabbing them when that was not wanted. It worked, and I threw it out. Too many rules pulling against each other, and no way for a player to predict what it would do. What replaced it: stop near cover and the character takes it. That is the whole rule.

Why: A fast cover system nobody can predict is worse than a slow one they can.