Let us fight while clambering

Games Halo Infinite
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One of my favorite things about classic Halo, and why I hate the way advanced movement has been implemented in the newer games, is that you can take any possible route on the map while dueling someone. This freedom to navigate and fight simultaneously is essential in a game that is paced like Halo, where high skill players almost never miss and winning a 2v1 is nearly impossible unless you can break sightlines without taking free damage. If you can’t put shots off on them, they have more safety to play aggressive with their shields, while also having the incentive to take you out before your shield or teammates return. If you can put shots on them, they have to balance the pressure their aggression against the risk of getting outshot, increasing the impact of everyone’s skill in these situations.

In addition, this kind of freedom also rewards having the map knowledge and positioning awareness to be able to make jumps without looking, and while focused on aiming (or grenade placement). At present this is only possible where crouch jumping can clear a ledge, which turns many routes into deathtraps that you want to avoid in almost all cases, lest you get caught out with only the clamber as a “viable” escape. Similarly, trying to use these routes aggressively is usually a bad gamble, giving any enemies in LoS the time to react and put shots off on you as a prelude to a fight.

Giving players the ability to at least look and shoot while clambering would open these routes up more, making the maps overall more vibrant as these spaces become usable paths, allowing players to spread out more and stop crowding into the 1/2 routes that aren’t elaborate suicide. And it’s not like crouch jumps wouldn’t still be worthwhile just by way of being faster and not having the extra animation time to lock your movement.

And come on, you can’t tell me that my spartan can leap 2m+ vertical but can’t do a one handed pull up facing backwards.

2 Likes
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Better idea, remove clambering all together.

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If you’re not crouch jumping 90% of the ledges in the game and skipping clamber all together you’re doing it wrong

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So long as they then redesign all the maps

Yes, but there are a ton of jumps that you literally can’t make without clamber, which is what I’m talking about. I have no problem with shooting people who are in clamber, but I hate when the best route forces me to pray the enemy is too braindead to shoot me while my gun disables itself, so there’s a choice between that or praying they are too braindead to kill me when I run the slower/predictable/suicidal route. Or stay still and die the moment you get pushed.

Basically, I just want to not be punished for moving around the map in a game where positioning is as much of a deciding factor as aim.

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I agree, we should be able to clamber 1 handed and shoot our weapons. Since when does a spartan need two hands to do a pull up? If you gotta balance it, just let us not have ability to shoot rocket/sword/hammer(power) during that but I would like to shoot my BR for example while clambering.

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That would probably require all maps be changed to work better without the ability to clamber in the process. Means more time taken away from getting new content in the game and much needed fixes as well.

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For the moment, toggle Auto Clamber off and practice crouch jumping. A good majority of ledges require no clamber to access at all and only those really high up edges like Aquarius’ side lane - middle platform jump requires clambering.

This should let you have an overwhelming advantage over people auto-clambering up small ledges while you just clear it entirely.

There’s also another option called Step-Jump which lets you minimize your jump height when jumping specifically onto small elevations which helps in stopping you from over jumping and needing a clamber to get back up, so turn that on as well.

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Two things:

Turn off auto clamber, and just crouch jump like old Halo games, then only clamber when you want to, if it’s higher than you can jump

As far as shooting and fighting while clambering, all I have to say is…

UNCHARTED

If you never played any Uncharted games, being able to move along ledges while clambering, and being able to jump from ledges, shoot from ledges, or pull someone off a ledge, woo boy you missed out on one of the greatest games I’ve ever played. Since Infinite has clamber and grapple, if they added ledge strafing, ledge jumping, ledge shooting, and pull down assassinations, I feel like they would feel stupid good in Forge Custom maps

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I turned off auto clamber before ever entering multiplayer, and I take every jump I can without using clamber. My issue is that there are a lot of critical routes that force you to clamber, and there is only one that I have found where you can gandhi hop to skip the clamber (on streets from mid to cubby).

Jumps like the one at score at live fire force you to clamber onto the first box, or the jump from the crate up to nest, or up to tower. If you don’t have the single repulsor that spawns on the map, you are forced to either clamber or move through longer routes, which are often predictable and easy to pre nade.

Same on recharge, you have to clamber for all 4 jumps out of pit, forcing you to take the long and predictable routes up the stairs below mangler or sneaky, run all the way through blue pipes, or else turn off your gun and glue your screen to a ledge because it’s time to clamber. You also have to clamber to jump up in elevator, and to climb the ledge in whirlpool, and to get from long hall up to top glass, and from bottom control to br. To say nothing of how miserable it is to get stuck in the death trap that is batteries.

I could go on for each of the maps, but hopefully I’ve made the point clear.

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I presume if you disable auto-clamber there’s a button you have to push in order to have it clamber for you? Which one did they assign it to by default?

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Yea but that is by design. It puts risk to trying to obtain the power weapon so you should make sure it’s safe before going for it. As for the Elevator shaft, pretty sure there are boxes there which let you crouch jump up.

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I get the sense this would be similar to mounting in cod, becoming a noob trap that will get people killed more than anything else. People do that for their gun challenges and then never again if they can avoid it, because headglitching and being able to move is just better.

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You just tap your jump button near a ledge when you want to clamber, or don’t tap it if you want to hit the wall, or crouch to tuck your legs in and go over the wall like older games, if your jump was high enough. I hate auto clambering.

1 Like
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Ah, thank you =]

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I too can climb with my -Yoink!- while using my hands to shoot…

Nah it makes no sense to be able to climb and attack, dont climb mid battle, crouch jump and you dont even clamber most things anyway

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By power weapon, you mean the equipment? Because the risk for going there is entirely down to placement in the middle of the map where you can get shot from pretty much the whole map and the complete lack of cover next to the actual drop… And once you have that, in this case camo, taking the clamber isn’t exactly a problem in most cases because people can’t see you to punish the downtime. The issue is more that the penalties for clamber discourage entering that area for any reason, whether or not camo is up, because clamber is a risk in and of itself. It locks you in one place for a long animation where you can’t alter the position of your hitbox unless you cancel it, which negates the purpose of triggering it to begin with.

All the jumps are designed around clamber, as is the one to br which lets you not run across the wide open sightline to stairs or mangler. And the jump up elevator, the one in whirlpool, the one in long hall and many many more, none of which access weapons of any kind. Just because they designed the maps with clamber in mind doesn’t make it good design. And no, there are no boxes in lower elevator that you can use to crouch jump up, nor any geometry on the walls to gandhi hop off.

But whether the design is intentional, my point is that this is bad design for a game like Halo. All the complaints people have about advanced movement, as much as you can even call stuff like sprint and clamber advanced, essentially boil down to a general dislike of this exact problem. A game like cod can get away with disabling weapons as a tradeoff to faster movement because the ttk is so low that a good player can win a 3v1 simply on the virtue of aim and awareness. A slower paced game like halo requires you to use positioning and movement to win these fights, breaking sightlines to turn a 3v1 into a series of 1v1s, which still require the split second advantages of not being in their crosshairs when they chase, or not having to chose between finishing someone off or getting out of range of a grenade.

Locking players out of combat in these situations only decreases the overall impact of player skill, which is generally not what you want to accomplish when designing a multiplayer shooter.

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Clambering just shouldn’t exist. It’s a stupid mechanic that just slows things down. Crouch jumping onto something is better every time.

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Clambering works exactly as it should. It is a skill gap mechanic. Setting auto-clamber to on by default is intentional. Beginners who run defaults will clamber everything they press forward against and get on all ledges. The disadvantage is they can’t fight back which opens up the opportunity for a better skilled mechanic called the crouch jump. Learning which ledges that can be crouch jumped is a skill that will give you the advantage over the clamber because you can now shoot. Taking this a step further, learning to actually clamber ledges that can’t otherwise be reached is a skill in itself. It lets you route with taking fire in typical choke points.

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Except where there is literally no alternative, leaving no room for any kind of skill gap in how you take the jump. Which is usually the case.

Recharge is a great example of this; out of all the jumps on that map there are like 4 that you can crouch jump that you can’t make normally. There’s the jump from grapple to red window, from plasma pistol to the frags, from long hall into sneak, and from the battery onto shock rifle. Out of all the jumps on the map, you can make 4 where clamber isn’t just a straight punishment to anyone, regardless of skill.

Another great example is bazaar, where you must clamber to get from alley into cafe/den, or to go from shotgun to pillars, or to bypass the stairs to get to rocket, or to go from os to truck or up mid to bridge, or to take the alley side jump onto the flag platforms. You can crouch jump from grapple to rocket and from double doors up to flag platform, but pretty much any other route on the map is going to lock you into clamber. Which is a big part of the reason bazaar is so miserable to play at higher skill brackets, because you can almost never move without taking shots for free while you are locked out of your gun, forcing you to then hide in a corner so you can take fights without a huge disadvantage.

Streets has a similar problem with the jump from c to stalker, forcing you to run through the suicide corner to challenge someone in planters, or else run all the way around plaza and get shot by 3/4 of the map like a complete bot. And the jump up atm, and both jumps up to br (it’s possible to crouch jump the one from the light, but in my experience you are going to be forced to clamber 90% of the time).

Ditto aquarius; there are 5 jumps up to top mid and all of them force a clamber. As do the jumps up the outside of util. Need I go on? If these routes could be made with crouch jumps or by gandhi hopping, I would agree that the clamber is a skill gap, punishing only the people who don’t know the advanced jumps or can’t make them relaibly. But that isn’t the case.

There is no skill gap in being forced to decide between a route that you know is watched and/or pre naded, sitting still to get shot or naded out, or taking a clamber and praying they are too braindead to shoot you while you can’t fight back. It turns the correct option into either sitting and hoping they are too afraid to challenge, or making a suicidal play in hopes for a trade. Both of which would be more meaningful if you could take people off guard when they were expecting you to go for the jump, creating more space to mind game the enemy for the outplay.