Discussion Main / GameplayDerailment

Linking to a past Trope Repair Shop thread that dealt with this page: Unhealthy, non-indicative, started by TheGunheart on Feb 16th 2012 at 12:04:37 AM

Removed the following entry:

• Equally infamous is "bunny hopping" in First Person Shooters. Bunny Hopping was the exploitation of the fact that many games let you move a little faster when jumping than when running, and sometimes made you harder to hit. Thus, many players would constantly jump while moving. Unlike combos, however, FPS games since often took steps to eliminate bunny hopping, as it was almost certainly an unacceptable break from reality.
  • Strafejumping is another one: Diagonal movement was faster than straight movement due to engine limitations and jumping diagonal made it so that people could reach insane speeds and cover great distances whilst jumping. It is part of the skill test present in Quake Live before you go online.
  • Funnily enough, bunny hopping is a gameplay mechanic in Warsow.
  • As well as Nexuiz.

This entry gets its facts pretty much completely wrong. The U Nintentional speed increase from bunnyhopping was specific to the original Quake engine. As such, no game ever "took steps" to eliminate faster movement through jumping, because other FPS engines simply didn't suffer from the same defect in the first place. Later Quake games however implemented jumping speed increase (coupled with strafejumping) intentionally, because by the primary fanbase (which was small by today's standards, but back then made up a sizeable chunk of the small multiplayer scene) it was never seen as detracting from the game. The same thing applies to the other examples (and many more); for these games, it is a purely intentional main gameplay element. Further inaccuracies: only a few games with multiplayer capabilities had added diagonal movement speed, and this had nothing to do with jumping or engine "limitations" (rather, it's just sloppy programming and could likely have been fixed with a single line of code or even a binary hack). Later Quake games did have ways to increase movement speed while jumping through strafing, but this was, again, intentional. (the first game also had the unintentional effect that constantly strafing left and right increased your average forward speed above what's possible by walking in a straight line, but here, no jumping was involved) Some games may have removed the ability to jump repeatedly, because it made targets harder to hit. This has nothing to do with a bugged speed increase as again, games other than the original Quake and its direct derivatives did not suffer from that bug.