K-Hop was honestly the best unintentional bug

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Karisnikov dodge speed was honestly a good in game bug. To bad people where using it for exploitation. Would like to see some sort of ability brought back. Since some hostile npc's can Dodge your bullets. RIP dodge jump best parkour feature in the game
 
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!
 
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Crudeo

Forum regular
I loved this "feature" before it was removed.

It is a single player game and having it in it doesn't ruin the game.

It requires some skill in timing and I see it as a skill expression of a veteran player who knows a bit more of the games mechanic.

With the existence of mods, that lets you use no_clip i don't see any obvious reason to restrict the increased mobility the feature offered in the past.

It was a fun way to travel through Night City and explore, especially because we probably never will get flying cars or other modes of transportation.
 
I get your point but I don't think it's coming back.

It's a bug and a pretty well known one and was constantly used to dismiss the game as a bug ridden fest.
 
It's a bug and a pretty well known one and was constantly used to dismiss the game as a bug ridden fest.

I can't say I've ever seen k-jumping/dodge jumping used to dismiss the game as a bugfest. Now T-Posing, cars piling up forever and enemies standing around doing nothing? Yeah, definitely. Those are the accidental bugs that David Speyrer was referring to. The kind of bugs that you don't discover and have fun with. You just experience them and you wish you didn't.
 
I can't say I've ever seen k-jumping/dodge jumping used to dismiss the game as a bugfest. Now T-Posing, cars piling up forever and enemies standing around doing nothing? Yeah, definitely. Those are the accidental bugs that David Speyrer was referring to. The kind of bugs that you don't discover and have fun with. You just experience them and you wish you didn't.

The fact that it's not a negative bug doesn't detract from the fact it's a bug and I've seen it used as confirmation this game is just filled with bugs and poorly developed/designed plenty of times both here and elsewhere.

Point being - you don't re-introduce a bug into your game who's entire reputation is that of a bug filled mess while trying to get rid of said reputation. If the demand is strong enough you might see it re-introduced in a more controlled way as cyberware that fits the world and lore. It definitely won't let you cross the city at warp speed though.
 
The fact that it's not a negative bug doesn't detract from the fact it's a bug and I've seen it used as confirmation this game is just filled with bugs and poorly developed/designed plenty of times both here and elsewhere.

Point being - you don't re-introduce a bug into your game who's entire reputation is that of a bug filled mess while trying to get rid of said reputation. If the demand is strong enough you might see it re-introduced in a more controlled way as cyberware that fits the world and lore. It definitely won't let you cross the city at warp speed though.
The whole point of making the distinction between positive and negative effects when it comes to bugs is that if given the opportunity, a programmer will tend to engineer the fun out of their own game. Its worth watching that HL2 speedrun because HL2's lifespan was greatly extended as a result of the developers consciously deciding not to fix the bugs that allow Waezone to do incredible things. The developers talk about what they could have done at length - painting everything out of bounds with kill brushes so you die instantly if you clip out of the environment. Fixing physics props so you can't walk on top of them or use them to clip through collision meshes. Making the toxic waste puddles kill the player.

They also talk about the initial design concept for HL2 to have fully simulated player movement and they talk about an early playtest where they did this but the playtesters would walk into a wall and instantly die because of how fast Gordon accelerates from stationary when using WSAD keys. All of this is unintentional but if you oversimplify it and treat solely as problems that must be fixed, you end up with a game that isn't fun to play. Thats why they didn't fix them and the game is better because they chose not to.

I'm going to have to ask for just one example where someone trashes on the game because of k-jumping. This is the complete opposite of my experience. I post on r/cyberpunkgame which has been effectively brigaded for the past 4 months by people finding their way to the sub via r/all from places like r/gaming and r/cringetopia. They come to meme on the game and laugh at the bugs and its not a good look at all. Yet even in a place as hostile as this, I can still post about this issue and get upvoted 168 times: Pokiehat comments on Patch 1.2 — list of changes (reddit.com)

This is in response to a parent comment lamenting the loss of k-jumping with over 1800 upvotes. It seems there is quite a positive reaction to having this fix reverted from the most negative corner of the playerbase.
 
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I'm going to have to ask for just one example where someone trashes on the game because of k-jumping.

You're making one simple mistake - that I care about proving you wrong.

I don't.

I will not waste my time scouring the forum, or the internet in general, to provide you with a single example. If you want to go looking, go ahead, you will find one. I didn't bookmark them and I have better things to do.

Thing is, why would you? Or I? It wouldn't change anything. The simple fact is you liked k-hopping. Whether there is a single person who shat on the game because of it or a billion won't change that and that is entirely fine. Regardless of how many are happy that it's gone, you'd still be unhappy that it is and would still want to see it re-introduced.

I gave you my opinion on why I don't see it being re-introduced - at least not in it's previous form. You are free to disagree with my opinion on the matter.
 
Ok so your opinion counts for nothing because its not based on anything real. Gotcha. You can't be bothered to substantiate your claim that k-jumping was "constantly used to dismiss the game as a bug ridden fest" but you can be bothered to weigh in on the subject? Seriously?

Don't bother with the second part. I already read through all of the comments in the reddit thread I linked and there isn't a single person using k-jumping to dismiss the game as a bug fest.
 
Regardless of how many are happy that it's gone, you'd still be unhappy that it is and would still want to see it re-introduced.
why should anybody be happy that its gone???... if u didnt like it pre patch u just didnt have to use it lol... - for those who like pakouring it was a great tool to explore the map. i can understand that people are missing it but cant understand that people are happy about it beeing fixed - cause there is no logic in last claim at all... - the only thing i can imagen why they patched it because they dont want us to find more unfinished or left over areas on the map. yet do u have another approach on this?
 
why should anybody be happy that its gone???
Way to miss the point.

Look, if you guys want to start an argument over something as trivial, be my guess. I won't participate. My posts were merely one man's opinion on why I don't see it coming back in it's previous form. Not to start an argument on it's merits, how many people like it or whatever else you might think of.

I don't care about the argument or k-hopping either way. Bottom line - CDPR removed it so obviously they don't want it in and their opinion is the only one with any weight in the matter.
 
so people dont have the right to talk about it? like the loss of random slots on gear and the save scumming with it? they removed and brought it back because people had a lot of discussions about it. [...]
 
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Please don't get this thread locked :(

I busted my ass writing that wall of text OP and collecting all the videos for it. 1.2 deployed so soon after the patch notes got published that I didn't have time to get good footage of the climbing/jump tricks and just like that, k-jumping was gone. At the end of the day, I just want to hear what other people think of the whole thing and get the topic some visibility so the devs have an opportunity to reconsider. We play games to have fun and k-jumping was a lot of fun. I didn't mean to get off on the wrong footing.
 
I appreciate your work with this thread and feel sorry for talking right out of my heart - wasn't meant to get you into trouble or mods to close this one - cause im pretty much on the "bring it back - it was super fun" side.
 
I loaded up cyberpunk for the first time in a while. All I wanted to do was run and jump around. Honestly jumping from building to building or across the river was so much fun. Please bring k-hopping back. I know the developers don't wanna hear this but I didn't wanna play the game without it.
 
I think everyone needs to keep in mind that there's a strong sense this game is going to go online and be multiplayer in the future, even as distant as that future may be.

In my opinion, having these kinds of bugged mechanics in an online game will take away from the spirit of the game as a whole. Additionally, that sort of "mechanic" feels like it would be even more immersion breaking, which is something the majority of players say they want (more immersive content).

This is a fictional game (obviously) and they've given us the ability to augment our bodies to double-jump and super jump, not leap a mile or two as that would likely be considered crossing the line.
 
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