@bhtav:
Geralt is superhuman when it comes to physical ability - why shouldn't he have a reasonable jumping ability? "He moves like a normal human outside of combat" doesn't cut it, Bruce Lee (before he died) and Chuck Norris (before he got old) moved like normal humans in normal situations but neither would have had any problems suddenly doing things that are impossible for the rest of us when they needed or wanted to. How is it bizarre, in any way, for a character like Geralt to be able to jump?
Geralt also has the ability to vault over things and climb up things, both of which I've done plenty of times - run up to a fence and hold B/O/space bar at the right time and you'll see him vault over it. Why are you jumping all over the place in The Witcher 3? I've been playing that game lately and I just don't have any idea why you would be jumping if it isn't necessary when running or galloping on Roach is faster (if Roach feels inclined to behave that day).
Is it a problem with traversal in general? Are games so open and huge, that trivializing the trek itself is necessary? Is jumping the only way, or the best way to accomplish that? I feel like the parkour crutch comes from the same place. Suddenly everyone is a parkour expert, including the enemies following you (any AC game ever).
People like robust traversal systems and mechanics and being able to jump at any time just feels good. It feels like more of the world is opened up to you because you can jump, and you know (or, at least, you hope) you're never going to be stopped dead in your tracks by a one foot high obstruction that any schmuck with working legs could get across.
@Mike said:
I mentioned ArmA III but you didn't say anything about it...are you just not interested in that game? It fits what you are talking about almost exactly. However, the fact that there is no jumping and there are multiple types of stances and movement for just being on foot alone is one of the most divisive things about that game. As it turns out, a lot of people claim they want realism, but when they get a game that has those features they just complain and want it to be more like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Of course, ArmA is also PC only, so that may be a problem if you're a console gamer.
I'm going to highlight Mike's comment here so that maybe you'll see it again. ArmA is pretty much what you're looking for. I'm also going to ask, again, for more specific examples than The Witcher 3.
EDIT: I posted this after you posted your post above my post and didn't see that post. Post.
Um, anyway, the jumping in Call of Duty doesn't seem so ridiculous because those games are pretty ridiculous anyway. They're hardly even realistic on a surface level, much less when you get down to depth of the rest of the mechanics. It's a little weirder that people in Battlefield would be doing it, though - when I played Battlefield 3, I remembered the jumping slowing me down. I also played that game with other PC players where jumping made you an even easier target than on the console. He won't be able to move left or right or go prone, just aim up, get him in the head, and watch his corpse crumple to the ground.
I kinda suspected you'd bring up Counter Strike for some reason.
"why shouldn't he have a reasonable jumping ability?" ... Again... oh forget it... I'm not sure I understand the Bruce Lee analogy. Are you saying that, say, Michael Jordan (an accomplished jumper) would go around jumping up mountains and across streams rather than use a more mundane mechanism? Geralt has a very, very silly jump, and he takes these really silly looking bounds no matter the obstacle. It looks silly.
"People like robust traversal systems and mechanics and being able to jump at any time just feels good. It feels like more of the world is opened up to you because you can jump, and you know (or, at least, you hope) you're never going to be stopped dead in your tracks by a one foot high obstruction that any schmuck with working legs could get across."
Meh. Just feels good. I mean, fine, then let's just have everyone fly, and screw it. A good many games are already basically giving you flight, making traversal completely trivial, rather than building interesting worlds that are a pleasure to move around the way that people actually move. If the world is a lot more open due to jumping, it's because the world was designed for jumping. That's not the only way.
As for Call of Duty, there are a large number of forums of CoD players (I'm not one of them) lamenting exactly this. I can't comment whether or not it's effective, but I sure see a lot of jumping in videos.
@bhtav: I never intended to imply you were arguing for it's removal. It was simply an observation of the use of jumping as a means to tell the player something that doesn't necessarily have any real mechanical benefit. Also, maybe I've missed something, but your points on CoD and Battlefield seems really strange to someone who's played a lot of those. Sure, there are people that jump around like frogs, but those are rarely your best players. The best players I've known usually go prone faster than I can aim and then I'm dead because I'm aiming at nothing. And I have never, ever, felt as though I was required to jump around to stay alive in those games. In fact, doing so usually had the opposite effect for me.
Advanced Warfare being the exception so far, considering it built it's entire movement around the boosts and double jumps.
At some point, aren't you arguing people's behavior more than the actual game design?
Well, no - I'm arguing that the game design lends itself to jumping about, or nobody would do it. Games are all getting to the point where everything has to be this constant flow of one thing into the next, whether it's movement (parkour, pogo jumping everywhere), combat (the omnipresent batman / mordor combat), or what have you - it can be fun to just combo everything, but man, it's starting to make everything look like super mario brothers.
Again, I'm not saying everything needs to be 1:1, but so much is spent on physics that make things feel visceral and weighty, while jumping is just magic for some reason.
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