Zhukov said:
I kind of prefer having no jump button, or replacing it with a climb/vault button, in games that are going for the realistic look.
Seeing people bunny-hop around in my super-serious games does not improve them.
Agreed, with the added emphasis on the "realistic" part.
I see no problem with jumping in a cartoony platformer or an action-RPG involving superhuman protagonists, but any game with even a modicum of realism? No.
I mean, have you guys tried jumping lately? The human body is not built for it, especially not for the vertical kind. In real life you do not jump onto boxes or ledges, you climb.
As for the other side of the problem, as in "everything is about contextual button presses now", I say it's a good idea with oftentimes bad execution (see the Mass Effect sprint/action/take-cover/vault-over-cover button being the same), and I mostly blame multi-platform-development for that.
It's because controllers only have a limited number of buttons while games are getting more and more complex, so developers often have to compromise and make one button do multiple things. In case of your generic action game, you have a few commands that you cannot overlap (shooting, opening a menu, crouching, reloading, the hacking/magic/whatever-gimmick of the game, etc.)
Jumping on the other hand is a very contextual thing to do to begin with (unless you are one of the bunny-hoppers that ruin the immersion of every MMO ever), so mapping it to the "action" key, another contextual button, is very tempting.
Then someone realizes that "Wait, taking cover/melee attacks/hacking/etc. are also contextual!", so they add more and more functions to the "action" key in order to free up the other buttons to do specific and/or unique things. At the end of the day, whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on how much sense the developer and how much tolerance the player has, and whether or not the gimmicks of the game are good enough to justify giving them their own buttons on the first place.