This is sorta on topic with the horrible jumping the op mentioned, and it's bugged me for quite a while.

Can anyone explain the logic behind the game design decision to make it impossible to jump while sprinting to jump further?

I get that, but I get the feeling that they changed some things about this game after the experience of Oblivion. I'm not sure I agree that spell creation should have been removed, but then I do know that people were certainly creating some overpowered spells - and then they almost assuredly complained that the game was "too easy". Same thing with jumping. Not only was it a pain in the ass to level - the only feasible way to level it was simply running from city to city, instead of fast traveling, and jumping the whole way - but if you can jump over people's heads, then how is the AI gonna manage to do anything with that? I think the idea was "let's remove the ability to do some ridiculous, one-note things, and people will likely enjoy the game more".

Every game has to have some structure, some things that just won't work, because if any and all tactics work, then you've sort of moved into a place where the player is guaranteed to win. Part of the fun of learning how to play a game is to learn what works and what doesn't - which means that some tactics just have to not work out.

I'm gonna guess they just couldn't get it to work well in an animation sense - but I don't really get the sense that we can't jump far enough as it is.

Oh and @ OP's issue;
Problem is all of the objects/NPCs have that invisible magical box that surrounds them, and sometimes it is just silly how big that box can be, but that is what you know. On my assassin mage I tried to cast spell at the opponent from the corner of some wall or something, and I was at least 12-15 inches from the corner and yet it just got blasted in front of my face, hitting the invisible box. Or sometimes I get stuck just by walking next to the wall and running into some barrel or something. I get stuck and it takes me 10 seconds to get out by jumping or crouching. Texture problem is a really mood killer sometimes, I agree with that.
I also mind when random NPCs are walking in the middle of my path, running into me and just pushing me away, doesn't make a difference if it is guard or some kid, textures and structure of it is just ment to be that way. It is annoying.
Sometimes crouching/sneaking mode helps to get out of it, but it takes too much time or effort in crucial situations in the middle of combat. Yes this should be fixed, but it is surely more difficult then it seems to us I suppose, otherwise it would be done already I guess.

I don't think games should ever remove gameplay mechanics that their predecessors had unless it fits into the game's story. I wouldn't mind seeing Shouts return in TESVI, because while kinda gimmicky, they were a fun gimmick. But I'm not gonna throw a fit if they decide to remove them because we aren't the Dovahkiin anymore, so Shouting would be much harder to incorporate into the game (though not impossible).

Refining and improving is one thing, gutting and removing is another thing altogether. If Bethesda is really just axing things because it's easier than thinking critically and figuring out a way to improve the mechanic, than I guess the next game won't have Smithing, Enchanting, Alchemy, or Sneaking, since I see people constantly bringing up how "OP" these skills are.


I personally find the length of the jumps to be terrible. I don't want to jump off a cliff face fleeing for my life from Forsworn to die because I only went 6 inches forward with my jump and landed on the jags directly below me rather than the river I was trying to jumping into. Also, increasing the length of our jumps could allow them to make dungeons/walkways/whathaveyou more complex, so that we have to put more thought into navigation than just following the steps.

Exactly so. Very well said. Better than my attempt in fact. The physics box. We've surely all been there and had things like this happen. I know I've had perfect shots lined up and the arrow bounces, off of thin air, alerting the enemy instead of killing him. Now I think we're all on the same page.

Not all gameplay mechanics are good ones. Jumping all over the place is a little absurd. I also don't think that a mechanic being in game A means it's supposed to be in game B. If something's stupid, cut it out.

...Which makes absolutely no sense given that they haven't made jumping (again something that is taken for granted in video games and is, you know, actually realistic) useless, they've removed it completely aside from a very basic function. If they've programmed the function in to begin with, it's clearly to sere some function; It's the only way up a mountain, but that seems to be a physics glitch, and it's a way to clear obstacles quickly, which... It is utterly useless for because of a BLATANT glitch. Not a feature. If you're gonna argue that standing too close to something when you jump making it so you only jump a couple of inches is intentional, I'm going to laugh at you.

Similarly, nothing else in the game has this supposed "gimp," because TES is and always has been a game where you are supposed to be able to do anything to become the hero. This is why it makes sense for athletics as a skill, but not as a speed attribute, to be scrapped. It was useless and just got better slowly as you levelled up. I agree that's stupid. (Acrobatics actually rose fastest by taking risks and surviving falls, especially in the Oblivion realms, so arguing "I decided to level it by grinding constantly so that is the only way" is fallacy). But smithing makes you capable of making weapons that overpower almost anything in the game. Enchanting can make you virtually invincible and equally overpowered. Alchemy, same deal. Illusion lets you control any enemy with the right perks, eliminating challenge. Conjuration means you don't even have to participate in your fights. And so on for each skill; By the time you master it it is extremely powerful and you have but a few weaknesses, even "strange" and almost completely noncombat ones like pickpocketing.

Acrobatics is not only no longer a skill at all, but the small feature left in for it is horribly glitched. At least sprinting, the new incarnation of athletics, has some use, some way to improve it and some METHOD.

But, no, clearly Bethesda made jumping glitchy intentionally because they arbitrarily decided they would spite would-be acrobats because this is a game where you have to be a nord sword-and-board warrior that uses shouts and never jumps, or you are wrong wrong wrong.

Being able to leap all over the place might be a little absurd, but being able to improve your movement speed and jumping ability isn't. It sounds like your discrediting not the mechanic itself, but the execution of it in previous games. That's where refinement comes into play. Rather than just removing it, they should have found a way that you could still get around quicker/better without being able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound or outrun Barry Allen in a foot race.

You say that being able to jump all over the place is little absurd, but I think it's incredibly absurd that my nimble Khajiit assassin and an Orc berserker are only differentiated in terms of movement speed and jumping ability by their difference in height.

"I am used to wearing my heavy armour, so I can run faster than any Bosmer." Good stuff. Of course sprinting makes you move at a reasonably high speed and has other benefits combined with certain skills (it's pretty overpowered with Block), and increasing stamina means you can do it for longer. I wouldn't mind racial bonuses or something, but that's a relatively small gripe.

I'm not saying that the jumping in the game is perfect, I'm saying that it isn't meant to be some sort of combat style where you jump over people's heads or whatever.


Small improvements might well have been programmed in, but I guess they didn't really figure it mattered that much. What's the point of a minor, small increase in running speed or jumping ability? No game can do everything well, so any attempt to have a game where "anything" can work is just bound to fail. In Oblivion it failed by having people do ridiculous things with Acrobatics and spell creation. So they removed those aspects, so that they could concentrate on other parts of the game a little better. Cities being cells is necessary for memory management, at least for consoles and lower-end PCs I suppose, and so they had a choice to make: either remove acrobatic ability so that people couldn't jump over city walls just like they removed the levitate spell - or else have REEEEALLY high walls to all the cities, making them feel isolated from the world around them.