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.
Debatable. Half-Life's early development was a hot mess until they started building around how things actually worked. Like, they had the soldier AI, and it completely fell apart outside of some corridor-heavy environments... so they remade all the soldier encounters to take place in hallways and crate mazes.
The crouch jump was almost certainly an accidental invention. But its inclusion in the game was surely devs going 'this is neat, let's make it a whole thing.'