Movement

You know what’s one of the most-cited favorite memories from City of Heroes?  Super jump.  I hear it over and over and over again — “Super jump was the bomb, yo!”  And despite their weakness for late 90′s lingo, I totally know where they’re coming from.  (Word.)

Super jump (and to a lesser extent, CoH’s other travel powers) was an utterly liberating experience in a MMO.  We’ve gotten used to hauling around avatars that have a vertical jump of two inches, a top running speed of 6 mph, and an unbeatable foe in steep cliff faces.  Sure, we get “mounts” that up our travel speed some, but it still doesn’t give us that freedom of movement that I think we all subconsciously crave in video games.

Games aren’t supposed to mirror real life — they’re extensions of fantasy and flights of fancy that becomes a sort of surreal, super-life.  If Mario was anything like a person would be, there’s no way he’d be able to jump that high, grow from vegetables, or tame dinosaurs and use them as transportation.  It just would end badly.  But we’ve learned since the beginning of games that it’s awesome to have characters who are given a more grand ability of movement than we will ever have.  Hence why we got characters who could double-jump off of nothing in particular, fly, swing from vines, and do these ridiculous Hollywood-style action stunts that nobody aside from Gumby is flexible enough to do.

Which brings me back to super jump.  When you got super jump, the world of CoH stopped being so limited.  You had verticality as well as speed.  The entire town became a giant platform-type game, where you could hop from rooftop to rooftop in search of your foes.  It felt huge, epic, involving.  And I’m desperately needing something like that in my other MMOs.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want super jump in, say, Lord of the Rings.  Although that would be funny: “Whee!” said Frodo as he leapt over Sauron to slam-dunk the one ring in Mt. Doom.  But the other day I had a great moment where I jumped off a ledge, hit my shout attack on the way down, and landed on top of a bad guy.  That’s the sort of thing I crave — to be able to do a few epic moves from time to time.  Scale walls with a fleetness of foot that some heroes possess.  Have a move where your character automatically ducks an incoming attack and uses that motion to launch a counter-attack of their own.  Doing a flip jump into a pool of water.  Anything.

I hate it when I feel limited in movement in MMOs.  It was particularly bad in Guild Wars, where your feet were nailed to the ground, you couldn’t go up or down many hills, and invisible walls blocked you at every turn.  But other MMOs carry with them some bad habits of immobility, including the classic “let’s make you stand in one place to cast a spell over a few seconds”.  Because that’s immersion — standing stock still.

I know it seems like a trivial thing to devote resources toward, but I’d really love to see more freedom of movement within MMO environments as time goes on.  Let us be able to climb, if we can’t run up things.  Let my guy do a sliding skid down a tree trunk.  Let me be able to escape a pack of wolves by throwing up a grappling hook and scampering up to freedom.  Give me all the tricks of those free runners you see in movies like Casino Royale.  That’d be sweet.