A Lament for the Jump Button

[aozgolo]

It came as a sudden and rather astounding shock to me. I had waited several years between playing old-school action adventure games and their modern counterparts, and when I finally came around to it I found the controls alien and weird. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was different until I realized...

There's no jump button.

This can't be right? Games like Sleeping Dogs, Brutal Legend, Hitman Absolution, Shadow of Mordor, Thief, Tomb Raider, even Batman have tons of high flying leaps and death defying jumps. Yet there is NO jump button.

Action Adventure games seem to be well along down this path now of the context-specific jumping. You can leap across gaps, grab a ledge, vault over a short wall, or jump down on an enemy from above but you can't just "jump".

This may not seem like a big deal really, I mean who cares? As long as you can still jump when you need to who cares about not being able to jump whenever you want to.

Well I think it goes a little deeper. It's not just the jump button you can't do. You can't even walk off a cliff anymore. There's an invisible wall that prevents death by fatal misstep. When you ran headlong into a wall, you hit the wall, you didn't vault up it. Despite having more buttons than ever on game controllers, we now have more actions than ever tied to single buttons.

I'm not dissing these new games by any means, I rather enjoy them myself, but in some ways while my interactivity with the environment increases, I feel my freedom of mobility decreasing. I feel less compelled towards caution, less concerned about precision, I know as long as I tilt my thumbstick roughly in the right direction that the game character will figure out what to do. That I think is the big problem I have with it all, it's all my character's skill now and none of my own.

Context-sensitive actions in games seem to be the new king, and while I don't really fault game developers for it, as it is the inevitable step in streamlining the game, I feel it strips away aspects of challenge. I notice as time goes on that with an increase of AAA Action titles going this route I've simultaneously witness an increase in the popularity of Indie Hardcore Retro Platformers.

I'm not even the sort of gamer who really craves hardcore difficulty, I can't stand bullet-hell games or any sort of twitch-based Nintendo-hard games but I feel that most modern action games have all their difficulty "stripped" away once you learn the patterns of the AI. In older games even if you knew the layout, had a walkthrough in your lap, if you didn't time your jumps, hit that grab button at the right moment, or know just how fast you needed to go to leap that chasm, it wasn't going to work out too well. It was more player skill.

I am curious though, am I alone in this? Do others lament the dying jump button? What is the compromise?

 

[bbchain]

I feel the same. Maybe that's why I play certain games and just feel like something's missing. Jumping - and further, environments that require jumping, outside of platformers - Was a big part of making the game worlds feel alive and interactive in a lot of PS2 era games. With Context specific jumps only, it ruins the illusion a little bit and makes it feel more scripted and specific.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

Lack of jump bugs me too. When you can only jump an context sensitive spots on a level it just feels really gamey and artificial.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Yeah, I always notice when games lack the ability to jump. When I saw that The Witcher 3 had a jump button I flipped out. It's amazing. But the last Tomb Raider had a jump button too as far as I remember. If not, then the movement is so fluid I didn't notice that you can't jump. Nah, fuck it. It had a jump button I'm sure of it.

 

[Evonisia]

Yeah, I always notice when games lack the ability to jump. When I saw that The Witcher 3 had a jump button I flipped out. It's amazing. But the last Tomb Raider had a jump button too as far as I remember. If not, then the movement is so fluid I didn't notice that you can't jump. Nah, fuck it. It had a jump button I'm sure of it.

The dodge roll > Jumps any day, but Tomb Raider 2013 does have a jump button.

 

[aozgolo]

Yeah, I always notice when games lack the ability to jump. When I saw that The Witcher 3 had a jump button I flipped out. It's amazing. But the last Tomb Raider had a jump button too as far as I remember. If not, then the movement is so fluid I didn't notice that you can't jump. Nah, fuck it. It had a jump button I'm sure of it.

The dodge roll > Jumps any day, but Tomb Raider 2013 does have a jump button.

I'll admit in my "research" for this article I had to go back and test several games because I just wasn't sure if it had jump or not, I originally had Assassin's Creed on the list but apparently it does have a jump button (?). At any rate the uncertainty I think further illustrates how ubiquitous the issue of context-specific actions have become. Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed may very well HAVE a jump button but it feels almost tacked on and less a feature designed for since every bit of platforming in those games is reliant on your character just "being in the right spot" and has far less to do with how well you utilize the jump button.

 

[Wintermute_v1legacy]

Yep. Playing through sleeping dogs, that's the first thing i noticed. I don't know about newer asscreed games, but I'm pretty sure you can just jump in the first 4 games.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Yeah, I always notice when games lack the ability to jump. When I saw that The Witcher 3 had a jump button I flipped out. It's amazing. But the last Tomb Raider had a jump button too as far as I remember. If not, then the movement is so fluid I didn't notice that you can't jump. Nah, fuck it. It had a jump button I'm sure of it.

The dodge roll > Jumps any day, but Tomb Raider 2013 does have a jump button.

I'll admit in my "research" for this article I had to go back and test several games because I just wasn't sure if it had jump or not, I originally had Assassin's Creed on the list but apparently it does have a jump button (?). At any rate the uncertainty I think further illustrates how ubiquitous the issue of context-specific actions have become. Tomb Raider and Assassin's Creed may very well HAVE a jump button but it feels almost tacked on and less a feature designed for since every bit of platforming in those games is reliant on your character just "being in the right spot" and has far less to do with how well you utilize the jump button.

Assassin's Creed jump button is almost entirely contextual and I loathe it. But that's not the case with Tomb Raider. It works fine. Maybe you can't jump in a single spot but you don't need to do that. It's still a regular jump button.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

The Assassin's Creed, Borderlands, Far Cry and inFAMOUS games have jump buttons. The GTA games as well. Don't know about Saints Row.

The first thing I make a note of in a game is whether I can jump or not, so I guess it's important to me. And it does feel weird that Batman can do pretty much anything but jump.

 

[josemlopes]

The thing that bugs me the most is when navigation is very contextual, that is one of the reasons I liked Styx so much, if there is enough space for the character to be on top of you can jump there, if you fail the jump its your problem. At one point I jumped to the head of a statue and managed to stay there until a guard went away, in most games the character would slip to a side as if the statue was a cone with no space for the character.

Even Assassins Creed games have that problem with certain objects, remember when one could just walk anywhere as long as the slope wasnt too inclined?

 

[Ambient_Malice]

You can blame Ocarina of Time for contexual/automated jumping design in third person games. Also dodge rolling, possibly.

The FPS genre didn't feature jumping in the early years, but it soon became an established feature. But then Rareware decided that they didn't like jumping in FPS games. As I recall, they thought it looked stupid. So modern FPS games that don't feature jumping are likely influenced by Rareware's work, and possible Free Radical's work, too.

 

[Fappy]

I am a firm believer in the idea that games which don't invest in their platforming mechanics should NOT have platforming mechanics to begin with. Sure, make some super simple, impossible to fuck up platforming sequence for a cinematic purpose, but DO-FUCKING-NOT throw difficult platforming curve balls at us if your platforming mechanics suck ass. Dark Souls is a game that immediately comes to mind here. No real jump button + collision detection being finicky as fuck = terrible platforming.

Please devs, do platforming right or don't do it at all. I have played platformers my entire life. If you don't have tight controls I will absolutely despise your platforming sections, period.

 

[bbchain]

The Assassin's Creed, Borderlands, Far Cry and inFAMOUS games have jump buttons. The GTA games as well. Don't know about Saints Row.

The first thing I make a note of in a game is whether I can jump or not, so I guess it's important to me. And it does feel weird that Batman can do pretty much anything but jump.

Saints Row does indeed have a jump button that plays a good bit into gameplay, especially with the side activities

 

[sXeth]

Dying Light has a jump button. Its also quite happy to let you run off a cliff (well, buildings moreso) at leisure if you don't press it (although if you jump off THE Tower, it autoloads you back, since its on a separate map or something). All the Elder Scrolls too. Also Far Cry 3 & 4 (I can't remember if #1 had it). And Destiny. And Wolfenstein. And Dishonored..... maybe I just inadvertently play all the games with it.

I actually can't think of any of the examples mentioned that I've played that would stop you running off cliffs. I know its possible in most of the ACs, Batman (though he stops his fall with his cape or grapnel gun automatically), and Mordor (no fall damage as he auto-goes into wraith mode).

The main time I notice the gap is when the game designer also relies on ankle/knee height rocks/fences/etc to keep you in, especially if they have contextual leaping points or combat moves where the character flies around like a superhero/acrobat.

 

[Evil Smurf]

I've recently bought a WiiU, and as a result just need to press "B" for jump. Go Nintendo?

 

[CrystalShadow]

I guess as a long-standing Zelda fan I'm used to the concept of no jump button. I mean you do sometimes have them in some zelda games, but in the 2d isometric ones you can't jump, and in the 3d ones it's context sensitive.

I've never really noticed the specific issue you're mentioning, but I have noticed the general trend towards more stuff but less choice.

You can do way more than ever, but you have less and less control over what it is that you can actually do.

Adventure games went through this exact sequence, and since in some ways they died out in the late 90's it's interesting to see.

Adventure games started as text only games. You typed an instruction, and got an answer as to whether that worked or not, and then maybe a description that follows on from the action.

There were many possible actions, and often little way to know what you could or couldn't do, which was frustrating and very confusing at times. (ugh. hunting for the words the parser actually understood for the action you wanted, or what, precisely an object you were trying to use was called was beyond frustrating.)

From here, we moved to the graphical adventure game. Graphical adventure games were really just an extension of the text adventures where there was pictures and animation taking the place of some of the descriptions that would have been in the older ones.
The visuals made them more appealing, and made certain situations easier to understand, but didn't change much about how they played.
(Except that in some later ones you could walk around just with the arrow keys)

This eventually gave way to mouse driven adventure games. Initially, some of the groups that made them tried to implement a system where you had context sensitive menus full of possible things you could do with various objects and things in the environment.
At the same time a more standard system of 5-7 or so actions that you could try on anything started to form.
Some were common to most games, like 'look at this thing' or 'touch that'.
Others varied quite a bit. Such as 'lick a thing' in Space Quest, or Using Max on an object in Sam & Max

The adventure games that used mouse control but had many different choices didn't really last long, and quickly these handful of commands became common.
One new thing introduced here, which existed in different form in the text parser based games, was the 'pixel hunt'. (In text games the equivalent was basically, find the right word for this object).
Which is, trying to figure out what tiny spot on the screen might possibly be something you can click on and actually do something with.

Anyway, these handful of commands were the dominant form of adventure games for most of this era, but then, towards the very end, you got the 'one command' games. I don't know how many there were, but Kings Quest 7 is the most prominent.
You basically had 'interact' and 'items'.
All the other commands that once existed in text games were gone. Even the handful of commands in the older mouse based adventure games were gone...
It was just that one option, and whatever items you had.

And that's where the genre died out. Until it was revived much later, and in it's revived form, basically has reverted to the 'about 5 options' way of doing things...

To be fair, the change in interface made adventure games far more approachable, and less frustrating. And in practical terms it didn't change what you could do all that much.

But even so, it feels so much more restrictive than the 'try anything you can think of, maybe it'll work' approach of text adventures... Even if that old sense of freedom was probably an illusion in reality, because either way only the actions the developers actually thought of would work.

Anyway... Massive tangential essay... Stuff... Jump.

I guess to be honest I haven't played many games of the type being described here where you can't jump. And even where I have, it's games from series where that's pretty much always been the case...

Um... Yeah. OK then... >_<

 

[IceForce]

The Mass Effect games are the ones everyone's forgetting. No jump button in any of those. Instead you have the 'vault over cover' button, WHICH IS MAPPED TO THE SAME FUCKING BUTTON AS THE 'TAKE COVER' BUTTON. Worst design decision ever.

Also, Tomb Raider 2013 *did* have a jump button. You had to use it to scramble up walls and during the scripted sequences where the floor was giving way from under you.

 

[aozgolo]

Wall of Text

It's very true these issues permeate throughout many genres of gaming not just Action Adventure.

I think particularly I should have said "3D Platformer" as this seems to be all but a dead genre now. You had games like Spyro the Dragon, Crash Bandicoot, Psychonauts, Banjo Kazooie, Jak and Daxter, and they were very popular and common, and there were even more adult oriented ones like the old Tomb Raider games, Legacy of Kain, Shadow of the Colossus and Ico. Now this genre has greatly whittled away to context-heavy action games. It seems sandbox games like GTA, Saint's Row, Just Cause, and the like still maintain a jump button thankfully.

I've even noticed it in RPGs, particularly CRPGs on the PC. Back in the old days we had RPGs with a plethora of interactivity, customization, and depth. While there's still bastions holding to the old days, you are hard pressed to find a game with the immense amount of play offered by the likes of Baldur's Gate or Ultima VII or Daggerfall.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I've recently bought a WiiU, and as a result just need to press "B" for jump. Go Nintendo?

Unless you're playing Zelda ofcourse.

And seriously, that's the only game where the lack of a jump button annoys me. Resident Evil 4 has context jumping, but I really don't mind because I know the action will bring me to the other side of the chasm, and RE4 isn't about platforming.

In Zelda on the other hand there's tons of platforming, but without a dedicated jump button you have to just run toward the edge and hope you weren't at a slighty skewed angle, causing you to plummet to your death, which with its every so lovely camera will happen more often than not. Or hope that the game actually registers it as a jump action and not a 'lose my balance, tip over, and hang from the ledge' action.