Without wishing to resurrect too many memories of Brink, I think wall-jumping is something that could be incorporated into the game that would satisfy DB’s stated aim of movement mechanics that add skill but don’t impact too much on how hard targets are to hit.
Wall-jumping is fairly simple, you jump at a wall and bounce off it. The angle you bounce off at is the angle you hit at, but mirrored, i.e. you hit a wall at 35 degrees you bounce off at 35 degrees, with your trajectory changing by a total of approach angle * 2. So if you hit at 45 degrees you depart at 45 degrees, and your trajectory has changed by 90 degrees. Hit a wall head on (i.e. at 90 degrees to the wall) you bounce back in the opposite direction, 90 * 2 = 180. Although your POV doesn’t change, only the direction you’re travelling in.
In addition, at the moment of impact (and this is the bit that would require timing / skill) you press your jump button again and it’s like you jumped normally, except at the new height you’ve gained from the first jump. So if you can jump, say, 3 feet high normally, jumping at a wall and then pressing jump again just as you hit it allows you to jump 6 feet high. You could possibly add some weighting factor to the equation so that the wall-jump only gains, say, 2/3rd’s of the height of the first jump, so in this example you’d gain a total of 5 feet rather than 6 etc. but hopefully you get the idea.
Here are some examples:-
Jump onto these crates (which are currently too high to even crouch jump onto) to get over this wall, or even through that window.
Jump from the stairs (via the solar panel on the street light) onto the bridge.
Get up here without using the Van parked to the right. In fact, this is one thing I think wall-jumping could really help with. I suspect the Van is there precisely to enable us to take that route, and vehicles are parked strategically all over the place to enable this kind of thing, but adding a dirty great vehicle just so one alternate route can be taken could compromise game-play (by adding a great big obstacle to hide behind) and also act as a flag for the jumps that can be made. Part of the fun, and the skill, is finding out what can be done without having your hand held by the game.
This is an example of a possible flaw in the theory however. I suspect being able to get over this wall (and effectively into attacking team spawn) would not be a good idea.
Anyway, I’d like SD to at least think about this. It ties in with Brink to an extent, but you could view it as “Brink done properly”. It’s intuitive in that it makes more sense than strafe-jumping and circle jumping, as in you can imagine yourself doing these things, if you were agile and strong enough (which you expect your Merc is).
And I’ll leave you with proper hardcore wall-jumping, Urban Terror style. Another of those fast-paced games that no-one has complained about being too fast, ever.
