Jumping & crouching in Doom

[Final Verdict]

Jumping: Nope. Scram. I'm not a fan of jumping and I never use it. 

 

My beef with it is more about jumping in old Wads where it clearly wasn't intended, it's too easy to break progression with it. But even if I see a Wad where jumping is 'required' I probably won't play it, because then you often end up with a ton of platforming nonsense. If the map/wad is trying something new or it's not meant to be Doom 101 then that's entirely different. It's better to say I don't like it in old-school Wads or maps that follow the rulebook. Which is most of them.

 

I can definitely see a valid argument for it in multiplayer (mobility, hilarious mid-air deaths etc, etc). Although I haven't steeped my toes in Dooms multiplayer scene since the early noughties, so I can't say too much about that.

 

Crouching: I'm not at all bothered about it. I don't use it myself but I'm fairly indifferent to this one.

 

Freelook: Freelook isn't on the list here but it is the one exception where I will always use it whenever possible. I only disable that in old Wads or Wads where the mapper has disabled it. Otherwise I turn off auto-aim and enable freelook in a half-arsed attempt to create some semblance of balance for turning it on. Freelook is my guilty pleasure. 

 

Keep in mind this is all just personal preference, I really couldn't care less if others play with jumping enabled for example. Completely up to them, so long as they're having fun.

 

[DynamiteKaitorn]

I typically don't jump nowadays since I like to playtest WADs in WooF, but if I ever play a wad that needs jumping/crouching or is poorly designed, I will use it here and there.

[UAC guy]

Jumping is fine with me, because it was implemented well in Hexen. However, I feel that crouching is unnecessary, unless you're playing a realism mod, like hideous destructor. 

Edited June 3, 2021 by UAC guy

[magicsofa]

I never loved being glued to the ground, so jumping feels like a relief to me. Jumping and crouching have the potential to be cool features, if they are utilized properly.

I've seen WADs where you only need jumping for a handful of hops, or crouching to get into one or two highly linear vents. When this happens, it's because the mapper probably thought "this is already a feature of the port I'm using, so might as well use it." But of course, they only use it less than 1% of the time and the rest is standard Dooming like everyone is used to.

If you're going to require jumping or crouching, make it worthwhile. Give the player lots of opportunities to jump over enemies, crawl into an escape route, climb to weird places - and better yet, allow some monsters to jump around. Make it part of your WAD as much as running and shooting. If it isn't fun, then why require it?

[Gez]

I think I said it before: jumping allows to cross through large areas faster (by enabling shortcuts that wouldn't be possible otherwise) so it's a good option to speed up the pace of the game. It's not a surprise it has been fully adopted by the NuDoom games, which even went on to add double-jumping and dashing (which if you think about it, is horizontal jumping).

 

Crouching, on the other hand? It slows down the pace of the game. Sure, technically you could have little tunnels through a map that'd allow crouching to serve as a shortcut, but who does that? Crouching is used to make tedious ventilation shaft mazes, where you may fight a few enemies like lost souls or trites on a one-by-one basis. It's honestly kinda boring. Not a surprise it was adopted by Doom 3, the black sheep of the franchise.

 

In classic Doom maps, I like being able to jump around (just refraining from using it so as to shortcut map progression if the map wasn't designed with it in mind, but with no qualms to use it to backtrack faster through areas I've already been through "legit"). However I never use crouching unless required. It's just not one of my reflexes.

[smeghammer]

I'm kind of schizophrenic when it comes to this topic...

 

I almost never play with jumping/crouching, even if it is allowed in that particular map. I will however always play with freelook - it just feels more natural to me. However, if I come across a map that requires jumping/crouching or even freelook, I tend to think of it as not "Doomy" enough and probably won't play it through.

 

IIRC, some sourceports will distort the view if freelook is used. I use GZDoom and that seems to compensate for this quite well on looking up/down which is probably why freelook for me is OK.

[obake]

14 hours ago, Clippy said:

This is probably been done but I never noticed

 

As much as I like new tricks like free look and dynamic lighting and stuff like that... I just have a hard time when maps required jumping & crouching. It throws me way off

To me it matters on the set. If it's new and requires jumping and crouching, then I'm fine with it (as long as it's not all tedious platforming puzzles).

Old sets where it breaks continuity, not so much.

[Biz!]

As a Boom-Purist, I usually reject jumping and crouching on the maps I play because they weren't intended with it.

[Valboom]

Ever and never!

[Cehualli5]

I like jumping, I get to do whatever I want. Screw if it wasn't intended.

 

Crouching is a gimmick not really used much, so doesn't hurt to have it.

Edited June 3, 2021 by Cehualli5

[Rei is now real]

I personally like jumping and crouching. Only in the ZDoom family of ports, though.

[TheMightyHeracross]

All depends on whether the WAD I'm playing was designed with it in mind.

[Jello]

Honestly I don't think it matters whether it was intended or not. I always play with jumping and crouching on, or turn them on if they've been intentionally turned off.

 

I almost never use them, and honestly sequence breaking is the last thing on my mind. But I like to have those options available. If I see a secret in a map, and I can see an easy way to break it by jumping; I'll keep looking for the correct way to get to it, unless I know that the map was designed with jumping intended. If I'm at the very end of a level, gone through everything I can think of to get to your secret, but it's so damn obtuse that it'll take forever to figure it out, then I'll just go back and jump to it. Probably figure out the correct path after I do. Or I could've just used idbeholda, or idclip. So yeah, I'm guilty as charged.

 

And crouch, really, doesn't do anything unless the map is specifically designed with areas that you can only crouch to get in. It's not like Doom has that weird crouch/jump that became really popular after Half-Life so you can get to higher areas.

 

I'm playing single player, I'm not hurting anyone by having the options available to me. I will do everything I can to play a map as intended, but I don't like it when a feature is taken away from me. In my opinion, more options for the player is always a good thing. Same thing with using cheats in a single player game, I tend not to, I love playing the game as is. But if I do cheat, is the mapmaker going to know and get their feelings hurt? Did I only cheat myself? Well, did I still have fun? Yes. So no, no I didn't cheat myself. And I didn't cheat the level designer, because I still had fun playing their map. Because it's a game. It's supposed to be fun.

 

That's my opinion, and everyone has a right to theirs. I just don't think concerning ourselves over how other people might enjoy a single player video game is that important.

 

 

[ketmar]

i love crouching so much that k8vavoom even has "autocrouch" flag to use in playerpawn actor!

 

Spoiler

ok, it was added for Zan, because she's 64 units high, and if you gonna play with that mod, everything is already broken-not-a-doom anyway.

 

Edited June 5, 2021 by ketmar

[A Nobody]

On 6/2/2021 at 7:05 PM, Doomkid said:

I’m not sure which option to pick.. Jumping never bothered me too much, it has some fun uses here and there, particularly in certain multiplayer servers and with certain mods. I think it’s been in ports since 1999 or so, so it even has 90s cred as far as features go.

 

Crouching is a different story. Doom already takes place in a world that is substantially vertically squashed, where most creatures are nearly as wide as they are tall, if not wider.

 

When the DoomGuy crouches, he becomes a 32 x 32 x 32 little gnarled green turd on the ground. The sprite, being so tiny probably looks as good as it can, which still isn’t very good. It breaks compatibility with the 17 million skins that have been made since 1994 and just looks and feels shitty, awkward and stilted. It’s one of those features that seems “kind of obvious” and it was only a matter of time before it was implemented, but I just don’t think it works. You can’t remove it now since numerous maps likely depend on it, but I just can’t get over how shit it looks and feels.

 

You don’t even get wider, as if he was crawling around.. you just shrink into a tiny little cube! DoomGuy literally compresses himself on the Z axis like some kind of fucking jack in the box 😂

Have you checked with chasecam? There's crouching sprites.

Edited June 5, 2021 by The Strife Commando

[ReX]

As others have said, jumping (and/or crouching) when required or allowed by the game designer is perfectly fine. I see nothing wrong in using the z-axis for gameplay, so long as it doesn't break the intended progression of the game. Indeed, I have been guilty of creating games that depend on the use of z-axis gameplay.

 

As for mouselook, I will use it even when the game is intended to be vanilla-compatible. After years of using "advanced" source ports and playing modern games that require mouselook, I find it extremely difficult to go back to playing DooM without it.

 

Sue me.