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 made an FPS that runs on 1980s hardware and you can get onto any surface you can see over. You just walk. Halo 4 or whatever introduced "mantling" and it was like, oh, why didn't everybody think of this? Its absence now highlights any game with unimpressive obstacles. Even the Half-Life machinema series Freeman's Mind highlights how Gordon should be able to chin-up over some ledges and skip whole chapters.
Another example specific to Half-Life: the PS2 version's long-jump module is a double jump. You just jump in midair and it fires off. No wonky crouch-then-jump command. Movement isn't any less deep or complex. It's just simplified to the point you can do it by pushing a button twice instead of playing piano.