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 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.
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.
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.
I don’t think it adds anything and the extra button press probably reduces accessibility.
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.
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.
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.
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.