Source
r/truegaming•
nosox

Climbing isn't fun or challenging.

I've noticed a lot of games these days have similar climbing mechanics. You grip onto marked ledges and just direct your character in the direction you want to go. Most of the actual climbing is automated and dynamically animated, looking slick and polished.

While this looks nice, there's absolutely no challenge to it. It makes sense to me in a game like Assassin's Creed, which arguably made it popular, as you're scrambling around rooftops during combat where climbing mechanics should be an afterthought. Horizon: Zero Dawn on the other hand has rewards sitting at the end of long climbs, but since the climbing is all on rails it's not much of a challenge. God of War is guilty of the same, having climbing segments with no real danger or challenge.

Breath of the Wild is a game in recent memory which helps avert this trend, in my opinion. Instead of hopping around footholds you stick to the surface Spider-Man style with your grip gauge being determined by your stamina. It's pretty clever as your stamina is tied to collectible resources and verticality is used to gate those collectable resources as well as other secrets.

Posted Feb 17, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

697189
JudgeJoeCool•

Although it's a tad casual, check out Grow Home, climbing is almost entirely what you do and it's handled superbly because it's actual climbing, and not press-button-jump-here

276
MetaKazel•

+1 for Grow Home, if OP is interested in a game about climbing with actual mechanics.

There's also Human Fall Flat, it's not centered around climbing but there is a certain technique to it.

78
Nazsha•

Grow Home

And also its sequel (which doesn't change much, IIRC, but it's still pretty great), named Grow Up.

35
[deleted]•

[deleted]

7
PsychoAgent•

Haven't played it, but I heard Grow Up gave you too much mobility once you power up making the game lose some of its original appeal.

3
SugaryKnife•

I loved both games. And you're dead on with the game having more mobility. Tho IMO it didn't lose it's charm it just changed direction

1
Lacriphage•

I hated Grow Up. Just kinda got smothered in ubisoft bullshit.

0
Maximus125•

Personally my favorite climbing game is Getting Over It /s

27
CocoSavege•

No love for girp? Same author even!

9
Infintinity•

GIRP is a real treat. Once you figure out how to swing your momentum around to reach more holds, and then finding just the right line while your fingers move from key to key. And a single slip spells your doom.

But fuck that bird.

2
Bread-Zeppelin•

Grow Up's great but don't do the grind to get 100% completion, the "True Ending" is ridiculously not worth it and anticlimactic, just look it up on YouTube if you have to see it.

10
PsychoAgent•

You must not have been gaming in the 90s. Ridiculously tedious challenges only to get a short 30 second FMV was the norm. Looking at you, classic Tomb Raider.

3
Bread-Zeppelin•

Yeah, I'd take a 30 second FMV over 1 extra line of text on a monitor that makes you wonder why the cutscene isn't loading

4
Ice_Cold345CardinalJobber•

Human Fall Flat is so much fun trying to figure out how to climb efficiently. Once you get good enough, you can just skip all the puzzles and get to the ending.

3
[deleted]•

[deleted]

0
Aldryc•

There's also Climbey if you have a VR headset.

2
Socksalot58•

Oh god that game gave me such bad motion sickness. I really wanted to give it a chance but I couldn't handle it.

1
action_lawyer_comics•

Snake Pass. It's an actual physics-based climbing game where you need skills and planning. You're a snake and need to slither, twist, and climb to reach gems and coins and the level exit. Lot of fun and truly challenging.

38
[deleted]•

[deleted]

3
action_lawyer_comics•

If you’re interested in the concept, yes absolutely. It truly is the best climbing game out there. I’ve done some real-world climbing pand Snake Pass is the game that best recreated the sweaty palm feeling of looking at the next handhold and not being sure of reaching it.

Climbing is pretty much the ONLY thing it has though. There are some collectibles, but that’s still more about trying to climb up or down to them and safely returning than it is about finding hidden places. Graphics and sounds are nice but not mind blowing. There’s very few puzzles, no combat, and the story is just there to hold everything together.

Also, later levels get annoying, and you can’t save and quit a level to come back later. I only made it 2/3rds through before it became more of a chore than anything else. Still I got 10 hours of entertainment from it and really enjoyed it. Like I said, it’s a unique experience, once you can’t get elsewhere and that’s well worth the price for me.

5
Hyperbole_Hater•

It's fun. And on game pass

1
Seantommy•

Absolutely love Grow Home. I don't know that OP is necessarily looking for that, more just commenting on their presence in largely unrelated games, but +1 if anyone is looking for this. I adore Grow Home. Also, Shadow of the Colossus, though they're completely different games.

8
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
x_factor69•

How long to beat the story mode for that game?

Less than 3 hours?

1
askyourmom469•

Right around 3 I'd say. It took me a bit longer because I was fucking around quite a bit when I played it

1
Havoksixteen•

Average is Two and a half hours for the main story according to HowLongtoBeat

0
PsychoAgent•

Hell yeah! A very underappreciated gem. I love this stupid little game, haha

1
bowsori•

Shadow of the colossus is also mostly about climbing

0
Lorgin•

Such a relaxing game... Until you fall hundreds of feet and lose your progress.

-1
HammeredWharf•

Too many games ape the climbing mechanics from Prince of Persia: Sands of Time without the environmental hazards and wall-running acrobatics that made SoT fun. I think the worst climbing I've seen was in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, which had a ton of simplistic skimming along ledges without anything that would make that activity exciting.

134
VindictiveJudge•

Even the later PoP games simplified the climbing. I'm one of the few who actually enjoyed the 2008 game, but the climbing is much more automated than in the Sands trilogy. Forgotten Sands did it a bit, too.

25
fieryfrolic•

And Forgotten Sands for all its flaws had a lot of challenging and fun platforming sequences. The freeze water mechanic was amazing!

3
SUPERKOYN•

I remember when Ubisoft churned out Sands of Time and Beyond Good and Evil in the same year and they were UNTOUCHABLE. Those games were some of the best titles to get on the PS2. That was their fucking golden age for sure.

Anyway, yeah. I vividly remember hopping from pillar to pillar in SoT, the whole game was designed around climbing around this amazingly detailed and giant palace. It almost seemed like they designed the palace first and after that found ways for you to traverse it and so the game had an amazing sense of scale and progression as you climbed up the castle. The time mechanic was designed with some puzzle-platforming in mind, allowing for a lot of trial and error with specific boundaries. That game did climbing SO well.

​

I agree with OP that climbing has become more of a visual spectacle rather than a game mechanic. BOTW completely averted it by making it a challenge and has you actively searching for holds to rest on or decide when you wanna make that final leap towards the top of the cliff you're scaling.

20
jamesja12•

The climbing in lords of shadow was the worst part of the game. There were like, 3 scenes total where the climbing was ok.

2
lizardman1021•

Maybe I didn't play enough of it but I thought the climbing on the mech in los2 was really good

2
NelsonMinar•

The early Assassin's Creed games were quite different. Climbing was a 3d puzzle. Often you'd have to climb to the top of some tower and the only way to do it was climb all four sides of the tower, sometimes backtracking back down a bit to go up or having to make a hard-to-spot stretch / leap to climb up. IIRC in AC2 there was a whole minigame which was basically "solve the puzzle on how to climb this building". I'm sad they took it out. The game changed a lot when they went to areas like Colonial America with few tall buildings.

123
SirVer51•

Also the tombs in Brotherhood. Some of them required advanced maneuvers that are straight up not possible in the later games.

59
10z20Luka•

Hahaha, to be fair though, the camera in those games could be very fickle, leading to many unfair frustrating falls...

25
Rezol•

Like in the newer ones where everytime you need to leap backwards from a wall the game reminds you how to do it. What is this, dementia awareness edition?

12
Terakahn•

Brotherhood might actually be my favorite entry in the franchise just because of those tombs. Really tested your skills in platforming. And you felt like a real badass when you got through a hard part.

8
chr1syx•

I can’t believe people are praising the tombs now. Honestly those were some of the most frustrating missions in the entire history of AC for me, mostly because there often wasn’t any indicator of what jumps you could make. The game wasn’t really consistent with this, leading to many situations where you basically had to guess what jump was the next move. This meant that the system was basically boiled down to an extremely tedious trial-and-error system where one wrong jump would mean climbing through an entire section all over again.

Maybe those missions were fun to you, but dear god I do not miss them at all.

6
Terakahn•

That's what I loved about them. It was a skill challenge and a puzzle in one. I can see how they're not for everyone though. I loved doing everything there was to do in the entire ezio trilogy. Ac3 kind of killed that for me.

3
Beheska•

I had so much fun in AC1 climbing the cathedral.

16
WaltLongmire0009•

Yeah I miss that, now you're basically Spider-Man

12
fabrar•

Yeah I do miss those older games where climbing felt like a puzzle. I rerally enjoyed Odyssey as a whole but your character is basically Spiderman in that game. Dude can literally can climb any surface no matter how steep or unlikely, and there's even a certain upgrade that takes away any fall damage so there is literally 0 stakes in climbing.

But then again, the newer AC games are more action-RPGs than the Prince of Persia-esque platformers the older ones were.

3
ace09751•

I think Shadow of the Tomb Raider removes this problem when you put climbing on hard mode and it totally removes the white marks on surfaces that would usually guide you. Instead while the floor beneath you is crumbling you need to analyse your surroundings and make second to second decisions about where to jump and what to do. It’s acc really fun.

116
gotsmilk•

Does the level design accomadate this? Because just removing the marks on surfaces telling players what they can and can't climb wouldn't work on most games like that, like Uncharted and the first Tomb Raider remake. Their environments don't give you the freedom to climb any and everything like say BotW, but at the same time they are so focused on realism that the rocks and cliffs you CAN climb are largely indistinguishable from the ones you can't, so without those markers it'd just be trial and error to see which specific environmental objects the developers decided to let you climb.

129
InfiniteTree•

So much this. There are lots of games where I'd love to turn off the hand holding (I'm looking at you minimap) but most of those games have relied so heavily on their hand holding that they don't work without it.

The developers would have to have built the game in a way that it functions without the hand holding, which they don't seem to be doing these days because it's more time/effort.

67
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
Sagaru-san•

Asking the real questions here. Anyone?

21
tortnotes•

I'm finishing up Tomb Raider with hard climbing and it's okay, but the visual cues that tell you what you can climb are usually pretty clear even without the marks. There are just a couple of places where I've been stumped because the level design and camera movements didn't naturally lead me to the right place. I do feel a little bit more engaged by the climbing, but I wouldn't say that it's a big strong point of the game. The parts I like--the brief change of pace, the views you sometimes get, the level design that climbing enables, etc--don't really spring from the way the climbing gameplay was specifically implemented.

51
Sagaru-san•

Thank you for your input

7
temporarycreature•

Yeah well said, I'm going through Rise of the Tomb Raider right now and this is exactly how I feel about it.

4
TheLastOneWasTooLong•

I agree, the game uses pretty obvious standard models for climbable ledges. The white marks just give me tunnel vision and I don't end up actually looking at the environment.

3
miggitymikeb•

I played the latest Tomb Raider with climbing on hard to remove the white marks and it was much better. It feels more natural. If you think it’s something you can grab onto you usually can.

7
homer_3•

You definitely want the level design to accommodate such a thing, but TR marks climable areas pretty clearly. It's a different type of rock surface.

1
MrsFlax•

Tried that on my second run and I loved it. I hated the white paint marked edges. Made me loose the ability of looking around for stuff and ways to go, just drew me right towards them and made it much more linear. I remember getting stuck on one of the first puzzles where a huge wooden structure (ladder?) had to be put upright using two counterweights on the sides. The side building had an entrance up the wall to the left and I couldn’t see it for the life of mine. Turned out I had to double jump and then climb a couple of ledges before getting inside. Felt like a life accomplishment getting there with no help from the game. Also liked the option of the survival instinct showing absolutely nothing until buying relevant abilities later in the game. Only thing I don’t enjoy when playing TR and climbing is the bloody axe. Absolutely loathe the axe.

6
Slowness112•

Just like uncharted.

But in uncharted it still felt boring when not in combat/a setpiece/some exceptions

2
polite-1•

I have to say the climbing walls with pickaxes is the most boring piece of gameplay I've ever experienced. It's way worse in Shadow since for some reason there's so much more of it.

1
TbanksIV•

It's largely used as a means to hide loads. AC and Botw would be the only real outliers. They lock you in to holding a direction and occasionally pressing a button. Once you're on the ride there's no getting off. It's all about masking those loads.

It's bad, I agree. But they're not implementing this climbing because it's fun or interesting at all. It's just a mechanical thing.

68
deviantbono•

I don't known if this is true. But it sounds like the old long elevator ride loading trick.

45
TbanksIV•

Definitely. God of War 2018 did a lot of this with the small tunnels you'd crouch under or the trees you'd flip etc etc. There are tons of stuff like this games these days. And largely I think it's good. It's certainly better than freezing the game, ya know?

67
suugakusha•

I give a LOT of credit to developers when they are able to hide load times, even with dumb things like this.

Frankly, the worst thing about GoW 2018 was how poorly they hid the load times during the fast travel system (how you were told to run around a circular track until a door opens, but you could literally just stand there). And frankly, that's really not the worst thing in the world. They just didn't do something perfectly - and in a game where everything else was near perfect, it stood out.

36
Sugar_buddy•

Well, I actually didn't have a problem with it. The characters spoke and discussed the lore of the world during that particular "loading screen" and it was quite nice.

20
Scrat-Scrobbler•

I have other problems with God of War (namely the RPG elements), but if the fast-travel loads forced you to run around, or do anything else specific while it loaded, it would just be annoying. I'd really rather in general that games just load and let me stretch or check my phone or whatever than force me to sit there and press a stick forward.

7
EveningNewbs•

There's a spot in Shadow of the Tomb Raider where you need to wade through mud to reach another part of a large map. If you jump into the middle of the mud pit the game ends up freezing for a moment when you reach the end because it's not done loading the map yet.

11
TankorSmash•

It's certainly better than freezing the game, ya know?

Sorta. It's almost certainly a longer animation than the load (because there's no loading afterwards, so it's necessarily a longer wait), and if the game is on PC, you can have 0s loading time, given enough years pass.

0
fabrar•

Yeah I didn't really mind those, it kept up the flow of the game and maintained the immersion without cutting to a black screen or a loading bar or whatever

0
ComputerMystic•

Easy listening Mass Effect theme plays, faintly, in the background

4
Boris-Barboris•

And now the player blames game designer for waste of his time instead of just going to kitchen\WC\stretching when the game explicitly told him that he has free time.

I'll take the loading screen tbh.

11
lpeccap•

Seriously, just give me a loading screen instead of busy work just so you can say that your game has no loading screens as a selling point.

2
Astrokiwi•

I think they're also about controlling the pacing too. It gives you a moment to check out the scenery without being totally overwhelmed by constant attack all the time. This why Half Life 2 has a number of extremely simple puzzles in it. They're not meant to be hard, it's just something to let you catch your breath before the next encounter. Similarly, Skyrim has a lot of faffing about on looting, crafting, inventory management, and travelling in-between battles, and little mini puzzles within dungeons, which is part of why it's so soothing to play for hours. And it's why Halo 1,2, and 3 have big exploration and vehicle sections, combined with scenery porn. By comparison, I found the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games to be exhausting, and I constantly felt like I needed a break.

3
AzorMX•

To be honest, I disliked much of the nuances of climbing in BotW. Climbing was pretty useful to reach high places and overall explore, but the slowness of it made it so that most of the time I would climb a surface and look away at a stream in my PC or something. That is also the reason I always wore full climbing gear to dimish the tedium at least one bit.

61
SRVfender001•

Yeah I felt the same way. The climbing mechanic wasn't that challenging or groundbreaking, just an annoyance. I just got tired of it and use whatever that power that gives you a boost (ofcourse they fucked that up by making you deplete all 3 uses before it starts the recovery timer).

15
Animedingo•

I dont agree at all.

Being able to climb nearly anything opened up the world in such a way that it never had before. It allowed for true exploration

The challenge was resource management and knowing your limitations.

It may not always be fun but its absolutely ground breaking for a zelda game, or any game that just uses colored ledges to climb

8
ReganDryke•

The only challenge with climbing was cooking enough stamina food beforehand and hoping it wouldn't fucking start raining.

6
SRVfender001•

More power to you if you enjoyed that aspect. For me, it was just slow work.

3
ChronoX5•

This reminds me of late game sailing in the Wind Waker. I used to go grab a sandwhich from the kitchen after my course was set.

10
One-LeggedDinosaur•

I gave up on Wind Waker because of the sailing. I don't understand the praise.

5
mikepurvis•

Ehh, once you get the ballad of gales then you're never sailing more than a tile or two to get to your destination from the nearest warp point.

2
DaddysBlackCock-•

i wore climbing gear IRL to help with this. Highly recommend 👍

9
AzorMX•

I dunno, I don't think I can comfortably wear my climbing shoes for the entire duration of a gaming session.

11
Bluestalker•

Getting cramps in my feet just by reading your comment ಥ_ಥ

3
sleepytoday•

When I read the title of this post, BotW was the first game I thought of. Holding up on your d-pad and waiting isn’t my idea of fun.

6
Cyberspark939•

It's one of those things that was brought across from games like Shadow of the Colossus without really understanding why the stamina bar was there in the original and what it's for.

While it was interesting to see it used to gate off content it's something pretty easily maneuvered around if you're good at using the other mechanics.

6
wh03v3r•

I'm pretty sure they understood reasonably well what they wanted to achieve with the climbing mechanic. The simplified "you can climb anything" aspect of the game is there to open up the overworld compared to other games rather than to restrict it.

Like for many things in BotW, you are given many options to tackle each problem, including navigation. Climbing straight up is one solution but it's usually not the ideal one because it's tedious and takes away your resources. This is why it's often better to try to follow the paths that are laid out across Hyrule.

6
robolab-io•

BoTW had slow moments. Climbing sucked.

5†
TankorSmash•

Climbing was a very fun element. Being able to skip around by spending stamina, looking to make it to the next rock horizontal enough to rest on was pretty engaging.

I wore the climbing gear though, so I never slow-climbed, maybe that's the difference.

3
TetraGton•

I've made posts about this before. Reading through this thread I feel like I should do an AMA or something.

​

I have been rock climbing for years in real life and I'm also very experienced in Parkour. I've also been a gamer since Sinclair Spectrum so I guess that's a huge thing that drove me to do all these things in real life.

​

Here's a TL:DR on how a climber sees climbing in video games.

​

Best FEEL for climbing: Shadow of the Colossus. That's just how climbing feels. The grip meter perfectly nails the feel of climbing. In real life, climbers are are always fighting against the "pump". Pump happens when too much lactic acid is formed in the forearm muscles and the climber loses their grip. That desperate seeking for a rest in the middle of a climb is basically perfectly captured by Shadow of the Colossus

​

Best (and only) REALISTIC portrayal of climbing: Metal Gear Solid 5. Climbing isn't easy. Anything harder than a 4 (that's 5.7 in American) grade requires special shoes, pictured here next to my casual shoes and my work boots.

https://imgur.com/a/anCdSNZ

​

In Metal Gear we see Hideo Kojimas obsessive genius at work again. Since Snake is a special ops super spy soldier, he'll wear boots like I do at my security job. Climbing anything with holds as in a sheer wall is basically impossible in such shoes, you just need the special shoes for the job. It is next to impossible to walk more than a few meters with proper climbing shoes, they're just not designed for that. What Kojima and he's studio did was a strike of genius if you ask a climber like me. They made only the cracks on the walls climbable.

​

Now then, Crack climbing is an sport of it's own inside the climbing scene, mostly associated with "Trad" style where the protection is placed while climbing, instead of using pre placed bolts. But the thing is. Crack climbing, as in scaling fissures in the stone wall does not necessarely demand climbing shoes. Since the feet are "jammed" into the crack, it can be done with your average combat boots if the crack is easy enough.

​

47
bushdoc•

I agree Breath of the Wild did a good job with it. It reminded me a bit of playing Shadow of the Collussus, which in my opinion is the best game ever in terms of making climbing tense and rewarding.

In that game, most of the challenge was being able to climb up a giant to reach its weak point. You had to anticipate when the giant was going to try to shake you off, and stop and hold on for dear life. Once you reach the weak point, you have to decide how much time and energy to use stabbing it, deciding when to rest, making sure you had enough stamina to hold on.

Similar to BotW, you could sacrifice some stamina to make a quick jump higher up, hopefully making it to a ledge before you lose your grip. And if you had good timing, you could use the momentum from a giant trying to shake you off to get launched higher up.

God, that was a great game. For anyone that never got a chance to play it since it was a console exclusive, it works well on emulators!

33
[deleted]•

[deleted]

5
lpeccap•

Not neccesarily always true. You could catch another part of the colossus on the way down if you were lucky and many of the colossi had multiple options for climbing.

2
action_lawyer_comics•

You should look at Snake Pass for climbing. It's a physics platformer where you play a snake and move by slithering and twisting around poles and stuff. It's actually quite challenging but also very rewarding.

5
dibsODDJOB•

I just bought the 4k remake of SotC, can't wait to play it again for the first time since PS2.

2
frownyface•

Climbing also tends to be boring to even look at. After you've seen the character animations you've kind of seen everything. You're literally staring at a wall.

14
Demderdemden•

I will say that even for AC, and I'm saying this as a huge fan of the series, some of it can be ridiculous. While the normal scaling of cityscapes is of course to be expected, games like AC II where suddenly you're trying to climb around a church and suddenly the viewpoint that you've been playing from the entire game shifts and you have to try and play from a different camera angle, using different mechanics, was just a cause for continued fuckups. I understand they want to make the challenges, well, challenging, but I think this could be done while still incorporating new physics, viewpoints, etc.

12
Marshith•

I Am Alive had a pretty fun climbing mechanic. I enjoyed it for what it was and it never felt too hard or too easy to figure out where I needed to go next. Also, the checkpoint system it had for you to restore stamina was a nice little minigame. It's a shame the game's development was so wonky because it had potential.

7
TheLeftover821•

I loved that game but the ending was so sudden.

1
Cymelion•

You could really sense with I Am Alive Ubisoft just came in one day and said "You got 3 months to ship it or we cancel" And they basically panicked and just polished what they had.

The game definitely felt like they could have done more with it especially if it had been given a sequel to improve upon the mechanics and world lore.

1
Hraes•

Oh man I thought I was in r/climbing and just clicked into the comments to see what kind of incredible trolling was going on that hadn't already been downvoted into oblivion

7
nosoxOP•

What a lost opportunity.

3
amoliski•

I disagree on BotW- climbing is painfully slow and boring, and if you jump to speed it up a bit, you risk mos-estimaing your remaining stamina and falling all the way to the bottom. Not to mention that rain means you're staying put for a while if you're trying to climb somewhere.

6
a1studmuffin•

Unpopular opinion, but honestly for all the praise Horizon Zero Dawn got, I felt the game design was very lacklustre in parts, climbing mechanics included. Art more than made up for it, but the world really felt empty to me with some really strange action RPG design decisions and a fairly glitchy camera system. Monster combat was great though, seems all the energy was focused there and the rest was rushed through.

6
Astrokiwi•

Honestly, this is part of why I don't really consider Horizon Zero Dawn a real Open World game. It's an action game that gives you a little bit of wiggle room between missions and fights, but there's not enough to do outside of robot fights to really make it Open World. However, I think that works in its favour. There are very few side-missions, so almost everything you do is contributing to the main story and Aloy's characterisation. The loop of killing things to get more loot to get better equipment to get better at killing things doesn't take up much of your time - you quickly end up with enough shards to afford anything you want - so you get a tighter experience with much less grinding than you often get in Open World games.

1
M0dusPwnens•

I'm pretty sure the climbing in BotW never actually gates anything. Every single long climb has enough resting spots that you can do it with just the starting meter.

It's also painfully slow, even easier than marked ledges (just go upwards and identify a ledge to rest on every 30 seconds or whatever), and that fucking rain.

But I'm with you. It's fine when these systems are used to enable gameplay or some other effect, but they don't work very well as gameplay. I just got around to playing Rime yesterday and I thought about this several times while playing. So much of that game is climbing "puzzles" and there's just so little thought involved.

Conversely, when games try to do climbing that's harder, it's usually even worse. Assassin's Creed went through a period where it tried to make climbing challenging by providing only one route up something, and it wasn't totally obvious, and you had to figure out the route. And it was terrible. "Spot the hold" ends up being very boring, frustrating gameplay. I thought one of the best innovations of Origins was making all of the climbable stuff absolutely covered in holds. The more those games have accepted that climbing isn't a challenge, but a mere movement system, the better they've been.

The only game I've ever played that kind of got away with it was Uncharted. And even then, it wears thin at several points. But in general, it does give it that cinematic feel, usually due to a ton of scripting. Anyone who didn't love the derailed train climb has no heart. Sure by that point the sense of danger was pretty minimal, but it's not like you're worried the hero will actually fall and die when they're in that situation in a movie. The highlighted ledge climbing "puzzles" work well for Uncharted, and a huge amount of care is put in to make many of them exciting set pieces. A lot of other games have blindly copied it without nearly as much work, and the result is pretty limp.

5
yosoyellogan•

Damn 4 people are Shadowbanned here lol anyways, I’ve been playing Middle-Earth Shadow of War and I have some insight here. It runs on the AC model, where you just run towards a wall and basically auto-climb. Luckily you can speed it up dramatically right out of the gate, where in the first mission you unlock an ability to jump ~50 meters with a press of the X button. You have to time it slightly but after a few tries it becomes automatic. And getting it (even just from mashing X) boosts your hit streak, which increases your damage when the fight starts, or at least keeps it going during fights. That helps keep the climbing integrated with the combat.

The problem that SoW faces is that climbing path finding is AWFUL. Sometimes you’ll auto-stick to weird places on the wall or completely skip over the ledge you wanted. Also, the speed-climbing only works for upwards, not sideways, meaning that if you want to move across a ledge, it’s going to take so long that it’s almost faster to drop down and start again. Also for some reason, the MC prefers to grab ledges even if he could jump onto them, which can be frustrating if you’re trying to get somewhere fast or need to kill an enemy quick

Climbing is very important in SoW and since you’re almost always going upwards, it ends up working. There’s no fall damage, so that also speeds everything up. Just jump or drop off. At times when you’re in a rush it can be a little frustrating but I’d say it gets it right around 85%.

I might be biased though. While I hate the climbing in AC, I like climbing a lot in Uncharted. Sometimes it’s frustrating when you’re going up and down all the time because you don’t know where to go though.

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action_lawyer_comics•

r/truegaming automod removes top level comments below a certain size. So if four people just spammed “PoP Sands of Time!” those comments get deleted. It’s supposed to encourage discussion instead of just listing games.

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Naouak•

I just want to say that I dropped Shadow of war because the climbing was infuriating. Everytime you tried to do something specific, you could not. It gave me the feeling I was playing one of those old fmv games like Dragon's lair in which you only gave vague orders to the protagonist and they would act on their own. It's fun for some hours, but it's enraging when there is a bit of difficulty.

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yosoyellogan•

I’d say it can def be difficult, esp during combat. You get used to mashing X to climb, but if you’re in a fight and want to climb, you have to hold X. If you mash it, you just roll into the wall. I’ve had a few times where I just wanted to drop down a level and either a) accidentally stealth dominated into the middle of a hoard, or b) dropped all the way off the cliff. Fixing A required you to be very careful with the controls, which is hard because you’re already managing several things at once. Fixing B can be saved by the double jump but THAT is by far the least reliable thing about the game. It’s also annoying that how far he jumps has nothing to do with how fast you were running toward the edge, but just based on where the game thinks you’re aiming for. You can easily under or overshoot where you wanted and to salvage the jump you have to time the double jump nearly perfectly which is hard

I like the climbing but it has a fairly steep learning curve and even then it’s not the most reliable thing. Often times it just keeps sending you higher rather than stopping at the level you want, which isn’t particularly bad but it means you have to mash X longer and then reposition afterwards.

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Maximus125•

I remember raging at a gigantic climb in Far Cry 4. It was insanely difficult as it required multiple chained rope swings. It was guided but not too guided, and yet it was stupid hard

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CrazyDiamond1189•

Someone has never played Celeste.

Breath of the Wild has the problem of being unable to climb anything when it rains, and it rains quite frequently. I found climbing interesting as a means to get around (and climbed the highest mountains in the game for fun, not knowing there were cool things at the top) but the rain just made it a chore.

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placeholder368•

That's not true at all. Climbing in the rain is simply much more stamina draining and requires a bit of technique. It's actually quite simple, you do a climb jump (which causes a slip) then you climb back up normally until you are nearly at the slip point and you do another climb jump. Repeat until you reach the top.

Its not ideal near the beginning of the game, but as a psuedo RPG it shouldn't be anyway. Once you've leveled up your stamina bar, climbing gear, and made stamina potions, the rain is no longer an obstacle.

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DarthBuzzard•

That technique drains stamina much, much more than normal. Like by an order of magnitude. I guess the game lets you have near infinite health/stamina regeneration via food/potions, but it's a bit too much.

It's also unnatural in general that it was based off a set timer that always happens. That just makes it feel like I'm fighting against an animation system rather than struggling in the context of the world and the weather.

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DarthBuzzard•

but the rain just made it a chore.

It should really have added a chance of slipping on a cooldown. The fact that there was set intervals for slipping every so often was a design flaw.

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[deleted]•

They should have just made the climbing gear keep u from sliding in the rain at the cost of the speed boost that u get from the gear. So; climbing gear without rain: you get the extra speed. Climbing gear in the rain: u don't slide anymore but no speed boost.

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nosoxOP•

Or make the non sliding gear metal for maximum trolling.

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[deleted]•

Yes Satan, this one right here. He's all yours.

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DarthBuzzard•

Nah, that makes it less interesting. Rain should impact your climbing regardless of gear, but not at the level it does in the game.

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some1stoleit•

I've been playing uncharted lately and I question if you can even call it a platformer. Based on the amount jump when you hit X the jumps are inconsistent some that you can make you can't because the game doesn't want you climbing that object and some you can do even though your jump distance couldn't make it. It doesn't seem like much of a platformer if the main challenge is working out where the game wants you to jump. It doesn't ruin the game completely but it does make the pure platforming sections a but tedious to play.

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Jackissocool•

Does anybody call Uncharted a platformer?

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pem11•

I know this post is mostly focused on flat gaming, but I found the climbing in Robinson: The Journey (PSVR) to be pretty fun. I'm sure normal games could do something similar using trigger buttons or something.

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Soul-Burn•

Similarly "The Climb", also from Crytek is based 100% on climbing using your hands in VR.

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DarthBuzzard•

Climbing is generally a lot more fun in VR because you have complete control. You can often climb with one button while scrolling on your phone in most games, but in VR you are locked into it and it's more active by nature.

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