Climbing & Swimming

[Ditto]

The trouble with swimming, is that you have to pretty much arbitrarily designate areas you CAN'T swim to. A lot of the zones border oceans or large lakes. In theory, you should be able to keep swimming for hours, because these bodies of water are freaking big. Exploring areas like that would either be pointless, frustrating, or both - not to mention that if SE actually rendered these huge ocean areas, that'd be a whole lot of wasted resources.

So, SE would need to create boundaries to keep people from swimming too far. How would this be done? You could arbitrarily set invisible walls, but that is immersion-breaking. Boundaries on land can be excused by setting up steep cliffs or chasms (my character won't go further because it's too steep to climb!), but that's tougher to do in the water (my character can't go further because... well... the water is really, really hard for some reason!).

I'm honestly tired of seeing people use the words "Immersion breaking" as excuses for things.

Because the current invisible walls everywhere are not, right? Whats even more immersion breaking is how you cannot go beyond ankle deep water. I, and I'm sure many, would much rather have invisible walls placed to create limits in large bodies of water, as long as you could swim in them, than have them gate anything that's beyond ankle deep.

[LineageRazor]

Because the current invisible walls everywhere are not, right?

I never said, or even implied that. The current invisible walls ARE obnoxious. I'm annoyed every time I run into one. Fortunately, though, they are rare and hard to run into during normal gameplay. It's unusual in this game that your progress is blocked by something you could easily jump over or by a slope that you could normally scale. Usually a blockage is clearly a wall or sheer cliff, or deep chasm with no visible bottom, where it makes sense that your character would not proceed further. Invisible walls in the water would not be rare or hard to run into. They'd be all over the place.

A game needs to be built from the ground up to accomodate something like swimming or flight. WoW was. This game clearly was not. It's not something you can easily shoehorn in later with any kind of grace. I expect folks who are excited about the upcoming "flying mounts" to be sorely disappointed - they will either be restricted to very limited areas, or available in all areas but restricted in other ways.

Swimming, if ever added, will likely be similar. Maybe there will be dungeons where swimming is a mechanic, but I will be highly surprised if players will ever be able to dive off the coast of Costa Del Sol for some fun in the sun.

My expectations, both for the upcoming flying mounts and the hinted swimming, are pretty much in the gutter. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised with something of actual substance, but true flying mounts and free swimming would require an overhaul of the game as radical as the change from original release to ARR. I'm pretty sure that's something SE would never contemplate - at least, not for the simple reason that some players wanna swim and fly freely. If SE DOES introduce true flying mounts, then my expectations for swimming will likely do a 180. We'll find out next year!

[MageBlack]

-snip-

Immersion solved by permadeath from drowning, falling, or being swept out to sea. But fireballs, magical teleports, elves, and talking animals are ok, just don't put an invisible barrier in a video game cause its never happened before.

Here's a game for you!