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.
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.
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.
Was it ever intentional or was it just a side effect of the Source engine?
I would like to know the answer to this. Half-life 1 is one of my favorite games of all time
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.
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.
I mean, you use the long jump to reach some crouch-jump spots. It’s a type of crouch-jump.
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’ve been trying half life for the first time recently and I’m struggling to enjoy it.
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.
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 like that Black Mesa changed the long jump to just double-pressing the jump button
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.
The highest standing jump world record looks almost exactly like a crouch jump, except they start the jump crouched, uncrouch, then end up crouched again, so I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s no real world equivalent.
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