Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogyis hugely popular among long-time fans and newcomers alike, and was so successful that it even(briefly) revived the long-dormant platformer. But there’s one glaring problem that almost everyone has with the remake—the jumping. In a genre where the whole gimmickisjumping, that’s hardly ideal.
There’s been a lot of debate on why it feels so off, with some even arguing that it felt “broken”, but we might finally have an answer. As reported byGamesRadar+, Naughty Dog co-founder Andrew Gavin wrote an extensive breakdown onLinkedIndetailing where Vicarious (now Blizzard Albany) went wrong.
“The Game’s Fundamental Jumping Mechanic Feels Worse Than The 1996 Original”
“On the original PlayStation, we only had digital buttons - pressed or not pressed. No analog sticks,” Gavin explained. “Players needed different height jumps, but we only had binary input. Most games used the amateur solution: detect button press, trigger fixed-height jump. Terrible for platforming.”
Crash Bandicoot was different. “The game would detect when you pressed jump, start the animation, then continuously measure how long you held the button,” Gavin continued. “As Crash rose through the air, we’d subtly adjust gravity, duration, and force based on your input. Let go early = smaller hop. Hold it down = maximum height”.
When they remade Crash, they nailed the visuals. Looked great, faithful to the original, kept the spirit. Then they completely botched how jumping works.
For whatever reason, the remake altered how this system works. “They reverted to simple fixed jumps,” Gavin said. “Then realized Crash couldn’t make half the jumps in the game. Their solution was to make all jumps maximum height. Now every jump on the remake is huge and floaty. Those precise little hops between platforms are awkward. The game’s fundamental jumping mechanic feels worse than the 1996 original despite running on hardware that’s 1000x more powerful.”
Fans complained so much about the jumping that Activision’s editorial manager, Kevin Kelly, evenpenned a blog postshortly after launch to clear the air. “We spent a lot of time studying the three titles and chose the handling from Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped as our trilogy’s starting point; it represented the most improved and modern approach as it gives players the most control,” he explained. “In the end, we ended up tuning jump differently for each game, so that the jump metrics are the same as the originals.”
The only differences, he claimed, are that you fall quicker when you release the X button, which means that more precision is required in the first game. That doesn’t explain why jumping feels so “floaty”, though. But now we know; as Gavin said, you have less control over your jumps because they’re not nearly as precise, and as Kelly said, you fall faster. A wombo-combo that makes handling Crash a lot harder than in the PS1 days.
