Games By Russell Holly Jan. 25, 2014 12:07 pm
Whether you spent your time swearing at your opponent for using it better than you or dedicated countless hours perfecting the craft, bunnyhopping is almost entirely gone from modern gaming. Either as a call to arms or a touching eulogy, this documentary takes you back through the history of this skill-based gameplay.
Long ago, when the PC was where you found most FPS gamers, the battlefield was littered with players who would dedicate hours to finding the best exploits for a game engine in order to give themselves an advantage. Sometimes it was a poorly rendered walls that you could see and shoot through if you stood in just the right spot, or a broken spawn point that could be exploited for extra weapons.
Once you found the exploit, you’d share it with your friends and use it to totally own a server. One of the most common of these exploits was bunnyhopping, and whether you think it was a cheap exploit or an advantage earned after hours of practice, it’s hard not to notice how absent this is in modern games.
Bunnyhopping essentially allowed you to move faster because the game engine treated your momentum differently while you were in the air. As a result, talented players could travel across maps in a fraction of the time everyone else could. This offered some fairly obvious advantages, and in every game this mechanic has been discovered for there have been scores of players who flocked to it to acquire new mastery.
As video games become more realistic, as physics engines became more based on actual physics, and as gameplay started to shift more towards consoles, bunnyhopping has all but disappeared.
The concept still lives on in other forms. Rocket jumping, for example, is another type of exploit that has been used to create an advantage in specific scenarios. Games like Halo have even gone so far as to create special gameplay options where you can adjust the physics so you can have fun abusing the established game reality for the sake of a good time.
The documentary itself serves as a great reminder of how many hours gamers have spent on an accident, and the desire to see such a game return. Considering how much easier it is now for indie game shops to push a game to Steam or the PlayStation Network, it wouldn’t shock me to see someone try and bring bunnyhopping back after seeing this video.
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Long ago, when the PC was where you found most FPS gamers, the battlefield was littered with players who would dedicate hours to finding the best exploits for a game engine in order to give themselves an advantage. Sometimes it was a poorly rendered walls that you could see and shoot through if you stood in just the right spot, or a broken spawn point that could be exploited for extra weapons.
Once you found the exploit, you’d share it with your friends and use it to totally own a server. One of the most common of these exploits was bunnyhopping, and whether you think it was a cheap exploit or an advantage earned after hours of practice, it’s hard not to notice how absent this is in modern games.
Bunnyhopping essentially allowed you to move faster because the game engine treated your momentum differently while you were in the air. As a result, talented players could travel across maps in a fraction of the time everyone else could. This offered some fairly obvious advantages, and in every game this mechanic has been discovered for there have been scores of players who flocked to it to acquire new mastery.
As video games become more realistic, as physics engines became more based on actual physics, and as gameplay started to shift more towards consoles, bunnyhopping has all but disappeared.
The concept still lives on in other forms. Rocket jumping, for example, is another type of exploit that has been used to create an advantage in specific scenarios. Games like Halo have even gone so far as to create special gameplay options where you can adjust the physics so you can have fun abusing the established game reality for the sake of a good time.
The documentary itself serves as a great reminder of how many hours gamers have spent on an accident, and the desire to see such a game return. Considering how much easier it is now for indie game shops to push a game to Steam or the PlayStation Network, it wouldn’t shock me to see someone try and bring bunnyhopping back after seeing this video.
More...
