Wallrunning has become a bit of a thing in modern shooters, unless you’re winding the clock back to World War 1 ala Battlefield.
Question is: do people actually like it?
Mirror’s Edge helped popularise parkour in games several years back, but it’s starting to become an increasingly important facet of movement for blockbuster shooters. It’s been a staple of the last three Call of Duty games — Advanced Warfare, Black Ops 3 and now Infinite Warfare — and it’s also a core tenet of Titanfall.
Adding wallrunning means developers have to be a lot more generous with autoaim on console. There’s also a flow-on effect to map design, since you need to create space and areas for people to traverse. (It also means parts of the map have to have more cover and more clutter to give people a bit of respite from everyone running across the walls all the time.)
It certainly looks good when it’s done right. But I’m intrigued as to whether people genuinely enjoy the experience. It’s certainly going to be interesting to see how it works out for Call of Duty this year, when people are given a very clear reminder of where the series came from.
Are they going to want to go back to a world of grappling hooks and wallrunning after playing on classic maps like Strike, Crash and Backlot? I don’t know.
What do you think? Do you enjoy wallrunning in your games?
Comments
10 responses to “The Big Question: Wallrunning”
I love Titanfall because of the movement, especially including the wall-running.
However I do feel it has little to no place in CoD and that they should stop trying. If this was their first game with wall-running then I think it’s fine to try something new. A second game could try and take the lessons learnt from the first to try again to make it work. But at this point 3 games in I think they should really stop.
Hopefully they will get some metrics comparing Modern Warfare Remastered to Infinite Warfare and they change course going forward.
Pretty fun in platformers. I actually haven’t played a single shooter with it.
Unless I was just totally unaware.
It’s bloody hard when I try to shoot while wall-running in Overwatch.
Eventually, with enough baby steps, we can elevate the skill ceiling enough with this expansion of movement to get back to proper shooters, like tribes.
Tribes is the most skilful, and spectacular team shooter of ever, and skiing is mechanically better than wall running. Come at me!
Love it in Titanfall. Liked it in Blops 3 as well. It was quickly forgotten in the single player and misused there but in multiplayer it worked well.
I would love if more games utilised it.
As a long time trick jumper in games from Q3DM days and more recently the Halo series I feel that wallrunning removes the skillgap of traversing maps and utilising ledges, jumps, and terrain to defeat your enemy. It’s just become a bit too easy. In the Halo3 days not many people i knew could ghost jump on miniscule ledges which gave me an advantage. Today in Halo5 we have clamber which to me is acceptable because the majority of jumps have skill/duckjump methods available as well.
I don’t now about COD lately as I haven’t played since BLOPS2 but i enjoyed Titanfall as the maps were quite large which meant wallrunning and sliding to areas felt natural. I guess if it feels right then it’s a job well done to the designers because the world needs to support the use of wallrunning and not feel shoehorned in.
Ohhhh! It’s interesting that you think that!
As a fellow relic from the days of Quake style movement, I like wall running in console shooters (which most are first and foremost these days) as I think it provides dynamic movement without the need for a high-fidelity mouse and keyboard setup.
For a long time after Quake 3 I stopped playing multiplayer shooters (which IMO is still the best multiplayer shooter of all time). This was partly because I became principally a console gamer who didn’t care about multiplayer shooting with a controller, and also because the newer console/PC multiplatform shooters were limited in their designs because you just can’t move with a controller the way you can with a mouse and keyboard.
For YEARS every multiplayer FPS was set on a boring, flat map and punished fast movement with mechanics that encourage staying near cover (recharging health) and moving slowly (accuracy penalties for movement).
It’s only been the last few years that games like Halo 4, Titanfall, Destiny and the newer COD’s have again embraced vertical movement through means that are more simple than rocket jumps and launch pads.
By wall running, you stay flat(ish) but can still move dynamically. By adding a rocket pack or double jumping, you enhance vertical movement in a controlled way.
If I can’t have games designed for a mouse and keyboard, then I can’t have rocket jumps. If I can’t have rocket jumps, I’ll take wall running as a distant second.
Yes, definitely – however, only when it’s an integral part of the game. In Titanfall, it feels like the game is really built around the movement, because it is. Even the maps are built around it. In Blops 3 it just feels like CoD where it just so happens you can double jump and wall run.
I really don’t think parkour and this type of “wall running” should be grouped together – i love parkour in games such as dying light, but the ability to basically stick to and run along a 90 degree wall for meters at a time and shoot things is just silly and impractical. I hate it in cod, and tolerate it in titanfall (because the game has been designed around it and not just tacked it on because its the “in” thing) but it’s not something i use often
I like it where it’s an integral part 9f the games mechanics, but many games are adding it in not for necessity or game play reasons but more of just a gimmicks.