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.
Just like in halo 1/2 they never designed levels around crouch jumping but the ability was there expanding the overall gameplay in positive ways
Crouch jumping is a great mechanic but IMO it should only be used for hidden items or Easter eggs
I find myself accidentally using it
I made an FPS that runs on 1980s hardware and you can get onto any surface you can see over. You just walk. Halo 4 or whatever introduced “mantling” and it was like, oh, why didn’t everybody think of this? Its absence now highlights any game with unimpressive obstacles. Even the Half-Life machinema series Freeman’s Mind highlights how Gordon should be able to chin-up over some ledges and skip whole chapters.
Another example specific to Half-Life: the PS2 version’s long-jump module is a double jump. You just jump in midair and it fires off. No wonky crouch-then-jump command. Movement isn’t any less deep or complex. It’s just simplified to the point you can do it by pushing a button twice instead of playing piano.
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.
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.