For the uninitiated, crouch jumping is a mechanic where you can increase the height of ledges you are able to jump on by holding crouch after jumping, like a simulation of pulling your legs up in real life.
I never really thought much about it growing up, some games had it, some didn't, but it always felt natural/intuitive, and today I feel like it is a way to increase the ceiling of player movement by a simple combination of two existing movements.
However I've heard that some people dislike it, and some actively hate it. Some of the arguments I've heard is that if a player needs to be able to get somewhere, then ledges should be lower and not gated, and that the whole mechanic is useless and just introduces an extra button press for no reason.
I can see the merit in some points, and others I feel like are nitpicky, but I'm interested in broadly knowing how Lemmy feels about it.
I always saw it as a quirk of the way the game is programmed (they didn't bother disabling crouching while mid-air) that they just ended up somewhat legitimising by teaching it in the tutorial. AFAIK you only have to use this once or twice in the entire game, and don't recall it ever being useful when not forced (maybe except for climbing where you shouldn't to sequence break).
It's not part of the core gameplay. You learn in in the tutorial, forget about it, get stuck in the middle of the game, remember this is a thing, use it once and then forget about it again.
At least that's how I remember it. It's been a while since I played HL1.
HL1 had the long-jump upgrade where you had to do a crouch jump to use it.
The long jump sequence is crouch, then jump. Close enough together that it registers and turns into a single long jump move.
The crouch jump sequence is jump, then crouch. And it's really just a regular crouch in mid air.
But my point is that the long jump reduces the hitbox. They're both crouch-jumps, just different forms.
You had to long-jump into little spaces that would be too big to fit in normally.
That's not the kind of crouch-jump that's being discussed here. In source games you can crouch while you're in the air and it allows you to reach slightly higher ledges. It's got nothing to do with the long jump upgrade.
That sounds like bad design to me. It's not realistic at all.
In real life you'd do some kind of mantle. Box jumps are a good workout that no one ever uses for anything else.
I mean, you use the long jump to reach some crouch-jump spots. It's a type of crouch-jump.