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This is a soapbox that I really enjoy standing on. I think there is a large number of game developers who have forgotten that the point of a game is to be fun.

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.




Fun is different things to different people. It’s common for many gamers to believe that fun for them is fun for everyone, but balancing fun for multiple parties in a multiplayer game, where losing has to be fun, too, involves a lot of tradeoffs. Inevitably, there will be some mechanic or feature that works against the long-term health of the game, despite being fun for some, and it’s either the game or the mechanic. One of them has to go.

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.


It should be noted that there are multiple mechanics at play here, and neither was removed completely.

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.


"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."

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.


I don’t know if you played CS at the time, but there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t enjoy bunny hopping or had mastering it as a goal

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.


> I don’t know if you played CS at the time, but there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t enjoy bunny hopping

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.


Since that was the only way CS ever worked until then, what else would you expect? It was never marketed as a Rainbow Six.


I don't expect ANY game where "run" and "jump" are options to make "jump" the primary form of movement.

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)


By that measure, Doom is a terrible game. No hopping, but people don’t move at 50km/h. It’s all about pleasurable game dynamics and realism plays an incredibly small role there.


> It’s common for many gamers to believe that fun for them is fun for everyone

I never liked bunny-hopping.


> there wasn’t a single soul who didn’t enjoy bunny hopping or had mastering it as a goal

Even someone who never heard of Counter-Strike could figure out that this is a false statement.


Well said. Good example of this illustrated through a classic CS:S montage video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNvDUO42Hys


I feel like we're in a renaissance (or maybe modernism) of fun in video games.

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.


Someways games have become so streamlined as to remove all fun from it, Witcher 3 for example has a detailed world, but the game is essentially that of going from one marker to another in the mini-map, in other words while playing one is essentially ignoring the beautiful world and instead fulfilling tedious chores. Many recent Ubisoft titles have been similarly critized for being essentially descending into a rote task of clearing markers on the map.


Raytracing is pretty beautiful in minecraft.




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