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> I suppose the Halo CE campaign is not a very good Halo game in your opinion, because Jumping is rarely necessary or encouraged in it?
Not CE specifically, but you’d be happy to know that one of my top criticism for classic Halo in general is that Bungie never used the full potential of the movement sandbox.Indeed, the movement on most levels, campaign or multiplayer, is quite uninspired.
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> Or is Jumping a bad mechanic in it?
Obviously not. It is inherently a fun mechanic that is so captivating that players go out of their way to find interesting uses for it. A whole community of trick jumpers was built around finding the most ridiculous jumps in environments that were not at all conducive to it. Just today I was speedrunning The Package in Reach, and used a number of ingenious and precise jumps (by no means of my own invention) to circumvent sections of the level.
There are always two parts to designing a mechanic. First is making the mechanic intrinsically engaging, so that the player seeks opportunities to use it. Second is giving as many of those opportunities as is reasonable. Failing at the second doesn’t mean that the mechanic is bad, or even that it’s implementation is bad. It just means that there’s more work to be done. It’s just that if you’re actively working against that, you’re doing something very wrong.
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> And not being seen when you don’t make a jump doesn’t seem to matter very much to anyone other than the person who didn’t make a jump they’re supposed to be able to make. You’re STILL rewarded with more efficient map traversal if you make a jump without using Clamber, because you wouldn’t be slowed down by the animation. If you would open your minds and be more logical, you’d see that the base concept for Clamber doesn’t have to interfere with Classic style gameplay.
If you would be less prejudiced, you would see that I’m not trying to claim that the basic concept of Clamber is fundamentally a bad mechanic, just that your idea of how to deal with it is. There is indeed a way to retain the basic concept of Clamber in a way that doesn’t interfere with (my idea of) classic gameplay. That is, as I have suggested earlier, to simply do away with locking the player to a first person animation. Every ledge would simply have a virtual box surrounding it that lifts the player above the ledge if they land anywhere inside the box. The first person animation might show the character quickly giving themselves a boost with one hand, but the player would be free to shoot during the animation, and throwing a grenade, turning enough, or doing anything that is not congruous with the animation would simply interrupt the animation while retaining the vertical momentum.This retains the basic purpose of Clamber, which is to help players up ledges. It is more engaging than the Halo 5 Clamber since it doesn’t interrupt combat flow. For the same reason, it is also compatible with the weapons-up philosophy that is at the core of classic Halo.
It doesn’t punish the player for failing to jump precisely. But that is the cost of having a ledge climb mechanic that is engaging and compatible with classic gameplay.
A more different alternative for Clamber is a simple double jump. It accomplishes the same task as Clamber, but would probably be slightly more comfortable to classic fans. This of course comes at the expense that it still leaves opportunities of someone failing a really long jump because their foot caught on a ledge, which would make it less desirable for fans of Clamber.
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> At this point, you’re arguing against something purely because you, personally, don’t think you would use it.
Not really. I’m arguing against something based on what I think I understand about player psychology and game design. The reasons I’m fairly confident in it is that the principles I laid out are demonstrated in many successful games, and because I’ve read and heard similar sentiments by game designers who presumably understand more about this than either of us does. (I’m pretty sure the expression “empowering the player” I first read in a Jason Jones interview and it stuck with me.) Obviously, there is I a great deal of personal bias regarding what I find engaging and such. But since players generally dislike long animations that take away control (e.g., QTEs), you’ll have to find a lot of people with a differing opinion to make me change my mind about this personal preference being generally applicable.
It’d be stupid to pretend to be completely objective, but thinking I’m going solely by personal preference is equally erroneous.
