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No Swimming in MMO's anymore
Zandil
Member UncommonPosts: 252
So I was wondering the other day more and more new MMO's don't add swimming into there games, since WoW I have seen very few with it anymore.
So I was wondering ( Why ? ) is it the game engine ? the cost and time to put it in game ? or do Devs just think it's pointless nowdays ?
Comments
Underwater combat is disorienting, as mobs can be above or below you or whatever. It's kind of like trying to have combat while flying around arbitrarily in 3D, which is also pretty rare in MMORPGs. That's why the Lemuria zone in Champions Online is basically deserted, for example.
And if a mostly combat game isn't going to have combat while swimming, then why have swimming?
Hard to implement without it showing how cheesy a game is, as quiz said with the on top, below thing, just shows how lackluster many MMORPGs combat system is! If they implement proper physics, not just static animations, then underwater would look proper. Until then they avoid it like the plague.
I do miss it. The feeling of panic you get when deep or in tight underwater tunnels and running low on air. And in EQ there were sunken temples that had pockets of air once you entered with areas to explore and fight. Would be nice to see that again. Also with some more life to the water...various fish species, etc. Make it interesting.
In the case of SWTOR, I believe there is no swimming because of their poor choice of the early conpleted Hero engine. It seems just not able to handle much of anything and starts having problems with more bodies it has to draw. With them working on the engine for five years before release, I just feel that they will never be able to fix it so they can have swimming or large PvP type battles.
The Rift and may be Age of Wusuh are the only recent mmos whos game engines can handle swimming.
Guild Wars 2 has amazing underwater areas, can spend literally hours in some of the underwater spaces/zones, its pretty new also.
Basically some people do not like having to survive in a full 3d environment, so to alot of the players its too challenging. Course there are some bugs with the underwater areas, like invulnerable mobs.
Lolipops !
I disagree. Action combat has never been a major factor in this genre of gaming, but swimming has been in for generations.
as the poster above me has stated, the developers resource is to blame. Take Rift for example. It had swimming, but notice how small vanilla rift world is, for a well polished AAA MMO. That's because ever since WoW, developers have been putting more and more resources into graphics, which has been the only area that new aged MMO have been able to beat WoW in. That means less and less resources to go into gameplay, so features get cut. Remember how Warhammer had no dancing? Features get cut when resources run thin.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
I kind of agree with what Quizzical said. However, if devs are not going to code swiming and underwater combat then they should not add any kind of water (ocean, lakes, rivers, etc) in the game. Look at how great the underwater life and mechanics are in GW2. Even Perfect World and WoW have really nice underwater swimming but not as good as GW2 in my opinion. Look at TERA, gorgeous world and water and the swiming is a joke. Swtor doesnt even have access to deep water, everything is knee-high ponds which sux.
Like i said, if there will be no underwater life and swimming, please dont waste time designing water, but keep in mind that the game will feel it lacks something when you step out in a jungle area without a river to jump to, or a port city without sea and empty bridges, and no fishing.
GW2 swimming combat isn't new. It's actually the same combat as in WoW and Rift. It's just that the game has limited action bar which switches when underwater, which gives the illusion of it being different, but in reality it isn't. It's the same. 3D combat.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
From a game engine perspective, if you've got access to the source code of your engine, then you can make it do whatever you want. If you've got a budget in the tens of millions of dollars and don't have access to modify the source code of your engine arbitrariliy (whether you created your own or licensed some other), then you're doing it wrong. I'm not aware of any would-be AAA games that have made that mistake, though.
Drawing water and making it look good is really hard, though. If you want to make animations underwater different from animations above water, that's cost++; Trying to make the new animations make it look obvious that you're underwater is also hard.
And then there's the problem that most people simply don't have good intuition about what being underwater "should" be like.
Some games do still have swimming, and you can do it if you make it into a priority. But swimming simply doesn't make sense in some games. And if you're going to implement it badly just so that you can check off a box of another feature that your game kind of has, you're better off skipping it. Actually, that's true of just about any feature, not just swimming.
it is not new, but its far more complete and polished than Rifts and maybe not as polished as WoWs but definitelly more fun because you have more fluid combat underwater without killing the mechanics (and the sense) of being underwater
WAC has swimming :-) But only to cross water with annoyance aggro on the way.
Ditto on earlier comments that large scale underwater areas are disorienting. I like the underwater caves / dungeons with a bit of swimming, but several hours of non-stop swimming gets old fast.
How did it work out in GW2? If I remember it was supposed to have a large underwater area. Haven't heard if players liked it or not.
Could you please point out where i said it was new or different ?
Cause i cant find that.
Lolipops !
If we had ships and navel combat we wouldn't need no cheap ass swimming. Never once did I have the urge to swim in UO...but I did love me some ships.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
I've seen vid of modern engines using shader fx to produce under water caustics (is that the right word?). Pretty amazing stuff when done properly.
very well executed. You can get easily overwhelmed by some anphibious creatures if you are reckless but its really well done. It is not perfect but its probably the best one around, even better than the ones in sub based mmos (to my experience)
With friggin laser beams on their heads. *grin*
i think having more skills would be fine to raise the limit you are refering to, but mirroring the surface build would actually kill the sense of being underwater in combat. As it is now it tries to simulate the mechanics a real person would attempt if trying to fight underwater with the weapons provided (of course im not talking about the skills lol, but the movements). ALso having underwater weapons feels actually more fun and even realistic. I cant see how a ranger build would work underwater with a bow when they are trying to simulate realistic mechanics underwater with a harpoon. Just my opinion.
It isn't needed.
It isn't realistic in any way. It is a pain to fight under water. It is a pain to program. There are other areas of development which could benefit from the time and resources it would take to implement a proper under water mechanic.
Just my 2c