Guild Wars 2

Ever since GW2 been released, every update, skill balance, living world content release and so on Anet seems to have forgotten the game has underwater gameplay.

Either they have forgotten or just ignoring it as if they don’t care since (I may be wrong) no update like skill balancing ever includes underwater skills or features.

I enjoy the underwater gameplay but to me personally it seems to be just a half finished idea. They built it into the base game then just walk away from it. It was like as Anet was designing the game someone said “Hey wouldn’t it be cool to have game play that was underwater?” everyone was like “yeah lets do it!”. Then after the game was released they thought “how do we include this feature in future updates like the living world releases?” and everyone just said “um, lets pretend it’s not there and maybe all the players will just forget about it.”

At this point and many players in-game agrees the underwater gameplay and combat needs to be completely overhauled. Maybe in the future (more like the far distant future) Anet can actually go back and give this forgotten feature some attention and evolve it along with the rest of the game.

There is a need for the ability to switch and keep builds specifically for underwater gameplay. What I think needs to happen is they need to make a separate build choice on gear for underwater gameplay build stats, they need to make it so we can switch to that build automatically when swimming (because we do switch some gear) or they need the ability to setup gear with underwater stats even if they are different from land stats.

Unless there is a living story specifically focused on underwater story,
don’t expect much changes to be updated for it.

Snowmoon.1758:

Unless there is a living story specifically focused on underwater story,
don’t expect much changes to be updated for it.

Would love to see a living story take us underwater. I fear it won’t happen though because they don’t even acknowledge underwater anymore. Pre-Launch though, they were all about advertising it and showing off how great it would be, then it wasn’t received as well as they would have liked so they just decided to stop trying it seems.

I get the feeling that pretty much everyone would like to forget that underwater combat exists.

No one enjoys having half of their already small selection of skills locked out. No one enjoys being shafted into specific weapons with no choices. Few people enjoy meleeing targets in an underwater environment; the z-axis makes things difficult. And no one enjoys the fact that enemies clip through freaking walls, making them impossible to hit until they happen to come back to you.

The last one in particular should have been patched out before release. Instead, we have underwater combat that feels like an alpha-product.

Come on, let’s get some ascended underwater headgear crafting up already!

Underwater wasn’t really for everyone. Since ANet removed the PvP map with water combat the expectation was that they’d be reworking it… doubtful. Maybe when we’re fighting Bubbles?

Invictus.1503:

Snowmoon.1758:

Unless there is a living story specifically focused on underwater story,
don’t expect much changes to be updated for it.

Would love to see a living story take us underwater. I fear it won’t happen though because they don’t even acknowledge underwater anymore. Pre-Launch though, they were all about advertising it and showing off how great it would be, then it wasn’t received as well as they would have liked so they just decided to stop trying it seems.

It wasn’t well received because to me it’s half finished & broken and was just a novelty idea at best with no real purpose towards the game as a whole. Anet added it into the base game then had no idea what to do with it and ran away from it. It’s like if they forget about it and never acknowledge it the players will forget about also.

Snowmoon.1758:

Unless there is a living story specifically focused on underwater story,
don’t expect much changes to be updated for it.

There is hope yet, for Bubbles awaits us in his deep-sea lair.

Underwater content is probably the thing the devs regret most in the making of GW2. It is unbalanced, unworkable, difficult to design and frustrates players.

Anet is systematically removing all underwater content from the game, and I am 100% certain they will not bring the LS underwater.

WvW underwater fighting: REMOVED
sPvP underwater map: REMOVED
LS S1: tower of nightmares: water REMOVED

The dehydration of tyria is underway and the devs will not stop until it is wiped clean of water.

Additional note: The last 3-4 BL weapon sets have not included underwater weapons. They are even phasing out the weapons.

An underwater expansion was one of the first things they hinted at by showing “bubbles” in the trailer. The underwater area is hinted at in-game by the Largos as a place you are not yet ready for and it’s where the Largos, Quaggan, Krait, Karka and the deep sea dragon story is.

Assuming they do eventually add it, it is one of the elder dragons after all, it will likely take place entirely under water. This is when they’ll do all the underwater updates. Since there are many area they can expand on however, and at the current rate, it could take years or never even happen.

Anet is so happy with their underwater battle and how satisfying it is to endure that they felt it necessary to remove the only PvP map that included it.

:)

joshc.3129:

Ever since GW2 been released, every update, skill balance, living world content release and so on Anet seems to have forgotten the game has underwater gameplay.

Either they have forgotten or just ignoring it as if they don’t care since (I may be wrong) no update like skill balancing ever includes underwater skills or features.

I enjoy the underwater gameplay but to me personally it seems to be just a half finished idea. They built it into the base game then just walk away from it. It was like as Anet was designing the game someone said “Hey wouldn’t it be cool to have game play that was underwater?” everyone was like “yeah lets do it!”. Then after the game was released they thought “how do we include this feature in future updates like the living world releases?” and everyone just said “um, lets pretend it’s not there and maybe all the players will just forget about it.”

At this point and many players in-game agrees the underwater gameplay and combat needs to be completely overhauled. Maybe in the future (more like the far distant future) Anet can actually go back and give this forgotten feature some attention and evolve it along with the rest of the game.

“It needed the players to be more “advanced” in the understanding of the game, so they considered not to focus in it, since is beyond of the normal player skill level".

Personally i loved underwater combat, and i am really good at it. However, beyond it been in necesity of a overhaul, the reason most people wasnt good at it (witch was a down point in their experience) is as mentionated in an above post, the z axis.

Considering the level of skills required for the game and the consequent and factual population level skills, underwater combat was too difficult for most of the players.

Anet recently recognised that in a interview, and explained that it needed the players to be more “advanced” in the understanding of the game, so they considered not to focus in it, since is beyond of the normal player skill level.

That answer your question and the why. In my opinion, as hinted above:
Population skills (not individual skills) are determined for the skill level required in the game and the game ability to teachs its mechanics.

This means that with more “teaching” content and a slowly increasing difficulty curve, underwater combat will be a option. Hopefully this is alredy on work with LS2.

Healix.5819:

An underwater expansion was one of the first things they hinted at by showing “bubbles” in the trailer. The underwater area is hinted at in-game by the Largos as a place you are not yet ready for and it’s where the Largos, Quaggan, Krait, Karka and the deep sea dragon story is.

Assuming they do eventually add it, it is one of the elder dragons after all, it will likely take place entirely under water. This is when they’ll do all the underwater updates. Since there are many area they can expand on however, and at the current rate, it could take years or never even happen.

Really? Which trailer are you talking about?

Otherwise I actually liked the underwatercombat, though so far it`s implementation was a bit lackluster.

I would enjoy it if they come back there, maybe polish it up a bit more.

To be honest I think it is a shame that it has been taken out of so many gamemodes.
The change between water and land is an awesome concept and I wish it would return in the future

I can’t say that enjoy it but I do tolerate it well. My biggest single complaint is what I consider “severe” restrictions on the utility skills, especially the elite skills. If they could come up with a set of exciting, effective utility skills that didn’t make me feel like I was being punished for fighting underwater, I might feel differently.

I hope they keep forgetting. :P

No, but seriously, I hope you get some content you’re hoping for. I just can’t stand underwater combat myself. Maybe if it was designed such that I could use my normal abilities, I would enjoy it. But instead, I just feel weak every time I pop my head down there.

And because most combat is above-ground-single-axis-combat, I never quite get skilled at maneuvering in an extra axis underwater. Not to mention the big mobs like Megadestroyer, who bounce around crazily with their confusing hitboxes and somehow manage to hit you when you’re practically out of range.

Right, that is my issue with underwater. It is just unsatisfying due to lack of good utilties and terrible to non-existently useful elites.

I know my first shocker was on my thief. Basilisk Venom, in PvE, I hate it enough. Now I have to fight an instance boss with that as my elite? Seriously?

They spent way to much time on the environment and so little time on the utilities and elites (elites had next to no time spent on them relatively speaking).

id like to see them design some underwater jumping puzzles, personally.

cmon, break my paradigm. the challenge awaits.

Maybe people from Atlantis, R’lyeh, and Ys are really picky about their architecture and complained about landlubberization of their distinctive and disparate architectural styles, so the underwater zone (and any further underwater development) got Cantha’d.

ArenaNet has a habit of not improving things which are not popular.

For example, when asked if they’re going to fix all the armor clippings with charr, they responded with ‘charr aren’t popular so it’s not high on our priority list.’ Funny thing is, the armor (and its clipping) is one of the major reasons charr aren’t popular.

Same thing is likely the case with underwater combat. It has issues so people don’t like it. Because people don’t like it, it’s low on their priority list.

Once GW3 gets is upgrade engine, we’ll have actually underwater content to play in.

I think the weapons need to be balanced AND all utility skills need an underwater variant. The difference between classes atm is ridiculous.

To be fair, I think the great majority of the playerbase prefers land combat over underwater combat.

Would also take a lot of effort to rework it… effort which could be better spent on things people are interested in.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Additional note: The last 3-4 BL weapon sets have not included underwater weapons. They are even phasing out the weapons.

I’m sure this has a lot more to do with the fact that they just don’t get enough people redeeming tickets for spears, tridents, and harpoon guns to make it worth spending time designing them.

Tormented got a spear because GW1 had a tormented spear and chaos weapons got underwater gear likely because they are all incredibly low poly, simple meshes that are recycled from existing weapon meshes on several of them so it didn’t mean as much work.

First person camera in too confusing and overwhelming for players to handle and so is movement in three dimensions.

BlueZone.4236:

First person camera in too confusing and overwhelming for players to handle and so is movement in three dimensions.

Players also need 45 hours of leveling before they are allowed to spend their first trait point.

Better not rush things, might confuse someone! /s

Not much of a fan of underwater combat which sucks because I LOVE being underwater.

BlueZone.4236:

First person camera in too confusing and overwhelming for players to handle and so is movement in three dimensions.

Not enjoying something doesn’t require that you are also overwhelmed by it and don’t understand it.

Labjax.2465:

BlueZone.4236:

First person camera in too confusing and overwhelming for players to handle and so is movement in three dimensions.

Not enjoying something doesn’t require that you are also overwhelmed by it and don’t understand it.

Problems with underwater combat:

3 axis opposed to two (sure, you can jump, but you don’t actually fly, meaning your z axis isn’t particularly used). This actually causes problems such as camera angles, depth perception, and other things. Depth is a kittene, because when we see depth in a video game, it’s usually tied to something such as size and/or position on a plane. However, we don’t see that plane so it’s reliant entirely on size and not everyone has experience with size-relative depth. This can make it confusing when you’re checking your range to see which axis you need to change to be in range.

Camera orientation is stuck in “gravity” oriented. While this makes it easier to know where “up” is, while you’re downed, it makes the fighting very, very hard to do. Water is similar to space (yeah, no, it’s not that similar, but in a virtual reality where there’s no gravity pulling you down…) the only “up” and “down” are defined by you, yourself, meaning that down should (or could) be in relation to how you orient your camera, and not how your camera orients itself. If anything, this can be released as a level-gated thing to help ease new players into it, or it could just be there from the beginning (and will revert to the current camera system upon downing).

Not enough keys for control. Defaulted, you don’t even have enough keys. There’s swim down, swim up, move forward, backwards, left, right, turn left, right. There also needs to be rotate axis of control (see camera section). Of course, this makes there be a ton of keys that aren’t very intuitive to control, but it would help make the combat more fluid for people who like to stay in it.

Disparity in skills because, god knows, we can’t have fields underwater. Oh wait, we do. Now, I understand it’s hard to get ground-target skills without, you know, ground all over the place. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be variations. If there aren’t variations, there should be water-only utility skills. Also, there needs to be more variety in water weapons. 2 weapons is enough for players without weapon swap (ele/engie) even though they only have 1. At least 3 or 4 for players with weapon swap. This allows for fluidity and control of combat based. 3 is a good one for players with weapon swap, as most players don’t typically utilize weapon swapping too much, currently.

Tl;dr: Treat water combat like space and stop trying to force the camera on us.

Arenanet’s balance team seem to look exclusively at SPvP when making their balance changes. Given that there’s now no underwater combat in SPvP, there’s no balance changes made for it.

I will go on record as saying I wish there was more underwater combat.

Under Way

I like underwater combat, and think the weapon skills are, by and large, fine, but I hate how limited the utility and elites tend to be.

Fixing that will fix a lot of what’s wrong with underwater combat in GW2.

Am I going crazy or did they delete the Spvp map that used to have an underwater area? I know its not inn arena queue any more. I really liked that map and don’t understand why.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

ArenaNet has a habit of not improving things which are not popular.

For example, when asked if they’re going to fix all the armor clippings with charr, they responded with ‘charr aren’t popular so it’s not high on our priority list.’ Funny thing is, the armor (and its clipping) is one of the major reasons charr aren’t popular.

Same thing is likely the case with underwater combat. It has issues so people don’t like it. Because people don’t like it, it’s low on their priority list.

The charr bit isn’t necessarily true. Arenanet could look at which races people pick for their first character and see which they go for. At that point people wouldn’t know about the armor clipping issues or how horrible high level gear looks on those characters.

Based on the popularity of races in other games, I am betting that human gets picked most frequently, followed by Asura, then Charr and norn well below those two.

The problem is that unless you are an elementalist, there’s not enough variety of weapon skills, and on top of that there are a lot of skills that cannot be used underwater, so underwater gameplay gets repetitive.

I think that all other classes should have access to all 3 underwater weapons, and then add some additional land weapons that make sense being used underwater, such as daggers and focus. This would make the game more interesting underwater.

Underwater content is lackluster in general. Personally would rather have SAB back than anything to deal with water combat.

Back when they removed the map with underwater combat from sPvP, that was their way of saying that they’ve given up on making it work for players.

Neat concept, shame it didn’t pan out, but there are bigger fish to fry.

It’s not popular, no, but I personally hope that the current amount of underwater content stays. I enjoy my benthic exploration and seeing the world from a different perspective.

Plus, I really don’t know why people say they feel underpowered underwater. I find enemies so much easier to fight underwater, to the point where I will sometimes deliberately lure enemies into the water so I can kill them more easily.

Esplen.3940:

Problems with underwater combat:

3 axis opposed to two (sure, you can jump, but you don’t actually fly, meaning your z axis isn’t particularly used). This actually causes problems such as camera angles, depth perception, and other things. Depth is a kittene, because when we see depth in a video game, it’s usually tied to something such as size and/or position on a plane. However, we don’t see that plane so it’s reliant entirely on size and not everyone has experience with size-relative depth. This can make it confusing when you’re checking your range to see which axis you need to change to be in range.

Camera orientation is stuck in “gravity” oriented. While this makes it easier to know where “up” is, while you’re downed, it makes the fighting very, very hard to do. Water is similar to space (yeah, no, it’s not that similar, but in a virtual reality where there’s no gravity pulling you down…) the only “up” and “down” are defined by you, yourself, meaning that down should (or could) be in relation to how you orient your camera, and not how your camera orients itself. If anything, this can be released as a level-gated thing to help ease new players into it, or it could just be there from the beginning (and will revert to the current camera system upon downing).

Not enough keys for control. Defaulted, you don’t even have enough keys. There’s swim down, swim up, move forward, backwards, left, right, turn left, right. There also needs to be rotate axis of control (see camera section). Of course, this makes there be a ton of keys that aren’t very intuitive to control, but it would help make the combat more fluid for people who like to stay in it.

Disparity in skills because, god knows, we can’t have fields underwater. Oh wait, we do. Now, I understand it’s hard to get ground-target skills without, you know, ground all over the place. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be variations. If there aren’t variations, there should be water-only utility skills. Also, there needs to be more variety in water weapons. 2 weapons is enough for players without weapon swap (ele/engie) even though they only have 1. At least 3 or 4 for players with weapon swap. This allows for fluidity and control of combat based. 3 is a good one for players with weapon swap, as most players don’t typically utilize weapon swapping too much, currently.

Tl;dr: Treat water combat like space and stop trying to force the camera on us.

Solid breakdown. Well said.

Nobody likes underwater combat and the funny thing is, all these people asking for it will prolly be the ones to play it the least or come on the forums upset nobody is doing the underwater levels. It’s not a fun playstyle, it’s obnoxious and it’s not for everyone, some skills for underwater combat are just garbage and some builds won’t work for it.

sirian.4981:

Konig Des Todes.2086:

ArenaNet has a habit of not improving things which are not popular.

For example, when asked if they’re going to fix all the armor clippings with charr, they responded with ‘charr aren’t popular so it’s not high on our priority list.’ Funny thing is, the armor (and its clipping) is one of the major reasons charr aren’t popular.

Same thing is likely the case with underwater combat. It has issues so people don’t like it. Because people don’t like it, it’s low on their priority list.

The charr bit isn’t necessarily true. Arenanet could look at which races people pick for their first character and see which they go for. At that point people wouldn’t know about the armor clipping issues or how horrible high level gear looks on those characters.

Based on the popularity of races in other games, I am betting that human gets picked most frequently, followed by Asura, then Charr and norn well below those two.

My point was that charr remain so unpopular – in that, people make a charr, and then get put off by the poor armor of the charr thus going to other races – because of such. If you decided to start the game and role a human because, hey, you’re human, and then you see players complaining about all the armor clipping with charr, are you going to then role a charr?

For most people I know, the answer would be no.

And a lot of people I know refuse to play charr because of the constant armor clippings that are so blatant it bugs them throughout gameplay.

Actually, no, that was just a comparative argument, and the above was the point of the outcome of the comparative argument, which is “the charr don’t get worked on because they’re unpopular, but because they don’t get worked on, they definitely will remain unpopular” and that this outcome is in the same light for underwater combat:

That is to say, my point is: Underwater combat doesn’t get worked on because it’s unpopular. However, it definitely will remain unpopular so long as it isn’t improved.

I don’t mind underwater combats. The thing I don’t like is that mobs can spawn from everywhere and not only from 180° like on terrain. So if there are a lot of mobs, it’s pretty hard to manage.

The problem for me is: Lack of AoE for some classes and generally weaker skills

The problem I see, is that underwater isn’t just very well fleshed out. The potential and mechanics are already there to make it fun. But there are very few skills, and not a whole lot of content that makes use of the possibilities of underwater combat. It deserves a patch all of it’s own.

It hasn’t been well received. I like it though. If they do something like the huge underwater world in WoW called ’Vash’jir’ then i’d appreciate it. It’s a huge vast underwater world. If you go down to the lowest point it takes a couple of minutes.

I was hoping something similar for one of the elder dragons (‘Bubbles’).

insanemaniac.2456:

id like to see them design some underwater jumping puzzles, personally.

cmon, break my paradigm. the challenge awaits.

Undewater… jumping? :P

Zaxares.5419:

It’s not popular, no, but I personally hope that the current amount of underwater content stays. I enjoy my benthic exploration and seeing the world from a different perspective.

Plus, I really don’t know why people say they feel underpowered underwater. I find enemies so much easier to fight underwater, to the point where I will sometimes deliberately lure enemies into the water so I can kill them more easily.

I know, it’s so much easier underwater.

I don’t imagine they have forgotten about underwater gameplay. I believe one of the dragons is a sea dragon, if I’m right, so I expect sooner or later we will be given a large update for that, unless we’re never going to face all the dragons.

Underwater gameplay is, I suspect, insanely difficult to balance, on top of the fact that it doesn’t see much play-time with regards to the game overall (how much time have you spent fighting underwater compared to on land?), so I suspect that, while it’s not forgotten, it’s not a very high priority

The underwater areas are beautiful and the sound effects are great. I really enjoy swimming around now and then. The problem for me is the 3 axis and mobs.

You see a place that you want to explore, there is a mob to kill before being able to do so, so you start fighting. But since it’s kind of hard to orient underwater you often bump in to another mob…and another….and another.. and another and then they start to respawn. Then I just get to the point where it’s not worth my time time to even try to explore the area.