Fans reckon they've worked out why jumping is harder in Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy
Wump Around.
Crash Bandicoot fans think they have worked out why jumping feels harder in the new remaster.
Since the exceptionally popular launch of Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy on Friday, some fans have complained that jumping feels off for both playable characters Crash and Coco. Jumps seem trickier and slipping off edges appears to be more likely. Finally, we may have an explanation.
Redditor Tasty Carcass believes the N.Sane Trilogy uses "pill shaped" collision boxes for Crash and Coco's feet. In other words, rather than being flat they are rounded so can easily slip off edges.
"This shape is used as the default for the Unity engine and some other engines," he explained. "It means that rather than falling off things, you sort of slide down them a bit first, even if it's a flat plane."
The positive aspect of this is you can extend Crash's jump, if you learn to harness this feature. Jumping while sliding off an edge, at just the right time, allows you to get farther as can be seen in Tasty Carcass's video below.
However, the big issue is it means you are likely to die if you just barely land on the edge of something. Not ideal. (Eurogamer has asked Activision for comment.)
Twitch streamer DingDongVG created a video providing a visual demonstration of the problem. From the footage, it seems Crash's jumping arc is sped up, meaning he lands just slightly quicker than in the original, and it appears he is sliding off the edge of surfaces.
This would certainly explain why the game seems harder now, especially for levels that require carefully timed jumps, but perhaps we just aren't as good as we were before.
It's worth noting developer Vicarious Visions had to rebuild the game from scratch as all the source code and reference material from the original was nowhere to be found. You can read more about the studio's journey in this article by Ars Technica.