I was watching a Half Life 2 speedrun by Waezone recently where he beat the game in 50 minutes from start to finish. This run had commentary from three HL2 developers - Adrian Finol, Robin Walker and David Speyrer. As they watched Waezone completely break the game they spent years painstakingly building, it started a light hearted discussion about whether they should fix some or all of the glitches being exploited. Then David Speyrer said something really important: "We always made the distinction between somebody who is accidentally experiencing a bug and [somebody who is] enjoying the bug" (
https://youtu.be/sK_PdwL5Y8g?t=1307 video time: 21:47).
In Cyberpunk 2077, the recently released patch 1.2 fixed an issue where dodging right after Kerensikov's bullet time effect expires causes the player to be propelled a great distance forwards. I'm going to try to make the case that this glitch is a good thing and the game loses something important without it.
For anyone who doesn't know what I'm talking about, this is what it looked like in game. Wait for the bullet time and then look out for the burst of acceleration:
Odd physics defying techniques like this are nothing new in games and are almost always the byproduct of developer oversight. In Quake, resourceful players figured out that player velocity increases when you turned into a strafe and that by controlling the degree of turn while strafing to the opposite side, you could move much faster. They figured out a way to exploit the player velocity update code but purely by intuition and feel.
ID Software could have fixed it, but they decided not to and the rest is history. Quake engine would go on to be used in many games that inherited its player movement code so bunnyhopping spread far and wide. It is now a core feature of arena shooter movement and is a critical skill to learn if you want to get good at these games.
Another example of glitch tech is the "kick glitch" in Mirror's Edge. Kick glitching is a technique where you cancel out of a wall run with a wall kick and for whatever reason, it creates a temporary collision box underneath Faith which can be used to jump a second time. You have a 3 frame window where you can do this so the timing needs to be precise. It is equivalent to Cyberpunk's double jump legs, although it is much harder to execute and requires a vertical surface to kick off.
Kick glitching in Mirror's Edge is a critical skill for time trials because it enables you to take routes that are otherwise impossible. The first time I saw Mirror's Edge glitch tech in action, I was completely blown away and subsequently spent hundreds of hours in Arland trying to get half as good as this guy:
Unlike ID Software, DICE decided the glitch tech should be fixed, so all of the techniques shown in the video above are no longer possible in Mirror's Edge Catalyst. I think that is a real shame and Catalyst lost something really beautiful. It is a much more terrestrial game than its predecessor.
Why use Kerensikov speed boost in Cyberpunk 2077?
Boost jumping with Kerensikov was a great tool for parkouring around Night City. You could use it to jump impossible gaps, even without a run up. Aside from vaulting across buildings, it could be used to move really fast and in conjunction with Maneuvering System cyberware, enabled players to move around the game world like this:
This speed can be really difficult to control so I constantly have to decide whether its a good idea to "k-jump". Heres a video of where I make a bad call and hit a car:
You'll notice I don't use the K-jump very often and there is a reason for that. Kerensikov has another interesting property that is important for movement tech - Activating Kerensikov in the air by dodging in the opposite direction of your velocity vector is the only way to halt your movement in the air. You can see it twice here:
On the second Kerensikov you can see that I lose control of the speed I have, end up flying off the bridge and my reaction time is so poor, I kill my momentum with Kerensikov far too late and end up going for a swim.
In patch 1.1 and earlier, you always had to entertain this dilemma - do I burn Kerensikov for speed and distance? Or do I save it for emergency course correction when I can't control my speed and distance? It has a cooldown so in many cases you can't have both. This dynamic no longer exists in patch 1.2.
Why keep a bug in the game?
Games that allow you to express creativity in movement are awesome. I could understand if the decision to axe k-jumping was antithetical to the lore or setting of the game world but this is cyberpunk. When I read Hardwired and imagined what Santestivan hardwiring or Owari speedware looked and felt like, I didn't quite imagine this. This is better. If ever anyone dreamed up a world where this could be a thing, it would be in the cyberpunk genre.
In terms of mechanics, the way speed boosting works in the game feels great and has a wonderful tactility to it. The timings required to speed boost jump are lenient so its easy to learn. But the better your timing is, the faster you accelerate you get and you can feel the difference between good timing and great timing. If you get it just right, it feels like V doesn't touch the ground but instead glides off a cushion of air.
All of this makes the moment to moment gameplay really engaging. It encourages you to be hyperaware of your surroundings because so many things can knock you on your ass or slow you down. It opens up rooftop climbing that wouldn't be possible without it. Some of the best screenshots I ever took were from vantage points I was only able to reach with k-jumping. I just wish I recorded more of my k-jump climbing stuff to show here.
Right now you can only gain speed and distance off horizontal surfaces. I think the game would benefit from
more movement tech like this, not less. It gives players more options, more problems to think about when traversing the city and engaging in combat. It creates more opportunities for emergent gameplay.
One of the reasons I would love to see wallrunning restored is the ability to maintain speed or change direction off vertical surfaces too. I appreciate that there would have to be restrictions but wallrunning and kick jumping in Mirror's Edge is also restricted and that is fine. The goal is really to give tools to players that make the basic things really fun all the time.
When a mistake doesn't have to be treated as one:
All of this may have been a mistake, but mistakes aren't always bad things. While watching the dev commentary on Waezone's HL2 speedrun, it occurred to me that engineers have brains that are wired to compulsively fix anything that is wrong or unintended. Well, I'm not an engineer. I'm a (pretty bad) musician so I have a different take. I spend a considerable amount of time and effort trying to stumble into that one happy accident and capture that perfect mistake before its lost forever. Accidents happen all the time, but happy accidents are really, really rare.
K-jumping and dodge boosting are the happiest accidents in Cyberpunk 2077. I never expected it to be as fun as it is. So many clip worthy moments, lost to nVidia Shadowplay fails, like tears. In rain.
Bring back k-jumping. As the dungeon master you have the power CDPR!