Rationale for a Parkour Overhaul (with suggested system)

[MXXVI]

There have been posts like this in the past, I aware. Nevertheless, in the following post, I will attempt to make a case for a significant re-evaluation of Warframe’s movement system... and offer a fleshed out gameplay mechanic to make movement in Warframe more than just a means to an end. If you want to skip to that part, you’ll find it under heading 4 “The Possible Solution”.

 

1) The Past:

For those of you who weren’t around in the old days, here’s a brief history lesson:

In the beginning, movement was slower. To get a sense of how slow, run through a level without ever using crouch-jump, slide, shoot dodge, or any of the methods of accelerating or circumventing scenery. Regular jumps and sprint only. And keep in mind that in the beginning, there was stamina; you couldn’t sprint forever.

All level design and game pacing was based around this movement system (and arguably, a lot of the game’s tilesets are still based around it).

Navigating a level quickly in the old movement system required mastery of the old movement system; it required skill on the part of the player. Horizontal wall-running required the correct angle. Vertical wall-running could only be done in short bursts before your character ran out of momentum; you could back flip onto a surface behind you and climb further, but this required correct timing. Wall-running also involved an actual wall-RUNNING animation, not that awkward hop-hoppity-hop thing we have now.

Anyway, because of these limitations, navigating a level quickly required learning the game environments. Your movement through the environment was entirely defined by that environment; entering a large open area, your eyes would not be focused on the empty space... but on the platforms, walkways, stairs, elevators, zip-wires and white scuff marks. At a glance, the player was engaged with the environment; contemplating the paths they might take, the shortcuts they might find.

Combat was intrinsically connected to movement; as such, combat was intrinsically connected to the environment. Where you were... defined the nature of the fight from start to finish.

 

2) The Present:

Play through a regular tileset-based mission. Enter a large open area. Ask yourself how you’re going to reach the other side. Pause for a moment, and seriously think about it. How are you going to get from there, to the other side?
Now ask yourself, how often is your answer based on control inputs, not environment details? How often is your answer, “sprint forward, crouch, jump, hold aim to engage shoot dodge, then before I fall out of the sky, forward roll and engage shoot dodge again”? How often does this answer apply to every area, every level? How often did this apply when you reached the Plains? How often did this apply when you got to Vallis?

When you’re at the bottom of an area, and you’re trying to reach the top, how often do you actually rely upon environmental details... and how often do you immediately crouch, look up and jump?

How often do you initiate the jump BEFORE you know where you’re going to land?

How often do you begin moving through an environment before you’ve actually processed what the environment is, or what it contains?

As you’re sliding and rolling through a level, how does it feel when you are forced to interact with the environment? How does it feel when you accidentally come into contact with scenery, and your otherwise smooth flight is interrupted?

How does it feel when you cross that open expanse, soaring through the sky, and promptly get lodged in the ledge above the door, and the rest of your team zooms past you? Do you feel like part of the team when that happens? Does it feel like a coop experience? Or do you feel like you’re suddenly slowing them down?

In the old days, levels were there to be explored, navigated with care; a challenge to overcome. Now, they exist to be avoided. The more detailed the scenery, the more inconvenient it is. Give serious thought to how you interact with a level – are you engaging with the level? When the extraction marker appears, are you figuring out how to reach it, or are you just spinning the camera around, looking for that green icon and pressing jump?

When you’re told to evacuate quickly, when the game tells you to flee, do you feel like you’re running from something... or racing towards something?

 

3) The Problem:

The level itself has become an inconvenience. The optimal gameplay – that is to say, the least frustrating player experience – requires that the player interact with the level as little as possible at all times - an issue compounded by the fact that players tend to race each other to the finish line. This not only renders the level design itself (the level geometry, its physical space) redundant, but so too the aesthetics; everything is a fleeting blur, and every solid object is quickly dismissed as naught but a tedious obstacle.

This also has the simultaneous effect of homogenizing the combat. If the player exists in a state of limbo, perpetually scanning for negative space in which to move freely, and the player can propel themselves into the air on a whim and traverse great distances with speed... then the player is no longer concerned with the possibility of being flanked, with the possibility of being backed into a corner; the player no longer has to search the environment for ways to attain elevation... elevation is an inherent possibility at all times.

The gameplay is reduced to 3D Robotron – the player moves around in a void, while enemies spawn on all sides, brainlessly moving in the player’s direction, never quite catching up. Once you’re up in the air, remember, cover no longer matters to either you or the enemies; you gain direct line of sight on everything, and they on you.

Put simply, the modern movement system has resulted in the relationship between player and level deteriorating dramatically. The diverse tilesets don’t matter, because the player interacts with them all in exactly the same way.

 

4) The Possible Solution:

If the game is going to focus on players practically flying through the levels, then the act of flying through the level should be integrated into the core gameplay, subject to skill, to risk and reward like everything else.

To this end, I suggest the introduction of a parkour counter or bar, not unlike the melee combo system. Essentially it would function as a visible, readily quantifiable version of the “flow” system in Mirror’s Edge – the better you play, the more mobile you become. Here’s how it works:

Firstly, changes to some basic behaviour -

Sliding should no longer prevent heavy falls – instead, like in Mirror’s Edge, a well-timed roll should be necessary to maintain momentum. The height at which the heavy fall animation triggers should be decreased a little, to encourage this fundamental interaction between the player and their jumps (that the player actually has to know where and when they’re landing).

Slide acceleration should be reduced, and the slide should be far less effective on flat terrain (only inheriting the player’s momentum, not accelerating them, and not allowing for physics-defying slide-roll chain acceleration). However, acceleration acquired from sliding down slopes of any kind should be increased significantly, and sliding into enemies with sufficient speed should knock them down (with knockdown potential increasing with player speed, and decreasing with enemy mass).

In open world environments, sliding down big mountains should allow for sufficient acceleration to enable Tribes-style skiing and stunts (so instead of just leaping into the sky and flying, you earn the air time, replete with whistling wind effects to make it a bit more thrilling).

Finally, crouch jump should not be a default behaviour, but something that also has to be earned.

 

How To Earn Momentum:

At the start of a mission, your mobility is limited to the basics of sprinting, jumping, dodging. As you cover distance in continuous sprinting (without stopping or bumping into things), whenever you climb scenery, wall run, utilise zip wires, slide down slopes or successfully land big jumps via well-timed rolls, you gain parkour points, which we’ll call “Momentum” with a big M for the purposes of this post.

You gain Momentum at different rates depending on the action – uninterrupted wall-running would grant Momentum quickly. Continuous sprinting would gain small, steady amounts. Landing big jumps would grant bigger chunks of Momentum, depending on the height fallen. Bonus Momentum would be awarded for chaining these movements – going straight from wall running into leaping onto a zipwire, or sliding down some stairs then jumping from a great height and landing it perfectly? Bonus Momentum awarded.

Gaining Momentum would have the following effects:

• Increase to movement speed
• Increase to jump height
• Increase to wall-running range
• Increase to knockdown chance when sliding (or jump-sliding) into enemies
• Increase to aim glide duration (which should be tied to movement speed by default, because hovering in one spot is silly)

With sufficient Momentum, certain enhanced movement abilities could come into play. For example, crouch-jumping. Instead of just being able to take off and fly like you have rocket boots at all times, crouch-jumping would be something you could use only when you had high enough Momentum (and could possibly cost Momentum to use). There could perhaps be other enhancements or augmentations relating to your Momentum counter – for example, the ability to replace your crouch-jump with a bonus to defences when Momentum is maxed out, or increased resistance to slowing effects.

 

Losing Momentum:

Momentum loss would happen when failing to land jumps properly, being knocked down by enemies, dying, falling into bottomless pits, running face-first into lasers, that kind of thing. The amount lost would vary depending on the incident (dying or falling into bottomless pits would wipe the counter entirely, for example).

Momentum loss would also happen slowly over time (so if you stand still doing nothing for long enough, it would zero out).

 

Extended Rules:

Combat could also play a part, especially melee combat. Melee kills should add to the counter (allowing you to build up Momentum as you fight, working hand in hand with the combo system), with stealth kills adding a big chunk of Momentum (allowing for people to become speedy ninjas, zooming from one kill to another, or accelerating away after slowly sneaking up on a target). Additionally:

Some people like the power fantasy of being a lightning-fast ninja, a shadowy blur of death. Some people like the fantasy of being a juggernaut, stampeding through enemies. To accommodate these plays styles, I’d suggest the ability to set (via armoury) your Warframe’s Momentum mode to either Grace, or Brutality.

Grace:

Setting it to this mode, pure parkour feats gain a lot of bonus Momentum, allowing you to accumulate it more quickly... but also penalizing you more for screwing these actions up.

Brutality:

Setting it to this mode, killing enemies in any way would grant small quantities of Momentum (so you could actually gain Momentum by striding head-first into some enemies and shooting them all), but you’d lose small amounts of Momentum by getting hit (the numbers would be tweaked in favour of kills). There could be bonuses for chained kills, or kills performed while simultaneously doing parkour things.

In Summary:

As it stands, player movement is just a thing that happens. Player movement doesn’t really interact with the environment, except when it is obstructed by the environment. Because players are so mobile, environmental dangers alternate between irrelevance and ridiculous lethality, and the enemies often lean this way too. Since the general Warframe playerbase seems to favour the fast-running “smooth” gameplay, the movement model for the game should be more integrated into this behaviour – allowing players to invest in it, and be rewarded by it accordingly. Smooth navigation and exploration should be incentivized the way many combat actions already are (we gain combat bonuses for combat actions, why not movement bonuses for movement actions?).

Other games with free-running elements already utilise a reward system like this, one way or another; granting momentum for skillful player movement. Other games with free-running feel a lot weightier than Warframe - like their characters have more physical presence. With a momentum system, perhaps Warframe could attain a more solid and skillful feeling to its movement.

If Warframe wants to be speedy, why not make speed, and precise movement, a fully implemented feature of the game... not just as a means to an end, not just as a way of getting from A to B, but a gameplay mechanic in its own right?

Anyway, like it or lump it, them's my thoughts on the matter.

[Rawbeard]

I don't understand how the current system is an inconvenience, because even your description intended to make it sound bad makes it sound really good.

[Atsia]

Don't you dare touch my bullet jumping. This is a whole NEIN from me.

Edited February 1, 2019 by Atsia

[(PSN)haphazardlynamed]

I come from a background of playing Destiny, not Mirror's Edge.

So if anything I want reduced or simplified Free Style Running (the less pretentious old term for 'parkour')

as opposed to a more complex system with proposed momentum and stamina...

 

 

a slight tangent, but actually the speed and airborne manuverability of warframe is one reason why I Don't play Conclave even tho I was a huge PvP fan in Destiny....

[Kenmei]

Damn, I remember the old days when the game was a bit (or quite a lot, actually) harder than it is now, because of (some) of the things you said.

When you had to take cover, and traverse carefully through the levels, it brought a sense of adrenaline and fear, at least for me, because of how quickly you could become flanked and destroyed, if you didn't move quickly. I enjoyed that feeling a lot.

While it's true that I don't like the new movement system, because it's honestly a bit ridiculous (because you fly, pretty much lol), I highly doubt DE would change it into a more complex system like the one you are suggesting. I would love it, but I don't feel like the majority of players would. Everyone and I myself included, go so fast through the levels that reverting back to the old days would make the game feel too slow, even with the Momentum system you speak of.

pd. The complain about terrain being a liability now rather than a thing to be explored as it was before really made me realize how sad it is. A lot of friends (who are kinda new, 1 year old or so in the game) tell me they hate the more convoluted areas where there's a lot of detail like the kuva fortress, the destroyed corpus outpost, etc. Because, as you stated, you run into a lot of things while racing towards extraction that it gets annoying. Ironically, those tilesets are my favorite because of the detail, and I have spent a lot of time exploring them and there are some cool stuff you can find in those. Things that are impossible to see if you are running with volt's speed towards extraction.

[Teridax68]

I really don't agree with this, and as mentioned above by Rawbeard, the description trying to disparage the current movement system sounds more appealing to me than the older system. Moreover, I think it is simply not true, levels adapted to Parkour 2.0, such as Lua, are immensely fun to travel through, and feature interesting gameplay relating to elevation and distance, in addition to movement-based challenges that are genuinely engaging. The Corpus Gas City rework is also specifically aiming to integrate movement-based gameplay into the new tileset, and challenge the player to flex their parkour muscles for enhanced traversal. As such, while I agree that parkour has changed, and caused many older tilesets to age poorly, I also think it has changed for the better, as it has become more accessible and freeform.

If there is one thing I agree with, it's that combat and parkour deserve to be integrated better, though right now I think the problem stems from an excessive reliance on defensive missions and other static objectives, coupled with oodles of radial damage from our frames, as well as an excessive amount of animation locks, and a complete lack of synergies or incentives to incorporate parkour into combat, beyond satisfying some Riven Mod challenges. Even if we were to revert to Parkour 1.0 now, or some similar system, these issues would remain, which is why I think the way forward to integrate parkour better into the game should be to address the ancillary systems that are holding it back, and present genuine problems of their own.

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, MXXVI said:

If the game is going to focus on players practically flying through the levels, then the act of flying through the level should be integrated into the core gameplay, subject to skill, to risk and reward like everything else.

I strongly disagree. I HATE momentum systems in any game that has them, and hobbling the game's movement system in order to force me to rely on a momentum system is absolutely not something I'm interested in. In fact, the movement system you describe at the start of your post strikes me as a terrible idea and not something to try and recapture. I've seen a few games try and integrate complex movement into their combat systems, and I'm frankly not a fan of any of them. Even stuff like Sands of Time era Prince of Persia games quickly learned not to mix parkour and combat in the same venue. While, yes, that had a complex and fiddly movement system, that all gave way to flat arenas the moment combat started.

 

15 hours ago, MXXVI said:

As it stands, player movement is just a thing that happens.

As it should be. Apologies for pulling an individual sentence out of context but that's my blunt opinion on the matter. Movement is not and has no business being part of the game's skill or challenge mechanics. That "it's just a thing that happens" isn't and indictment of its mechanics, but high praise, as far as I'm concerned. Systems which feel natural enough that I can commit them to muscle memory and not have to think about them are systems well-designed. All fiddly, easily-failed mechanics do is take me out of the experience and break my state of flow.

A good example of this would be The Division's cover mechanic, specifically its cover-to-cover move. When I got into my first fight in GTA 5, I instinctively hit my space bar trying to advance to a forward cover position as soon as the enemies ducked back to reload... Causing my character to climb onto cover and get shot to S#&$. Rather than trying to be "challenging," that system had been made so smooth and convenient that I reached for it in a completely different game without even realising I was doing it.

That's where movement in Warframe sits for me. It's not something I have to think about, it's not a puzzle I need to solve. It's a system which gives me tremendous, dominating mobility made so intuitive that it goes straight from my head onto the screen with no sense of control input at all. That's where I want it to stay, personally.

[MXXVI]

I feel like most of the replies here have missed the core concern, and haven't actually addressed it in the slightest. Nobody has made an argument for environment or level design... mattering. Which strikes me as rather baffling - that nobody is bothered by the fact that the elaborate level design work that has gone into each of the tilesets is being wasted at the moment by virtue of players simply not interacting with it in any meaningful way.

 

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"I don't understand how the current system is an inconvenience"

You didn't read my post properly. That's not what I said at all.

 

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"I come from a background of playing Destiny, not Mirror's Edge. So if anything I want reduced or simplified Free Style Running."

You come from a game in which you are far more physically grounded, and cannot just fly around the environment; a game in which the environment actually defines how you move through it, and you spend most of your time with feet on the ground.

 

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"Moreover, I think it is simply not true, levels adapted to Parkour 2.0, such as Lua, are immensely fun to travel through, and feature interesting gameplay relating to elevation and distance, in addition to movement-based challenges that are genuinely engaging. "

You mean the tedious mini-games on Lua that some people get stuck on for a very long time? There's a reason people don't visit Lua that much unless they have to... and outside of those mini-games, I'm not sure I've seen any evidence on any tileset of the level design being "adapted" to Parkour 2.0. How would it be, except to make more big open environments? The player doesn't need to climb anything anymore, wall-running is entirely redundant, there is literally no chasm that the player cannot slide-crouch-jump-flip-glide their way across. What adaptations are present on Lua, outside of forced challenges (that ironically are more restrictive than the systems I'm suggesting above)?

 

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"Movement is not and has no business being part of the game's skill or challenge mechanics. "

This statement contradicts the bulk of good game design throughout history. Player movement is supposed to be absolutely intrinsically tied to the game's challenge. You are movement. You are a physical presence that moves through the world - how you move should always be tied to player skill, and be something to learn and master. Additionally, the game already integrates SOME movement systems into challenge mechanics - stealth kills, for example, and stealth in general requires specific types of movement (speed, proximity and direction being important factors). Movement also already plays a role in melee combat, defining the nature of the different attacks you perform.

One could argue that adding new game mechanics that are tied to movement is not desirable, but this was my attempt at fashioning a design option that uses the existing movement pattern, instead of discarding it.

Because quite frankly, speaking as someone who has played the game since its earliest days... the current movement system is awful, and given the choice I would gut it entirely and return the game to its more "grounded" days of back-flipping off walls and clambering up obstacles, instead of just flying everywhere.

I get the impression that people are envisioning a system in which you would slow to a crawl the moment you hit a wall - I suggested no such thing. I literally just suggested that crouch jump be restricted, and that you gain minor movement bonuses (on top of current movement values) when performing parkour actions. I also suggested, let's not forget, that slide essentially receive a buff; that greater mobility would be granted in more open environments... while still requiring interaction with the terrain.

 

Edited February 1, 2019 by MXXVI

[peterc3]

20 hours ago, MXXVI said:

Other games with free-running elements already utilise a reward system like this

Other games are built entirely around this mechanic, though. Mentioning Mirror's Edge is a red flag. Comparing a game whose entire raison d'etre is parkour to a third-person shooter with a fast paced movement system is disingenuous.

[RedDirtTrooper]

OP seems to be forgetting that most of us old players did the exact same thing in the old movement system using the mobility provided by melee slide attacks. I hated Parkour 2.0 when it was released because it actually slowed down the game. Even earlier than that when they temporarily removed zorencoptering a large portion of the fan base rioted, and they added it back in as a feature very quickly. I do not see these proposed changes being well received.