any game that has a good slide gets it nerfed anyway (MW2019, apex legends, etc) because someone will find an actual mechanical skill that uses the slide to do something else and then when that gets nerfed to oblivion the slide becomes redundant and useless

or you have a game with genuinely insanely dope slide movement like krunker where you can get phoon level speed and keep it while doing sharp turns, but then the game dies because the developers treated it like a phone game for goo goo babies (which is how it made money)

i will never shittalk fps slides because slidehopping was the only thing that made titanfall 2 a tolerable game despite respawn's best efforts

they wanna be warframe

I think it's a broader reflection of how media is consumed today. Fast, short, high-dopamine hits.

Think about how stimulating cod is compared to 10 years ago. Constant action, addicting hitmakers, fast and constant slides.

Sliding is relatively easy, looks visually cool, and makes the player feel "faster" even if it's not. It's a short, quick dopamine hit. Endlessly repeatable.

For players that haven't experienced deep movement of a game like tf2, quake, etc sliding seems great. They're hooked on the fast feedback

I vented about this on Reddit so I'm just going to paste that here:

Over the past few years movement shooters have surged in popularity, which was exciting, but Ive found myself unhappy with how these games end up turning out. I'm going to be speaking very broadly and not all of these issues are going to apply to every recently released movement shooter.

1. Lack of mouse involvement in movement tech.

The mouse is a really interesting input device. It's extremely granular, precise, and moving it around has a very kinetic feel that separates it from buttons or analog sticks. I have boomery tastes in the sense that I prefer strafe jumping/bunnyhopping over sliding and wall running, but I'm certain I wouldn't feel that way if those sorts of mechanics involved more mouse usage. Sliding and wallrunning look cool and are way more intuitive to understand than bunnyhopping, but since that sort of movement is usually done by simply pressing a button at the right time, there really isn't any depth to the mechanic. I'd love to see a game where wall running requires you to move your mouse in a certain manner kinda like surfing in counter strike. I think it would be really cool if you could wall run or faster/longer as you get better at moving your mouse at the right rate against the wall. I like that more shooters are trying to implement more movement options, but I wish they were just a little deeper and rewarded you for practicing them and not just learning of their existence, and I think getting more mouse action involved would be the best way to facilitate that.

2. Assault rifles.

I think a lot of movement shooters shoot themselves in the foot by making the weapons heavily tracking oriented. Having lots of way to juke opponents feels way more impactful when you're using those techniques to throw off single shot weapons and projectiles. When I dodge someone's shot I feel great, but when my movement just makes somebody hit a lower percentage of their clip I honestly can't even really tell. Back to my first point, having more single fire weapons would also give designers more room to implement more mouse usage in movement tech as there would be time between shots for players to use their mouse for things besides aiming. One of the most underrated appreciated aspects of team fortress 2 is how good it feels to move your mouse to airstrafe away from a rocket only to immediately flick back onto the enemy to shoot them with your shotgun. There's a natural trade off between movement and aim that can be overcome with skill, which makes the aiming aspect of the game feel a lot more expressive than just holding your crosshair on the enemy for as long as possible.

The way crouch sliding was done in Quake 4 and later Quake Champions I really liked.

casual gamer now (i love being integral to shareholder investments) im a big fan of skate fast eat ass philosophy so whatever lets me do that is cool in my eyes HOWEVER if its something where i spend lots if my very rare free time for very small payout (ex. something where u do a sick movement then get owned by adam_mcfreakery_2006 who installed the game last night) id just rather not do it.

how this relates to sliding is if it fits the philosophy then tight, if not then its not a game id play that seriously, maybe just for a couple dopamine hits like prev. user mentioned. then go back tf2.

to add onto this

as a mechanic, sliding is a cancer in modern movement shooters.

the lack of mouse input required, completely destroys the viability of anything that isn't just spamming sliding/dolphin diving/whatever burst move option your game of choice has, why learn to airstrafe or ground dodge and aim when you can just hit one button and get the same burst movement without the tradeoff of having to move your mouse?

sliding in most games is designed to be a risky, committal movement option, and will force you into a long, laggy, clunky animation where your mouse movement is oftentimes restricted. as such, to get any value, you need to spam the shit out of it. this artificially reduces skill expression in 1v1s because of how linear your movement options are in and out of a slide, leading to a fights being dictated less by how good you are at dodging attacks and aiming, and more about how good you are at timing the game's animation engine. it feels like shit to play as and against, but its such an oppressively good option that you're forced to play in that way.

quakelikes on the other hand allow you to develop your own style of movement, it forces you to think about how you're moving, where you're moving, and why. you also have full control, requiring greater precision when aiming from both you and your opponent.

the unfortunate thing that isn't being mentioned, sliding feels really fucking good on console w/ aim assist, so it will continue to be shoehorned into every single fps game from now until the sun explodes.

wall jumps arent getting enough hate either, half of these new movement shooters just cram dat shit in too

slides themself are fine
its just that 99% of movementslop games that come out nowadays are just cheap titanfall clones with boring traversal-only movement that has 0 depth in combat
also they have instant cod ttk for some reason

Slides came about because these games want to have “realistic” ADS-style gunplay, which is pretty incompatible with movement. Sprinting, jumping, climbing, pretty much doing anything gives huge accuracy penalties to your gun, and ADS literally slows you down so you can shoot straight. The solution they came up with was sliding so that you can actually move fast AND shoot straight for a short period of time

TF2 and other quake-style games avoid this problem entirely by just letting you truly run and gun

Some of the lack of variety in movement-shooters is also probably due to how consoles rule the video game market and the need to make games that work with their input methods (controllers). Things like air strafing and rocket jumping don't really work when using a controller.

This leads to less skill-expressive movements like "press x to rocket jump", slides and wall-strafes that have less depth than games designed primarily for mouse and keyboard.

I think new input methods may well lead to more creative and higher skill ceiling FPS movement design.

the fucked up thing is modern controllers are fully capable of competently playing fps games with gyro input but controller players are whiny little babies who refuse to have the game not aim for them to compensate for their ridiculous fake controls, and devs are too cowardly to force them to actually play the game themselves

still, even pc-exclusive "movement shooters" are largely really bad due to the lack of camera movement based techniques other people already mentioned. without involving the mouse, the only thing a keyboard and mouse input based game can ever test the player on is timing of inputs, as soon as you involve the mouse everything becomes so much more granular and engaging

i dont play other games with slides, sprint etc etc but apex does source movement very well, very in depth, lots of engine manipulations to do things like mantlejumps, or advanced lurches etc etc.

as for things like sliding in any direction, you can easily accomplish this in apex by transferring your momentum with redirects, lurches, etc. apex has very fluid, almost combo like movement, similar to something your would see in other janky ass movement games like tf2, quake, melee, etc etc.

I highly recommend checking out the apex movement wiki to learn more about apex's movement if you are fan of the classic, arena shooter style of WASD movement. apex absolutely shows it's source engine roots.

there are many valid criticisms of apex (EA is horribly greedy, awful micro transactions/in game items, the fact that its a battle royal and much more) but the movement is fantastic and largely the exception to a point i would otherwise largely agree with.