Wizards in Wizard 101 can jump. It’s actually more of a half-hearted hop, but they respond to the spacebar.
Jumping does absolutely nothing for gameplay. Your character is just as much on spatial rails as Guild Wars characters who cannot jump. Neither game lets you jump off cliffs or clamber over small obstacles. Even a character who jumps in Wizard 101 doesn’t get any sort of “z-axis” benefit for getting around.
So why can they jump?
One of the silliest complaints that I’ve seen about Guild Wars is that their characters can’t jump. Somehow that matters to some players. Specifically, those players who come to the game with preconceived notions. (And then they claim that GW is not an MMO, as if that meant something.)
I submit the notion that such is the reasoning behind letting W101 characters jump. Some players are expecting video game characters, especially MMO third person characters, to jump when the player hits the spacebar. No matter that the combat in W101 is radically different from any other MMO, no matter that the theme is aimed squarely at the tween crowd who may not be jaded MMO veterans, no matter that the art direction is more “last gen” than “next gen” and more “Rowling” than “Tolkien”, if those characters don’t JUMP, the “first fifteen minute” impression will somehow be lacking.
W101 jumping is probably not about smart game design. It has no use in the game if it’s taken in a self-enclosed context. A player new to MMOs likely won’t care, and if they play for a while, they may indeed question why it’s even an option as jumping obviously does nothing but play an animation. It is more likely a smart business decision, a bone tossed to MMO veterans (or tourists, if you’d like) so that they can feel more at home when they start to play the game and get around. Jumping in W101 is more for those players who normally play something else, a hook to hang their virtual hat on, so that they might stay a few critical minutes longer.
So, I ask again: What evolutionary purpose does the combat trinity serve? What purpose, levels? Do you really need raiding?
Some have levied criticism against my somewhat revolutionary design tenets, saying that evolution, not revolution, is the likely way to go when proposing game design. There is truth to this position, and a large part of it lies in just these sort of vestigial design elements. People tend to dislike change, and too much, too quickly can be a considerable obstacle. Sometimes, for non-game design reasons, you may indeed have to include design elements that make no sense. It’s an unfortunate evolutionary necessity. (And as has been noted, MMOs aren’t really the best stage for revolutions, for better or worse. The critical mass and adoption curve concerns pretty much make MMOs evolutionary beasts, rather than revolutionary, to my chagrin.)
At least, if poaching existing customers is important to you, rather than carving out your own “blue ocean” niche. When I talk about revolutionary game design, I’m not catering to existing WoW addicts or other MMO tourists. I thought that much was clear, but perhaps it’s still nice to reiterate.
If you are jumping in the “red ocean” shark pool, I simply propose that such choices shouldn’t be made “just because that’s how things are”, but that inclusion of design elements catering to expectations be carefully weighed and considered. Perhaps they are right for your game, and perhaps they are a waste of dev resources. Either way, do not design or create anything just because “everyone’s doing it”, or because “everyone expects it”.
You’re playing directly into Blizzard’s hands, and you will be crushed, perhaps without even knowing why. The established MMO design priesthood has a Vision for How Things Should Be, and steering your game design into their trendsetting mainstream is giving them control over your success. You can make money as a cheap clone, but it’s a precarious position.
EDITED: In his link over at his place (the AFK trackback link below), Syp corrects me, noting that the word is “vestigial” rather than “vestigal”. I have no excuse for this oversigt, other than that I’ve seen it both ways in more than one publication. I thought it was akin to the difference between “color” and “colour”. An appeal to Webster confirmed the error of my ways, though, so I’ve made the appropriate corrections. I’ve left the actual article http address alone, though, so as not to break anyone’s links. It’s an undying testament to my everlasting shame.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
It’s interesting that you bring this point up because when I first came to WoW I was quite startled by all the people jumping around. It truly seemed bizarre to me and frankly I didn’t get it at all. I thought there was something I was missing to the game.
What I came to realize is that it actually does serve a purpose in WoW. By jumping all the time you prevent your character from getting caught on various design elements in the game (such as lamp posts) that impede movement. Then the action of jumping becomes a habit to prevent this.
So I think your analysis is correct. Designers are putting in jumping moves to cater to this habit even though it is no longer necessary; the very defination of vestigal.
The whole ‘getting caught on a design element’ has struck me as silly. We can run over each other in SW or IF, yet get stuck on a post; it makes no sense. But here’s a thought that occurred to me. Maybe it’s on purpose. Maybe Blizzard was trying to attract the Mario Brothers crowd where jumping is second nature. So they deliberately designed the game in a way that rewarded jumping behavior. If that’s the case, I think it’s very shrewed. I want to strangle them, but I think it’s shrewd.
I suspect the a fair few of the designers *were* that Mario Brothers crowd, even if it was a few generations before the current Mario incarnation. 😉
Jumping in Asheron’s Call was a skill you could — if memory serves, and it doesn’t always — raise and even buff, and you could do some pretty amazing leaps around with it. It was useful for climbing onto rooves and generally being silly, but it was also used in quite a few dungeons and quests where you needed to know how to jump and where to jump in order to progress. And yes, this was an MMO (still is).
Interestingly enough *most* people didn’t jump around like cocaine-addled asshats in AC. Dunno why.
The best thing about being able to jump in these games isn’t that you can jump over fences or up hard-to-navigate hillsides – it’s that it gives you something to do (apart from falling asleep) when moving from point A to point B ingame.
Jump in beat with the music you’re listening to. Jump from cobblestone to cobblestone, avoiding the cracks. Jump and pretend you’re about to take off and fly. Jump! Jump!
Daniel, true, jumping in WoW may be largely a holdover from earlier games. And you’re right, it does serve a purpose. WoW also lets you jump off of (or “climb” up) mountains, which is something that GW and W101 don’t do. (I seem to remember reading an article that proposed adding the Z-axis to SWG, and that it was a big deal at the time.)
And, well, to be clear, I don’t *mind* that W101 characters can jump, it just seems like wasted animator time, so I wanted to guess at why it’s there at all.
Ysh, from what I’ve seen, jumping is also a skill in DDO that can be boosted and is useful for getting to places and accomplishing unique goals. I actually like that design, since it makes the 3D world and character customization more interesting. From what little I’ve seen of DDO (the free trial from a bit ago), people don’t jump around like ADHD rabbits there, either.
And now you’ve got me wondering how much of the silly jumping is simply a social quirk of the superpopulated WoW. I’ve even seen people call the Night Elf jumping flip “the best racial trait in the game”. 🙂
Xoduz, yes, that’s one use for it. Along those lines, I wonder what use “running” emotes might have; those that you could trigger (say, via hotkey) while your avatar is running or walking, without breaking stride. Machinima artists might have fun with them, at least.
The earlier dungeons like Gnomeregan, Blackrock Depths and Blackrock Spire had design elements that required or at least rewarded jumping. However, Blizzard has changed it’s dungeon design paradigm since then from mazes to pipes, so jumping became irrelevant. It’s there simply because Blizzard doesn’t want to “waste” time updating old content.
However, if a new MMO wanted to implement jumping, I’d rather have them go the route that Zelda and Assassin’s Creed went: Jumping doesn’t need to be micromanaged, the character does it automatically when it’s appropriate.
One really misses open world pvp when someone is jumping around right before your face… WoW players must be hyper nervous to jump all the time! Having no jumping in Guild Wars is not limiting or a strong cause for criticism.
Still, I would wish that players could jump. It makes your char feel a bit more alive and real if it can hop over a minor obstacle.
I have seen the same in LOTRO: You can jump and swim, but you apparently cannot dive.
In Aion 1.0 people could fly, but not swim! They simply walked into the water like King Ludwig II of Bavaria!
W101’s jumping is particularly annoying because, as Tesh stated, it serves absolutely no purpose. If there’s a ledge in front of you, you can either step up onto it or you can’t, and if you can’t then you also cannot jump up onto it. This is particularly obvious in Instances with ramped paths (Krokotopia springs to mind as one example) where if you’re climbing the ramped path and it doubles back on itself, you absolutely cannot cut the corner and jump up onto the next section. Even if the height difference is less than the height your avatar can jump, the game refuses to let you jump up onto that section; you must take the ‘long way’ and continue on to the switchback. Even when this height differential is reduced to bare inches you cannot jump up, and in the most extreme case you can actually find yourself getting stuck and unable to move forward because there’s the barest sliver of ledge in front of you. In Wizard City you can drop into and climb out of the pond & stream area (outside the library) despite the bank of the stream being about waist high. So you can climb up onto a waist high ledge to get out of a stream, but you cannot climb or even jump up a one inch ledge in an Instance. Ridiculous.
I suppose part of it is the resistance to change. I’ve been jumping (not like a quake player though) since EQ1. If you got stuck, you jumped. Small gap? Jump it!
It just makes sense. Now if a jump does nothing I’m not sure I would include it but I do hate not being able to jump. It makes the game feel artificial to me. It hurts my immersion. I can jump and I’m miraculous. Why can’t my toon, who is a hero, jump?
If two stereotypical Italian plumbers can jump in the 80s I need to be able to in the 00s ^_^
Hirvox, at first, that sort of “autojump” in Zelda bothered me, but it was pretty easy to acclimate. It might be a good idea to experiment with it in an MMO setting… but it also means that players’ spacebar still won’t give that little rush of control.
Longasc, I just want jumping to make sense. I don’t mind that the wizards in W101 can jump, but since it’s functionally useless, why is it there? I guess it *does* bother me a little in gameplay, as those little steps and edges mentioned by the Cap’n are indeed ridiculous. Common sense suggests that the jump *should* be able to do something there, but it can’t, and that clash between expectations and reality is jarring.
It’s the downside of trying to meet expectations outside of those that are built by the game’s internal logic. Those who play W101 exclusively or to whom W101 is their first MMO will see the jump as being annoyingly useless. Again, I suggest that every design element should be thought out and have a good reason for doing what it does. Merely appealing to veteran expectations is one reason, but it’s not always compelling, and it has consequences.
Ferrel, if we’re going to play the realism card (and we may as well), how heavy *is* plate mail, anyway? Certainly we don’t need to limit our fictional heroes to real human standards, but shouldn’t a hero in light armor jump higher and farther than one in plate mail? Should strength and agility ratings make a difference? What about those pansy glass cannon mages in their dresses?
Hirvox, at first, that sort of “autojump” in Zelda bothered me, but it was pretty easy to acclimate. It might be a good idea to experiment with it in an MMO setting… but it also means that players’ spacebar still won’t give that little rush of control.
Yeah, I know what you mean, I’ve accidentally jumped off a platform in Zelda as well. That’s why I mentioned Assassin’s Creed, where there was one button that automated climbing: You held down the parkour button and moved. Your character would automatically make the best effort to go where you wanted, looking for hand- and footholds, balancing on poles, shimmying across thin ledges and so on. While a full-blown parkour engine would be overkill for an MMO, some kind of “negotiate this obstacle” button would be nice. After all, many MMOs abstract away a lot of combat, why should movement be any different?
Jumping isn’t just something taken from WoW or EQ. Lots of people asked how to jump in Meridian 59 over the years (and usually generated the “humorous” response: alt-F4). M59 has a z-axis but it’s just a function of where you are in the X/Y plane of the world; in other words, jumping has no meaning but people still wanted it. I imagine the W101 developers figured it was better to add something useless like that rather than deal with telling players, “no, you just can’t jump.”
As someone else pointed out, jumping is kind of “fun” for some people. The night-elf flip is the purest example of the “random reward” where people would just keep jumping until they saw the flip. It was a neat little extra.
I was a bit disappointed in LotRO because jumping actually slows down your character’s movement. So, it’s disadvantageous to jump everywhere like you might in WoW. But, it can still be useful for getting over obstacles.
One other interesting thing about jumping is that you can also use it to call attention to yourself for some reason. In WoW, I jumped near unlooted corpses to get party members to check them so I could skin the corpse. In LotRO, I’ll jump near a corpse that probably has a quest item on it for a party member. It draws a bit of extra attention to something that may not be easily marked another way.
Brian, I think the slowdown after jumping in LOTRO is a good thing.
It prevents the so-called bunny hopping that is common in WoW – you know, jumping/hopping from the Shire to Bree and back.
Fallout 3 also prevents you from jumping immediately after you jumped over something in a quite realistic way.
Jumping is an odd thing. I guess I just instinctively push spacebar when I’m playing a MMO to hop around. I feel kinda weird without. I do think it adds immersion (same as swimming and diving) because it gives you more of a feeling of direct control over your avatar, even if it really is only an illusion.
I’m surprised that “because its fun” isn’t reason enough to put jumping in a game for most of you. These are games, remember? Why do games have non-combat pets and social clothing? They don’t serve any purpose. Must everything really serve a purpose? Why are there bunnies and butterflies roaming around the world? They don’t give exp or drop loot. Get rid of them!!
Jumping is FUN! Stop being such grown-ups!
That said, the reason I found the lack of jumping annoying in GW was more that “I’m stuck behind a 3″ ledge and can’t jump up” than anything else.
Pete, now take that “I’m stuck behind a 3″ ledge and can’t jump up” and give your character the ability to jump… but *not* the ability for that jump to do anything but play an animation. That’s the annoying part about W101’s jumping, as the good Cap’n noted earlier.
It occupies a strange place between “functionally useless”, “maybekindasorta fun for some players but frustratingly taunting for others” and “if wizards don’t jump, people will complain”. If wizards could actually jump over things or if they didn’t jump at all, it wouldn’t stand out as a weird design choice.
It’s certainly not something that makes the game worthless. It’s just a strange design choice, and I like to dig into those. It’s one that I suspect was made less because the world needed it, and more because the business plan of the game needed it. Not that such is necessarily a bad thing, either, but I do think that they really should have gone with real jumping or no jumping, not the halfway measure that they did.
Mountains of molehills and all that, this really doesn’t bother me all that much. It’s just a way to springboard into thoughts of why you make the design decisions you do, and what sort of secondary effects those decisions have.
I’m ok with jumping for some purposes. Sometimes our raid leader jumps to attract attention to him. When you’ve got 24 people, it’s hard to associate the voice with the avatar when he says something like “healers will stand here”. Where’s here? Oh, where the jumping guy is.
Jumping bothers me in some contexts but not others. In EQ2, I will sometimes bunny hop over the landscape sometimes just because it’s fun. But in PVP, bunny hopping and full movement-speed strafing bug me to no end. I don’t know why – I hesitate to say because it’s not realistic, because it’s not realistic to hop eight feet in the air repeatedly for miles on end through a PVE environment either.
I guess it just bugs me because running at full speed while looking 90 degrees away and bunny hopping just feels like an arcade game, and I prefer my RPGs to be more about the strategy.
Uhm, I like jumping. To me it’s a kin to skipping so I jump in W101. In WOW, well lord, I jump all over the damn place but I was jumping long before WOW.
AC2 had one of the coolest jump back animations I’ve seen in a game. You looked like you were seriously trying to evade some damage. I LOVED pulling with my bow then jumping back out of the way for melee to take over. It didn’t matter than just backing up would work as well. That’s didn’t looks as cool.
And don’t get me in a NE in WOW. I will jump-n-barrel-roll like a fool. LOL
[…] “Vestigal Design” – best article title ever! (although it should be “vestigial”, but we’ll overlook that) Thanks, Tesh! […]
[…] Last, but certainly not least, I want to mention Tesh! Tesh is a wonderful blogger who sometimes has different views than myself but is extremely curious about what players have to say. Even when we disagree we get great discussion out of it and it is always friendly! This is yet another blog I consider a must read! Check out Tish Tosh Tesh and this article about vestigial design! […]
I’m with you Pete. Jumping is more fun than not jumping. I’m one of those players who couldn’t stand not being able to jump in Guild Wars.
However I do agree that jumping has to actually do something. It needs to get you over that log on the ground. Being trapped by a six inch tall obstruction is maddening to me.
[…] Well, and jumping. You can’t have an MMO without jumping. […]
[…] example is the vestigial jumping of Wizard 101, which has absolutely no function. It’s purely cosmetic… but because players have […]
[…] Vestigial Design […]