Originally Posted by Tarkan2467
People have been lulled into stupidity by the watered-down movement mechanics of casual games.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that crouch-jump is an illogical concept that shouldn't have been kept past the first HL.
Why? Because crouching lowers your head
. There is no "tuck my knees up" button, because this isn't a parkour game. Therefore, the logical assumption is that crouch works exactly the same way it does in every other game, and just lowers your head (i.e. shortens the top of your hitbox but leaves your centre of gravity where it was before, at your feet because games aren't realistic that way).
HL has it backwards and shortens the hitbox in both directions, which... makes a twisted kind of sense, but only slightly. But this little amount of sense is completely overruled by play semantics: why a player would press crouch
vs. why a player would press jump
. When we request a crouch, it's because we want a lower profile; when we jump, we would expect Gordon to kindly just jump as high as he can using the most appropriate technique because if we wanted to manipulate his legs separately we'd be playing ♥♥♥♥
ing QWOP. In the same way that we don't have separate movement arrows for his left and right legs. He just runs.
I actually can't think offhand of any situations in the original HL where a crouch-jump was really required (not counting jumps that required a lower head profile, for which it is of course a perfectly valid move, and not counting the long-jump which is something else entirely). It was probably a bug that got left in because it didn't actually hurt rather than a conscious design decision.