Playing Bioshock recently, I was thinking about how jumping up and down during an interactive cutscene undermines the integrity of the drama. Half-Life 2 suffered from this problem as well - it was perfectly acceptable to hop around while NPC’s were delivering very serious plot points (watching you bounce up and down the whole time). One quick solution would be to inhibit jumping during cutscenes. Not quite sure why Valve didn’t do that in HL2, since they did forcibly lower your weapon when speaking with an NPC.
But, truth be told, I don’t think jumping needs to be in most games anyway. In a game like HL2 or Bioshock, jumping has no tactical advantage in battle. It basically lets you get over stuff, and in some cases leap over dangerous items like trip wires. I think there is a case for removing jumping and replacing it with a ‘clamber’ that occurs when you hit the same button that would’ve been assigned to the jump. If you can scale an obstruction you’ve run up against, you hit the clamber button and your avatar hops up. If you didn’t want to give up the gameplay challenge of things like tripwires, landmines, etc. you could give those objects a ‘jump’ bounding box such that within that zone if you hit the clamber button, your avatar would jump. So you get to keep your jumping challenge without breaking the realism forfeited by hopping around indiscriminately.
Playing Halo 3, I came across an age-old frustration that generally plagues all first person shooters I’ve experienced. Namely, the difficulty in getting grenades to go where I want them to. I can honestly say it is easier for me to throw something more accurately in real life than in a video game. Which is odd when you think about it, because everything else is easier in a video game – running, shooting, jumping…yet tossing a small, solid mass (i.e. grenades) is harder.
It seems to have become accepted that aiming your throws is a very imprecise affair because they follow an arc not directly targeted to your reticule. The arcs are consistent, true, but in the heat of an FPS I’m constantly sighting my enemies in the reticule, and having to alter my aiming to throw the grenade is cumbersome. So here’s my solution: When the player wants to throw a grenade, cast a ray to whatever his reticule is highlighting and calculate the arc for his grenade to land there. If the reticule is on something too far to reach, just cap the strength of the throw to some reasonable level. If you wanted to get tricky, you could even do a check for obstructions like ceilings such that, if found, the throw is of a lower arc, but harder, so the end result is basically the same. To keep things from getting too easy, I would suggest you add a little bit of randomness to the throw direction/strength, increasing more with distance.
-Jason
[Addendum]
Had a couple more thoughts regarding the above. First, there is a certain freedom in being able to jump around in games and I'm considering whether it's unrealistic presence is the lesser of two evils (compared to depriving the player of that freedom). I still stand by the idea of turning off the jumping during dramatic interactions, but maybe the best general use of jumping would be to include it, but have there be consequences for doing so at innapropriate times. This depends totally on the game in question, of course.
Regarding the grenade tossing suggestion, I think it's a worthwhile approach, but I could see troubles arising in certain situations. For example, throwing a grenade out a window might be difficult because you'd have to stand at the window and target the enemy while exposing yourself, and the player might want to instead stand back from the window and toss the grenade through, but how would you target this? If you aimed down, the game would think you wanted to toss the grenade in the room which would be bad. If you aimed at the window, the grenade would go through, but would be targeting whatever is along your vector of sight through the window, which could be another building across the street, the countryside, or who knows what. Maybe a solution worth trying would be having both a primary and secondary through button (similar to the common primary/secondary firing options present in most shooters), such that the primary button would toss the grenade at the target under the reticule, while the secondary button would cause the grenade to be tossed at a blind but consistent arc like what you find in games today.
-Jason
