Anet forgotten there's underwater gameplay?
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.
basically this.
I hate underwater combat AS IS.
Underwater combat is only fit for skirmishes. It is not fit for dungeons, would bosses, WvW battles, and so on. Essentially combat system work was designed for 2D and fails in 3D. The designers will probably continue to add some skirmish content underwater and not add anything more serious.
What I never understood about underwater combat is, why we deal less damage. The best example would be a guardian underwater.. what were they thinking?
I really hope that they are at least still thinking about reworking it. Otherwise it would be a shame.
Currently playing Heart of Thorns.
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.
I just wish Anet would just be so straight forward with us instead of keeping it to some obscure interview why there won’t be anymore anytime soon.
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.
Well said. I think water only skills would have help ease players into underwater combat better instead of finding out there favorite skills have been lock out when they go underwater or at least make the skills have different effects when used underwater.
I think when “Bubbles” is introduced (if ever) it will be a on land type of fight.
What I never understood about underwater combat is, why we deal less damage. The best example would be a guardian underwater.. what were they thinking?
I really hope that they are at least still thinking about reworking it. Otherwise it would be a shame.
I think when the dervs were making the underwater part of the game and they realize how hard it was going to be they didn’t put much thought or care into the skills. Hints* why the underwater mechanics feel unfinished, unbalanced and just a afterthought.
Over all if they want to steer away from the underwater gameplay that’s fine, I just think they need to go back and at the least balance it and fix the bugs. That might help get more interest from players and a desire for more underwater content.
As an engineer, I thoroughly love underwater combat. I make it a point to do something underwater every time I log in, whether it is as simple as killing random mobs, or underwater events… or even just resource gathering.
I for one, cannot wait till we get to take on Bubbles, because that HAS to bring more underwater maps into the equation.
I may be in the minority but I vote YES YES YES for more underwatery goodness.
(Disclaimer- In Real Life I have scuba dived.. a lot)
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Guys— Honestly, is better to have underwater gameplay than none at all. Would be VERY odd to just have your characters be blocked by an invisible wall that stops us from crossing the waters.
Yes, it is yet unfinished, but I see that underwater gameplay will be lifted when a living story needs it. I enjoy it very much actually, so whenever people say “No one enjoys..” or “Everybody hates this…” are generalizing their opinions, thinking everyone thinks the same.
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.
Yes, cause so far we’ve fought… how many Elder Dragons?
I’m skeptical we’re getting any large content updates at all. I’m not sure if we’ll ever fight another Elder Dragon apart from Zhaitan, at the rate that they’re currently pushing out new expansions.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-On3Ya0_4Y)
Not to mention, we could get our Polearms from the Spear weapons, since many of those spears do look like Halberds already.
Other possibility for underwater combat could be Daggers.
Not to mention actual release of this sea monster too… Since we only got bones to chew at right now…
But yea, propably once we head over to the Unending Ocean, from where Krait, Quaggan and Largos come from…
I rarely do PvP or Hard PvE, unless it’s organized.
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.
Yes, cause so far we’ve fought… how many Elder Dragons?
I’m skeptical we’re getting any large content updates at all. I’m not sure if we’ll ever fight another Elder Dragon apart from Zhaitan, at the rate that they’re currently pushing out new expansions.
Well the current Living Story releases are slowly pushing us towards a fight with Mordremoth and there is that rumor back up with some proof of an actual expansion pack for GW2 sometime in 2015.
But with the term “expansion pack” being so blurred nowadays it will be probably at best the size of Eye of the North instead of a stand alone game like Factions and Nightfall was.
Well the current Living Story releases are slowly pushing us towards a fight with Mordremoth and there is that rumor back up with some proof of an actual expansion pack for GW2 sometime in 2015.
But with the term “expansion pack” being so blurred nowadays it will be probably at best the size of Eye of the North instead of a stand alone game like Factions and Nightfall was.
If it was for winter/spring 2015 they would already have a trailer out by now. So if they ever release an expansion it will be fall 2015 early 2016. By that time I will be long gone, but I’ll come back if it adds GvG.
I don’t think ANet has so much ‘forgotten’ underwater gameplay as much as ‘would like to forget’. It’s such a different animal from standard gameplay that it’s next to impossible to properly balance. Take a look at all the most popular builds and look at how many fall apart because of some weapon or some skill that’s not available underwater. Fixing underwater combat would take such an inordinate amount of effort that they decided to just move forward without it. Hell, they removed a PVP map and completely overhauled all the wvw maps for the sole purpose of taking out underwater areas.
Whether they’ve forgotten it or are ignoring it, the bulk of the player base is just fine with that.
Thing is: exploring is cool! Especially cold areas such as the norns’. I think they would be wasting exploration potential if they removed UW combat.
(Disclaimer- In Real Life I have scuba dived.. a lot)
It’s funny you say this because just the other day, I was thinking how having familiarity with the 3 axes is unnatural for most people, unless you’re a scuba diver or something. :P
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.
Yes, this too! It’s something of a skill I’ve developed, trying to avoid mobs in MMOs and leash when they aggro me – something where my experience is essentially worthless underwater because depth perception confuses me and it can be hard to pick out where the mobs are, among all the miscellaneous underwater objects.
(Disclaimer- In Real Life I have scuba dived.. a lot)
It’s funny you say this because just the other day, I was thinking how having familiarity with the 3 axes is unnatural for most people, unless you’re a scuba diver or something. :P
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.
Yes, this too! It’s something of a skill I’ve developed, trying to avoid mobs in MMOs and leash when they aggro me – something where my experience is essentially worthless underwater because depth perception confuses me and it can be hard to pick out where the mobs are, among all the miscellaneous underwater objects.
It would be cool to see a zone where there is truly a main city underwater so I definitely agree with the exploration. Sometimes it can get kinda hard to orientate yourself when your underwater but I see a few solutions that might be effective. One can be to change the reset of monsters when underwater that can help with making the player understand how big the “battlefield” is when under water. Also how the character moves in battle can help stop that feeling of being disorientated. When swimming down but attack a monster that is on top make the toon be facing up while swimming back and not keeping him moving looking forward. Another solution imo is people getting familiar with the movement. I’m pretty sure people spend maybe 10% (being generous) of their time in the water.
(edited by Zoso.8279)
They have officially stated that they regret putting underwater stuff in the game and that they don’t understand how to fix it.
Underwater combat:
-only has 2 choices for weapons so there is no build diversity
-have virtually no traits associated with it which limits any build diversity
-resets certain “charged” utilities, un-summons pets
-is terribly unbablanced between classes, more so even than “land” builds
-is difficult to judge depth with (imo)
Generally my underwater strategy is to get back on land as soon as possible where the “real” fights are.
I just wish Anet would just be so straight forward with us instead of keeping it to some obscure interview why there won’t be anymore anytime soon.
Yeah, this one,
http://www.guildmag.com/guild-wars-2-interview-part-2-competitive-balance/
wasnt exactly the better or clearest interview ever made by Anet.