Climbing

Okay, fuck it. Here we go. I just finished posting on my buddy Zack's blog about Resident Evil inventories. So while I'm in a "people are idiots" kind of mood, I'm here to talk about climbing.

How hard is it? You hit a ledge with an angle between 150 and 270 degrees with 20% of your character's height above the angle and your character grabs onto the ledge (maybe while you hold B or something). With the same angles and 50% of your character's height above the angle your character will toss a leg up and pull themselves up. With 75%, the character simply takes a high step.
From 20% of your character's height being over an angle to the angle being 20% of your character's height above the top of the character, and within the angle range of 175 to 255, the character's arms with reach out to the ledge and the character will grapple the ledge appropriately.

Sounds complicated, doesn't it? I'll draw you some pictures.

See? When you look at it, it totally makes a little bit more sense. Okay, so maybe it's a little hard to describe, but I'm sick and tired of being expected to believe characters do not have basic human mobility.

Think about it. They almost always run forever, tirelessly. They can carry a dozen guns and access any one of them in often less than a second. They can smash traffic barriers in one swing of a crowbar. They fall and get shot and run into things and get hit with things and never ever get tired or weary or dead. This is a gameplay thing. Nobody wants to play a game where you need to catch your breath after running for a minute because you're wearing body armour and carrying a machine gun and 100 rounds of ammo. That would suck. But out of all the inhuman tasks we expect from our character, why don't we care that a six foot wall might as well be the Great Wall of China?

Counterpoint. Yeah, you do jump awful high. This is to compensate for your inability to climb. Some games allow you to jump as high as seven or eight feet in the air (unassisted). Well, I'm a six foot man with arms. That means that things over six feet, over seven feet, and over eight feet I can reach while standing comfortably. Things that are nine and even ten feet up, I can reach jumping. So, should we make the jumping standard 10 feet? No! I can't see anything past an 8 foot wall. I don't want to be able to jump up, have my shins say "umm, no fucking way, dude. There's a wall," and still be able to see, shoot, and kill everything on the other side before landing gracefully on the ground again.

So, why does this bother me so god damn much? Because so much time and energy is spent on making sure that the trees look good and the water shimmers and the light glows and the world is vast and expansive and the whole world is yours to see and explore and experience so long as there isn't a four foot tall rock in your way. Because heaven forbid anyone would actually climb rocks. It's unheard of. The bottom line is that too much time and energy is spent making things look good when no one has really taken the time to make it feel good.

Maybe this is why I liked playing Spiderman 2 so much. Sure, the graphics weren't stellar, the storyline was pretty quick, the 'sandbox' world quickly boiled down to "kill these robots," but there was never a time where Spiderman felt like a bounding box. I never felt like I was trapped, even on an island with nothing but ocean around it and no ability to swim. I was okay, because that made the game function. And you cannot argue that games function by not letting you pass objects that you can see over, but somehow cannot climb on top of. That's not acceptable limitation. That's just being lazy.