For the uninitiated, crouch jumping is a mechanic where you can increase the height of ledges you are able to jump on by holding crouch after jumping, like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life.
I never really thought much about it growing up, some games had it, some didn’t, but it always felt natural/intuitive, and today I feel like it is a way to increase the ceiling of player movement by a simple combination of two existing movements.
However I’ve heard that some people dislike it, and some actively hate it. Some of the arguments I’ve heard is that if a player needs to be able to get somewhere, then ledges should be lower and not gated, and that the whole mechanic is useless and just introduces an extra button press for no reason.
I can see the merit in some points, and others I feel like are nitpicky, but I’m interested in broadly knowing how Lemmy feels about it.
I think we need a Plank button, for those times when you need to sniper shot someone in the prone position whilst in midair. Think of the possibilities:
- Jumping into a tunnel completely ready to snipe
- Other examples
Bridging a gap for your team mates 😄
thank youuuu
I dont know why I find this so funny.
I thought crouch jumping was when you crouch first then jump so your jump is more explosive, thus gaining more height.
I’ve never played a game with the crouch jump you’re describing but that sounds awkward.
Super Mario Bros 2 did the one you’re talking about. I think Mario 64 onwards as well. However, the one OP is talking about is common in Half-Life.
Yeah I think I’ve heard of mechanics where you can crouch to “charge” a jump, but not like, jumping while in the crouch interpolated state.
What games use crouch jumping like that? I thought that had to be wrong, but apparently in CS:GO you can just barely clear higher objects if you crouch and then immediately jump.
It might sound awkward, but IMO it is very intuitive, if you imagine crouching as bending the legs instead of going down.
Like someone else mentioned above, Mario 64 is the one I had in mind. I can’t recall any others at the top of my head.
Some fighting games. One Must Fall, for example.
I don’t think it adds anything and the extra button press probably reduces accessibility.
It feels completely natural to me, but I think it is unintuitive, and games which feature it without explaining it are disadvantaging people with less gaming literacy.
It’s similar to the mechanic in shooting games, where reloading while there is at least one bullet in the gun results in a faster reload (because the gun doesn’t need to be cocked).
It’s realistic, but I feel that it should be ignored, in the same way each bullet from the old mag magically transfers into a new mag.
It shouldn’t be ignored full stop. It depends entirely on the game. A purely arcade shooter should probably ignore it and most do (halo, overwatch), but a sim certainly shouldn’t (tarkov, arma). And a mixed game can decide for themselves (battlefield, cod).
Or even leave it up to the player.
Only in single player though.
Multiplayer reload speed is a knob for balance.
Now I want an fps game where you have to stop and load each round into magazines for a while.
Some do this, tarkov is a popular example.
Depth to movement mechanics is one of the differences between mediocre and great first person games. Look at counter strike movement over the years. Players have extracted everything from the quirks of that engine, the game is better for it, and the skill ceiling for movement alone is enormous. That skill ceiling is important. Crouch jumps in particular have been in pretty much every game i can think of since i learned halo on the og xbox. even if they aren’t explicitly used by the game designers, there is often tricks you can do to exploit campaigns in fun ways, or maneuver the multiplayer with a higher level of expertise than others. Thats fun. Competitive but fun.
Compared to games where every mechanic is dead simple and everyone can do it, its more just rock paper scissors at that point. The designer gave a specific movement ability, you counter it with some other ability they designed. Its boring to me.
In counter strike it’s just a game mechanic, and if you can’t do it there are certain positions you can’t get into, or you’d have to go a longer way round. Past a certain rank pretty much everyone can do it reliably but it’s definitely a barrier for new players
It’s something I’m glad it is not longer being used anymore and run+jump or long press jump or double jump are used instead. It was a pain to pull the move on a keyboard, at least for me.
Like all game mechanics, it can be implemented in a clumsy way, or as part of a rewarding movement system.
I think that skeuomorphism in games is a decent accessibility feature for people just getting into games, but also video games have been a cultural staple for decades, so it’s not really that necessary that games mimic real movement anymore.
I don’t have a good crouch-jump example, but games like Quake have taken jump movement tech to a crazy level, originally intended or not.
Quake movement raises the ceiling for sure, I saw a graph once showing the optimal angles for bunnyhopping and it seems crazy precise.
Accessibility is always a concern, which is why I’m glad Black Mesa introduced an auto-crouchjump option for those that want or need it, but generally I think it is a good thing when the range of things a player can do is expanded.
deleted by creator
one of the main reasons i hated half life, along with slow as fuck intro and slippery platforming. super unnecessary and awkward.
skill issue
agreed, game design is indeed a skill. half life has some good examples of it, but in these aspects it failed miserably.
Do you think your age when you played it has anything to do with disliking it? It was leaps beyond anything else available at the time, and I was young and impressionable, so even for its faults it was amazing.
i wasn’t very old but i was experienced enough i guess. i was used to games starting immediately for example. while the first time going through the intro is an impressive tech demo, it becomes quickly obvious that it’s not meant to be replayed. similarly to Bethesda game intros, it sucks and it’s bad for a videogame.
physics were also impressive at times but it led to slippery controls which wouldn’t be so bad if the game didn’t require platforming. it’s frustrating and unforgivably so in my opinion. compared to much older games like quake and doom which had incredibly precise controls, it just felt floaty.
but the absolute worst was the crouch jump. Jesus Christ what were they thinking‽ unnecessarily complicated, unintuitive, badly implemented and barely even used so it was also unnecessary in general.
there were lots of technical feats and design choices that were good, mind you. level design was pretty good. enemy designs were cool. the mystery elements were very cool.
I’ve been trying half life for the first time recently and I’m struggling to enjoy it.
I’ve always hated it and thought it was a stupid untuitive mechanic that didn’t map to anything in real life. It also looks equally stupid in multiplayer when you see player character models spasm their way up a ledge during a crouch jump. It’s an old school mechanic that I am glad is going out of fashion due to better vault controls.
like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life.
You don’t pull your legs up in real life though, you use your hands to vault onto something. You can’t just swap stances in mid air without holding onto anything. Even if you were talking about box jumps, like the kinds you normally do at a gym, it still isn’t anything remotely like a crouch jump. Also anyone doing a box jump in an actual combat situation just looks goofy.
Any time a game explicitly has a tutorial for crouch jump, my immersion is completely broken. I am instantly reminded that it is a game.
When I was much younger and CoD4 was the latest, I thought I was rather good and so entered a competition.
Everyone was crouch jumping (we called it “bunny hops”), and I couldn’t hit them at all. Left absolutely defeated lol!
I don’t have an issue now, however every time someone does it today it’s like I have flashbacks to that horrible defeat 😂It’s all a bit of fun though. If the mechanic exists in a game I can’t be angry or hurt at someone taking advantage of it.
I always saw it as a quirk of the way the game is programmed (they didn’t bother disabling crouching while mid-air) that they just ended up somewhat legitimising by teaching it in the tutorial. AFAIK you only have to use this once or twice in the entire game, and don’t recall it ever being useful when not forced (maybe except for climbing where you shouldn’t to sequence break).
It’s not part of the core gameplay. You learn in in the tutorial, forget about it, get stuck in the middle of the game, remember this is a thing, use it once and then forget about it again.
At least that’s how I remember it. It’s been a while since I played HL1.
HL1 had the long-jump upgrade where you had to do a crouch jump to use it.
The long jump sequence is crouch, then jump. Close enough together that it registers and turns into a single long jump move.
The crouch jump sequence is jump, then crouch. And it’s really just a regular crouch in mid air.
But my point is that the long jump reduces the hitbox. They’re both crouch-jumps, just different forms.
You had to long-jump into little spaces that would be too big to fit in normally.
That’s not the kind of crouch-jump that’s being discussed here. In source games you can crouch while you’re in the air and it allows you to reach slightly higher ledges. It’s got nothing to do with the long jump upgrade.
That sounds like bad design to me. It’s not realistic at all.
In real life you’d do some kind of mantle. Box jumps are a good workout that no one ever uses for anything else.
I mean, you use the long jump to reach some crouch-jump spots. It’s a type of crouch-jump.
I love it and I notice when it’s absent. The coolest thing about games as an art medium is player choice and the potential to “break the game”. Playing in a way the developer didn’t intend is probably consistently the most fun I have in games, and advanced movement tech like crouch jumps almost always creates unintentional whackiness.
Was it ever intentional or was it just a side effect of the Source engine?
I’m fairly sure the crouch jump is part of the Half-Life 1 tutorial level.
Yeah but that doesnt mean its intentional
I’m too lazy to google it
I would like to know the answer to this. Half-life 1 is one of my favorite games of all time
There are some with finite ammo where you lose the rest of the magazine on a reload.
It never bothered me in Source games, but I don’t really care for it as a mechanic. Specifically in Half-Life, I don’t like how it overlaps with long jumping either. (Jump then crouch to crouch jump, crouch then jump to long jump.)
But I wouldn’t want it in other games because manteling is a superior mechanic. Mantelling is usually when you can hold down the jump key close to a ledge to grab it and pull yourself up, rather than jumping. In most games that have it, mantelling into a smaller space (a vent or pjpe) auto-crouches as you enter.
It allows for making longer jumps, exciting last moment saves, pulling yourself up into small spaces, simpler climbing mechanics, and more. It’s just a better, more intuitive mechanic that replaces long jumps and crouch jumps and requires no extra key presses.
I actually really dislike Manteling it feels like a quick time event, it’s easy and takes away any skill from the jump. The animation quickly gets repetitive. In some games where cinematics and being epic are the focus it definitely shines.
Crouch Jumping isn’t great either. It’s janky and should remain in source games only. However I’m so used to it that I try crouch jump anytime I jump onto a crate or something.
If you want two seperate jump distance have normal run speed jump and sprint + jump. Or slide jump
I like that Black Mesa changed the long jump to just double-pressing the jump button
