The devs, rather than patching it, incorporated skiing into Tribes 2 and has been a staple ever since. And also, while Counter Strike has become a massive success and has thousands of players today. Tribes (while it was successful at the time) has become a niche game that quickly weeds out newcomers and hardly anyone plays it anymore.
Not saying that there's a correlation, I just find it amusing.
Sadly, it was abandoned and taken over by cheaters. Also, it was never as moddable as the original Tribes was, and since there were no private servers, there was no way for the community to pick up the slack after Hi Rez abandoned it.
If you knew how to really ski well, and had the map mastery to apply it well, it almost felt like cheating sometimes because new players had almost no hope of keeping up.
I'm sure in today's world it would get patched out.
There is room in the world for hyper-realistic real-time raytracing games. But not a lot of room.
To any game developers reading this, my request to you is to please optimize for fun, especially at the expense of polish.
A good designer, though, should also be examining why that mechanic was fun, and how the same dynamics that led to it can be recreated in a way that’s fun for both the player and their opponent. Or even a different game built on different assumptions where those dynamics are accepted.
There’s often a lot more that goes into removing something like bunny hopping than just a desire for polish. To any player out there angry at the removal of their favorite mechanic, my request is to consider the whole game and the enjoyment of all the people who play it, even at the expense of the thing that’s fun for you.
The first mechanic is that while jumping, when you either hold down the A-button and move your mouse left at the right pace, or hold down the D-button and move your mouse right at the right pace, you will accelerate slightly, plus change your trajectory.
The second mechanic is that you don't just stop when you hit the ground, instead friction is applied to you in a very simplistic way. Also, when you jump at exactly the same tick at which you hit the ground, this friction won't even be applied.
Both mechanics together mean that you can reach theoretically unlimited velocity.
I'm not entirely sure what the changes in 1.3 were, but certainly both mechanics still exist in 1.6.
The first mechanic you can easily test on a local server, by typing "sv_gravity 0" into the console, then jumping into the air and performing the motions mentioned above - you can still reach unlimited speed.
The second mechanic is harder to test, but I'm pretty sure it still works. However, it might only work for a single time or something like that.
There is also "sv_airaccelerate" which somehow controls how much you accelerate with mechanic 1, but I'm not exactly sure how it works.
One thing though that I always mention when this comes up: Mechanic 1 doesn't just make gameplay better, it actually makes it more realistic too, and it should be implement in every shooter. "But I can't jump around corners in real life!" you might say, however I would argue that you actually can. We can do this because we can use both of our feet to manipulate our trajectory much more finely that we can in most games.
All mechanic one does is give us this lost freedom of motion back.
This is another thing that I think game designers often forget. When trying for a "realistic" game, you have to account for the fact that in the real world we have a lot more "bandwidth" than our computer monitors, sound, and input devices can offer. It is perfectly fine for a "realistic" game to offer some counterbalancing capabilities to address the unrealistic constraints of the game space. A HUD being a classic example that is generally included; it's a cute idea to try to build a game that doesn't need one, but they've mostly been disasters (couple of exceptions), because a HUD is one of those compensations.
Another example: I may not have a minimap in real life, but I do have proprioception, balance input as provided by my inner ears, a nearly 180 degree FOV (albeit with a lot of details and caveats, but I've got decades of experience dealing with those; my eyes saccade much more quickly and accurately than my mouselook even after quite of time working on the latter), tactile connections to the space even down to something as simple as feeling my feet hit the ground and the physical effort of walking. Staying oriented in real space is massively harder if we take those away (see also "people getting disoriented in zero gravity"). It's perfectly fine to have a minimap help me out.
Being able to fudge a trajectory a bit fits right in to that idea. In real life I've got all sorts of extra inputs to help me jump accurately, and years of experience in my body to help me know the likely consequences. Even a realistic game can afford to help me out a bit as I remote-control around the feelingless, proprioceptionless, tunnel-visioned, aurally-challenged, and so on robot that constitutes my player.
Besides the standard bomb maps, and the fun game dynamics created by this “bug”, there were hundreds of servers running surf_ maps and others that relied on hopping mechanics. The update threw a massive community in a tar pit.
Loads game
Sees people hopping like preschoolers
"No thanks. I'm good. "
A bit of a self fulfilling statement there. I understand and appreciate that others found it fun, but such mechanics have always reduced my enjoyment, and I tend to avoid such games. Nothing wrong with either side of that, but one cant then claim the unanimity of enjoyment as meaningful.
I get that "realism" is a silly thing to discuss, not because it's good/bad, but because it is meaningless to try and distinguish the "changes from real life we like/want" from "changes from real life that hurt our enjoyment", particularly when we all have different tastes.
But all games that make gummy bear-style hopping over flat, unbroken land a common form of movement are personally visually jarring, and even as I welcome others to enjoy whatever games they want, I don't think my reaction is a terribly crazy reaction to have.
...Fortunately I'll likely die long before common human inhabitation of the moon, so I won't have to a reality I find jarring in this way :)
(real life is jarring enough already. Too much realism)
I never liked bunny-hopping.
Even someone who never heard of Counter-Strike could figure out that this is a false statement.
In the early days of the medium, there were a lot of hard constraints with regard to computing power, so game designers had to work with what they had to produce fun in efficient and creative ways. In other words, space invaders or super mario had no chance of achieving anything approaching realism given the hardware available at the time, so they had to focus on maximizing fun instead.
Later, beginning with Doom and expanding with the rise of 3D acceleration, we were wowed by the prospect of exploring 3D worlds in a way that felt familiar to navigating the real world, which gave rise to this implicit idea that achieving realism should be the goal of video games.
I remember discussing video games like this as a teenager: when FPS games introduced reloading as a mechanic, or when Half-Life got rid of floating weapons and health kits in favor of objects which lay there on the ground diagetically like they would in real life, or when Halo only let us hold two weapons at the same time, we talked about these developments in the terms that they were obviously steps forward, because they were more realistic. Often the "best graphics" are also conflated with those which are the most photo-realistic.
But more recently, we've started to round a corner where people have started to look back, and realize that realism isn't necessarily the goal of games, and is often orthogonal to fun or other redeeming qualities. After all there are a lot of parts of real life which are not actually fun, and if we simulate the violent setting of many video games with perfect realism, it probably would not be very fun to experience bleeding out from a bullet wound in an accurate way. More recently, games have gotten a bit more fantasy back in, and are more unapologetic about revealing their medium.
I think it's similar in some ways to what we saw in European art movements. For hundreds of years, people tried to paint reality with ever increasing fidelity. But sometime in the classical period, the problem of how to represent light, shadow and geometry in accurate perspective in paint became a solved problem, and thus it was no longer interesting. Later movements, like impressionism and later modernism and post-modernism threw realism aside and focused on pushing the medium itself forward in whatever way ended up being the most compelling.
Cries in Team Fortress 2
TF2 has been around long enough to have the weight of history.
Escape from Tarkov is the new trending game and the market leaders are still Fortnite CSGO and League.
Quake-like games embraced bunny-hopping because I guess they were already pretty "unrealistic" whilst Counter-Strikes entire schtick was about the "realism" that it brought to the scene.
And bunny-hopping wasn't removed until 1.4, where they added a movement penalty every time you jump. It was softened in 1.5 after a lot of discord from the player base.
But when it comes to keeping things simple and enjoyable Overwatch really brought things back for me. For somebody who does not have time to invest tons of time into gaming and don't really care anymore, I love that in Overwatch there is no messing around with picking up weapons. Just learn the weapons your character comes with.
The cartoony look of overwatch makes the worlds a lot easier to navigate. Too much realism makes it hard to pick out enemies, objectives etc.
Also too realistic weapons, limits the variety of strategies one can employ.
I care more about internal consistency than absolute realism. Fortnite does not do it for me. You got these sort of realistic weapons but then then people can build walls hand houses in record time, in the middle of a fight. It just seems really dumb.
Although this seems acceptable to me in Minecraft, but against I guess it is the internal consistency. The graphics and everything in Minecraft suggests there is nothing odd about building a wall in the middle of a fight.
Ultimately it wasn't part of the intended game design, despite being a bit of a fun imaginary minigame within the greater 5v5, and I agree it was the best choice for all the mods around that time (CS wasn't the only one you could bhop in).
To add to this anecdote though, knife scraping on a wall when the round is down to 1v1 was almost always universally "come knife fight me" and for the many times I've seen players arrange this duel I rarely see either try to "cheat" and shoot the other.
Later, Battlefield 2142 had you spawn in via drop pods which you had extremely limited control over so you could try to land behind cover, it was discovered if you rapidly moved the mouse you could move farther. If you had a mouse that you could change the DPI on the fly you could crank it and actually travel across an entire map. Enter the pod surfing advantage.
With some skill you could basically land wherever you wanted to within feet, dropping behind enemy lines gave you an insane advantage. You could actually drop at the very back of an enemy controlled area, behind their most distant respawn and just waste the other team.
You could also use pod surfing to reach elevated positions that you could not get to otherwise. You could just sit in your sniper perch laying waste to unsuspecting people below. Better you could get up there, then have a teammate land as resupply or as a medic and effectively stay there the rest of the map dealing death. The clan I played with was very good at pod surfing, any time a guy would get in one of those positions I'd steer over to them and drop health or resupply depending on what they needed and then I'd just suicide and respawn elsewhere until they needed resupply again and I'd kamikaze and head surf back to them. Sometimes we'd organize sessions with another clan that was similarly adept at pod surfing and we'd either go play on their server or they'd come to ours and stuff would get ridiculous. Poor unsuspecting randoms would join the server and be like 'what the hell is even going on?!'. I think of all the FPS I've played, BF 2142 was probably the bulk of my most memorable FPS experiences, thanks entirely to that bug. I joined that clan because they saw me pod surfing on their server and extended an invite. I played with them for 3 BF games total before we all sorta went our own ways.
Fairly quickly servers with active mods would ban you for it and eventually they implemented something to seriously nerf pod surfing but man, it was fun while it lasted.
We also played a lot of actionquake later. We made maps especially for jumping with this technique but I can't remember ever calling it bunnyjumping.
Funny, yesterday my daughter found how to move faster in some game by pressing strafe and forward at the same time. Had some fun to explain how that works with math in programming :-)
"The main difference between the two is that Bunny Hopping requires the player to release the forward movement key immediately upon strafing."
https://quake.fandom.com/wiki/Bunny_Hopping
In other words, if you were playing Q1/Quake World, to gain speed, you would jump and only press left and right. To keep going straight you would flick your mouse in the opposite direction that you were pressing on the keyboard. Although there are a bunch of other small tricks. In Quake 3 you would be required to press forward and left/right, unless you were playing something like CPMA. You also had more air control in something like Q1/Quake World.
It is pretty interesting from a gaming and programming perspective :). Also, not about mechanics, but Q2 CTF was really fun at the time :D
I'm not mentioning this to be a jerk, just that I totally understand how the movement can make someone addicted to a game.
Side note, when id software handed off maintenance of Quake 2 to Threewave, Zoid added full air control ala QW to Q2. Suddenly I loved the game. Alas, Q2ers almost rioted and it was changed back.
Edit: and recording actions so you can do some hi-def video recording later.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ArenaFPS/comments/a1hm63/arenafps_f...
Apart from proper game-breaking bugs (fountain hooks, bottle crow), everything else stays mostly untouched.
A vast majority of hero balance often came down to limitations of the WC3 engine, that were carried on into Source2 because they had now become hero defining traits.
"Admin he's doing it sideways"
Great example of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRCeSpQUgbc
Don’t ask me how I know this.
It was a skill honed and part of the fun of the game. Then in version 1.3 they removed it because it was a 'bug' -- they basically removed the mini-game of bunny-hopping and the first 30 seconds that were all about perfectly executing bunny hops to get into position were replaced by a monotonous boring walk.
Such a shame that the monotony of real-life is added to games.
Anyways, I think the author should try Overwatch -- it's one of the few contemporary widely played FPSs that doesn't take realism too seriously.