demagogue on 18/11/2023 at 23:16

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Arma 3 replaced the jump mechanic with a "climb over obstacle" mechanic, and after so many hours playing that game, I've never encountered any occasion where I thought that that wasn't the right way to handle it.

But on the bigger scale, I think player movement and controls is just a function of what kind of gameplay flow and feel you want.

We've had this discussion recently on the Dark Mod forums, since some people want to greatly speed up the speed of mantling, jumping, sliding, and a few other things, and they posted some videos of many games that used that faster speed side-by-side with the Darkmod version.

My basic opinion was I didn't like it, not because he didn't notice a legitimate difference, but because I thought gameplay is on a spectrum from more simulationist (like Arma 3, where you shouldn't have jumping at all) to more gamey (like recent FPSs where you want mantles and jumps to be inhumanly quick), and each step in either direction is changing the character and flow of your gameplay and the feel of the game in those directions.

I actually tend to think of walking sims (which don't have jumping at all, and are prone to restrict areas you access with invisible walls, etc.) are on a gamey end on the other direction as the FPS-gamey direction, and proper sims are about versimiltude about how humans actually handle space. (There's also a whole discussion about what movement you want the player to directly control vs. some elements you want to externalize to compensate for the lack of environment feedback, things like the screen marking the direction you're being injured, or the lightgem in Darkmod, etc. But that's another related issue.)

So anyway that's the way I think about it. There's no objectively right or wrong answer. Or let me try to phrase it properly. It's a design decision about what kind of character you want for your game, and if you want to capture that character, it'd be best that you design the movement and control elements consistent with the norms for that character.

It sometimes happens though that a designer thinks their game is in one genre, but as the game comes together, sometimes the game itself has a natural tendency towards the genre that best captures what it is, as the designers begin to understand what it is... So I think that's the case when these kind of dynamics come into play, when a designer actually gets it wrong what the character of their own game really is, and over time it becomes more clear and the natural pressures will come into play that push players into wanting those elements to go in the proper direction, e.g., making jumping quicker or getting rid of jumping or whatever it is.

Playtesting often helps tease those things out. But it can happen in the opposite direction too, which is what I thought about that Darkmod criticism case, where there's a demographic out there that really wants to push Darkmod in a gamey FPS direction that IMO is really antithetical to its natural character...

But over time majority opinion of gamers may shift, where twitchy norms or walking sim norms get so set in a certain group of players that they start demanding it even in places where it doesn't belong at all (because, e.g., they just haven't been exposed to the history & sensibility of different genres), which is actually a little concerning to me. I want to see different gameplay sensibilities continue to be represented and respected, and I don't want to see certain pop norms dominate to the extent that they suffocate off certain sensibilities just because it doesn't mean anything to them in their limited experience.

That's the kind of things I think about in this neighborhood.

Edit: Okay, I'll be explicit with some examples.

- You need jumping in Darkmod because environment-negotiating gameplay is core gameplay (although as environment negotiation, not jumping puzzles per se).

- I can tolerate the quick mantles and jumps in post-Dishonored immSim FPSs, even if they're not to my taste, I recognize its core to the character of that genre, & if I were on the design team I'd demand them too.

- As I said, it'd be wrong to have jumping in Arma3 & it's proper it handles it with the climb-obstacle action.

- As for walking sims & other games inspired by them or building out of that root... that will take a whole other post, because I'm not gungho about this trend of cinematicizing games and want gameplay to still be a core part, but even then I recognize if you want a walking sim or cinematic flow, you want to make sure you don't have jumping, etc, to respect or capture that character.

I think you could gather my probable thoughts on other examples from that.

Kamlorn on 19/11/2023 at 13:26

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Brilliant examples of those "strange questions" which can be generated in us, IMHO, only by game, or by situation of creating a game if more precisely. The problem of direct control/scripted sequence prioritization. Or, as you have mentioned, the problem of some kind of compensation of some essential for a game but supernatural or simply imperceptible for us, as human species limited by input and output devices, features. I agree with you that those problems haven't single right solution. It's only a design decision to make it that way or another.

What interested me in this case is the situation itself. How it's even a problem? I mean where else such subtle and strange from the common sense perspective things can be a subject of our attention?

Kamlorn on 20/11/2023 at 17:41

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"These kinds of issues" were never discussed so deeply before. Furthermore, "these kinds of issues" were never discussed before at all. Literally. Why would we ever think about such things? I mean, before the appearance of videogames.
As Warren Spector kept answering to many notions about overall clumsyness of System Shock with the same :"1993". No one knew how to appropriately implement such an advanced character control scheme from a first person perspective into a 3D graphical environment. No one in history. Until 1993.
Why would we ever think so many about control scheme implementation, interface usability, the jump mechanic after all? Only by necessity to make a game. That's the wonder of game as a strange questions generator for me. To make a game we can create a completely new sphere of knowledge, simply to look at the world itself from the new perspective.

Sulphur on 21/11/2023 at 03:45

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I think one of the most meaningful things video games can do, like any other art medium, is to interrogate our assumptions about ourselves and the world and what we take for granted. Pathologic's examination of your agency in a hellish situation via Brechtian theatre motifs is one of the most irritatingly opaque and near-unplayable experiences I've had in gaming, yet one that remains firmly lodged in a portion of my brain because of how interesting it is.

It's why I tend to have this background sense of dissatisfaction when games default to killing as the default goto for any conflict-ridden situation. I mean, I'll be the last one to tell you that it isn't fun, and I'm not arguing to take away your Quakes and Dooms. But when you have a realistic enough setting and a grounded-enough protagonist, like Drake in Uncharted (yeah, I'm invoking the hoary old ludonarrative dissonance chestnut), it does make me wonder if roleplaying psychopathy should in fact have been something we've normalised in the genre. In a roundabout way, this leads back to the walking sim, because one of the first walking sims, Dear Esther, was made by Dan Pinchbeck. And he made a Doom 3 mod called (https://www.moddb.com/mods/conscientious-objector) Conscientious Objector, which is about as ludicrous as it sounds*. And really, the funny thing is why that's ludicrous - if it wasn't demons from hell in Doom 3, but just a bunch of humans you need to kill instead, the game would be different, but it would play just fine to us anyway. That's pretty interesting, because we're taking a heuristic shortcut in our brains that says 'if they're enemies, they must die', and then reinforcing the dopamine loop from killing them over and over again without thinking too hard about it.


*Here's the (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-540-89222-9_22) research paper he wrote about it, also, if anyone wants to know more.

Kamlorn on 21/11/2023 at 16:35

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The creator of the Pathologic is actually the author of the article I have described in my initial post. Trully the world is a small town, the world of videogames especially.