Realistic Water Reflections

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I love how so many suggestions are coming directly from GW2 all of a sudden lol.

Anyway... On topic... "realistic" reflective water is something that's been done by many games (MMO or otherwise) for a while now, and it doesn't "require" swimming to make it work or look good.

Right now, FFXIV is sorta "faking it" with something called cube-maps or reflection-maps, along with animated normal maps to simulate waves flowing across the surface. It's a total graphical short-cut, but usually does the job well enough, giving the sense of real reflections while maintaining better performance. Altana knows, FFXIV's current engine needs all the performance tweaks it can get lol.

Then you'll often see varying degrees of reflection detail in two different categories, one being reflection resolution (how sharp or blurry the reflections are) and the other being how much of the environment is reflected.. e.g. Sky Only; Sky and Scenery; Sky, Scenery and Characters, etc.

Some games present another option, such as reflection update frequency. EQ2 does this. You can have it update every frame (which is the most realistic, but slowest), or update every Nth frame so it's not as realistic, but with better performance, or "Once Only" which is exactly what it sounds like. It takes an initial "picture" of the environment, applies that as the environment/reflection map, and that's it. It looks really bad, though, because as you're running around, the reflection never updates in the water.

Point is, there's a number of ways SE can go with this, to varying levels of detail.
In all, though, they can implement all that well before, and even without swimming implemented. One does not require the other.

I agree, though, it would be nice to have more realistic water in the game. My favorite water so far is between Age of Conan and Lord of The Rings Online.