I was really excited to see the newest changes come into play for Rocket Jumping. This is my thing, it’s what Tower Unite is to me. I have 4000 hours in the game, and 3500 of them were rocket jumping. It got me through good and bad times, it got me through multiple shows and albums. I suffer from ADHD and often times rocket jumping is the perfect thing to do with my hands. I have a very strong feeling for rocket jumping, inside and out.
However, the recent changes utterly neutered rocket jumping. it’s not fun. It’s not fast. It’s awkward. Everything that made rocket jumping fun is gone. You can no longer perform sync jumps, you actually can’t even fall into an explosion and jump from it as you used to. The rocket is very keen on sending you straight up, and the aiming is WAY too strict.
The older iteration of rocket jumping was loose, freeform, and by a long shot the best mobility option in the game once you got the gist of it. It allowed me to genuinely feel like I could fulfill the dream of flight because with enough fiddling, 3000 hours of fiddling to be exact, I could basically be anywhere I wanted to be in seconds. Because the explosion is so focused on sending you upwards, all horizontal mobility is nuked. Jumps I use to end off a chain of horizontal speed gaining with some extra vertical mobility are now not possible, as it feels like it’s SO vertically centric that horizontal mobility is killed.
It’s genuinely heartbreaking to see my favourite mechanic butchered like this. While I see some people are praising it for it now being more similar to TF2’s rocket jumping, I loved Tower Unite because it wasn’t that at all. It was a surprisingly intricate mechanic that was wild, free and fluid. Perhaps I just have to re-adapt, but even if I did I just don’t think it can compare to the way things used to be with these elements removed.
My precise request is another rework of blast jumping. I think it was drastically changed a bit haphazardly, and while I reckon the ability to land into explosions and gain jumps from them was a netlag thing, I would really like to see it implemented, as well as the return to its focus on horizontal mobility to make it the blisteringly fast movement option it used to be.
Part of my issue with it is that the blast radius is so small that you can’t really shoot it far enough away from you to get a longer-distance-less-height jump. It seems like the only way I can manage to get good distance with a jump now is to shoot directly against a wall, but even that will launch me straight down sometimes.
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While I believe this is a temporary side effect of getting adjusted to the new prediction, I will still be looking into the differences. I rocket jump a lot myself.
After experimenting more with the new rocket jumping, I have pinned down pretty precisely what I am not a fan of (either that or I just want to articulate it a little better)
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It appears to be impossible to do a short hop while already blasted in the air. I used to carry myself forward by pogoing straight ahead, however it is not only very difficult to aim the rocket for right in front of you, when you do land it, it will send you very high up. Means of manipulating your height were already present, such as firing at a more upward-friendly angle and turning back around or using the umbrella, so I would say the presence of short hops are integral to allow us to more easily decide how we want to move.
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Although I recognize again that sync jumps/landing into explosions was a result of netlag, I would love to see it return as an intended mechanic. There was often a second post explosion where you could still blast off of it, and I always liked trying to time sync jumps with it and have even tried to lab out how many rockets could be crammed into one jump.
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There is simply no room for building speed. I have figured out that to maintain speed, I need to continuously hit behind me lest I want to be blasted up straight into the air. This is a tedious motion that I used to only have to do a couple times to accelerate, but could keep it just fine by pogoing.
I’ll likely have to fiddle more with it myself as I do recognize that sudden drastic change will inevitably make me anxious, I do believe that I know this mechanic decently enough to understand what just doesn’t feel good (not to say I know more than you, of course. It’s super comforting to know the lead dev also enjoys rocket jumping). Personally, again as there are means of controlling height, I think maintaining priority on horizontal momentum would be preferable, at least I believe so.
P.S I realize that I was on the defensive due to how close this mechanic is to me, though I don’t want to undermine the work you have done for this update at large. It was really cool seeing all those updates over the past week or so, thank you for your work on the game
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