A Personal Gripe With Movement For Warframe-

[Shamse]

This is a problem that has existed since closed beta, and very much needs to be looked at before release-

 

This games movement system feel very open-ended, having many places where doing the wrong move can actually get your character stuck in a ditch or forever sliding into a wall that refuses to let him stand up, resulting in his/her death.

 

I'm sure the devs will work on this at some point (I hope, you need good control in a game about movement), but my main gripe currently with this games movement is that there is an input delay in some of the key movements- Jump, Dodge, and Sprint.

 

The Biggest offender of this right now is Jump. This game is a mix of 3D platforming and 3rd person shooting, and the first thing ANY good platform needs is very tight controls, beginning with the jump. This games Jump for some reason delays for a split second after press the space bar. After testing it out with other keys, I found out that this is actually because your character winds up to jump instead of immediately launching himself in the air.

 

Now, this game does not have mid-air control, so from my experience with this, the jumping this game feels very sluggish. If this game wants to capitalize on skillful movement and shooting, I strongly request that you tighten up the time for this, because jump-kicking is a very useful tactic in this game. I cannot count how many times I ended up sliding into the railing instead of jump-kicking across the canyon, causing myself to get swarmed and killed almost instantly, ALL BECAUSE you cannot hit these simultaneously. 

 

Now, Dodge and Sprint go hand in hand because they are both bound to the same key. One is activated by tapping it, the other by holding it. Having 2 things bound to 1 key is ALWAYS a risky idea because it's up to the game whether or not you meant one thing or another, AND because the game always takes a split second to understand what you just did; did you tap it, or are you holding it?

 

Personally, the having a delay for Dodge isn't a big problem. Currently the dodge doesn't have any invul-frames, so you do very much have to plan it instead of having it be a panic-button. So you will always have time to use it.

 

Sprint, on the other hand, is becoming an irritating problem. Every time you are hit with a melee-attack or caught in the blast radius of an explosion, your character flinches and his sprint is interrupted. If you're character continued on sprinting, this wouldn't be much of an issue. However, your character instead reverts back to walking speed. I would find myself SMASHING the sprint key in efforts to get him moving again, but because the attack from enemies (especially infested) can come so quickly, the few milliseconds it takes for you character to begin sprinting again can cost you your life. Even when I'm NOT in the heat of combat, I find myself holding down shift with all my might because it feels like power = sprinting. 

 

So....

 

TL;DR- Please tighten up the delay for Jumping and Sprinting. These are KEY movements that 3D platformers are defined by, and tight controls is the first step to having a satisfying movement system.

 

Thoughts? Comments? Concerns? Please post below and give me your thoughts :)

Edited June 7, 2013 by Lyelentu

[suadumpy]

The delay for sprinting prevents wavedashing.

[Fluffbane]

I believe the main preventative measure for wavedashing was putting a cooldown on the slide speed boost, which was the focus of the wavedash. This was added sometime around update 7. The sprint delay has, as the op noted, been around since before then.

I'm unsure if it is an issue of the code checking for a tap or hold on sprint, but there is an odd delay to it, and it tends to cancel out for no obvious reason, especially if interrupted as noted. If this happens it sometimes takes several repeated holdings of the button to return to sprinting. Why it does this is really beyond me aside from the above suggestion.

 

Another issue I've seen in posts and personally is the jump button occasionally causing a forward roll. After poking at this I believe one culprit may be minor terrain variations. For an example, go to the Io or Xini infested defense maps and make a running jump at the orange boxes over the pit. If you wait until you've hit the tiny rise around the ledge, this will usually cause a roll instead. I've seen this happen in several other places with tiny terrain height changes; I think it's actually worse when running down. Note this will also often cause reloading issues; the duct ramp down to the room with six lockers on Corpus ships is a major offender. Based on that I think the game may be considering this as being airborne, which causes this.

 

Also, as far as the jump windup, I tend to agree. While I generally like such things, in this case it does cause sluggishness. This seems worse on slower, lower fps systems, since the Evolution engine ties many things to framerate, such as melee and semiautomatic attack speed. If the framerate is low, these are strongly slowed. Since we're here focusing on movement, I'll focus on the pre-jump. Speeding it up or cutting the frames it uses would likely fix it, if not simply removing it altogether.

 

One final thing, which I've most noted while stuck on a slower system, is a delay with grabbing walls for the wallrun, which has led to a number of misses and near misses. Again, this may be a quirk of the engine, but it's an unfortunate one and sticks with the points above.

 

Edit: found a thing about the slide/jump kick rework relating it to unintended sprint fix.

Edited June 7, 2013 by Fluffette

[Callback]

The controls all need a big rework.  Like OP said, jumping and sprinting are too sluggish.  Parkour controls suffer greatly because of this.  There's also the issue of the wall-accelerator cannon when you latch onto a wall and immediately release, and very bad detection for whether you run along or up a wall.  It would also help to lower the angle when jumping off from a wallrun so you don't end up climbing too high above the whole thing.