Posts Tagged ‘drown’

Players drown in sorrow over lack of SWTOR Swimming

A hot topic of contest on the official forums over the last few days has been swimming in SWTOR.

At the recent PAX convention players who were able to enjoy the game for the first time found this surprising fact, and that was there is no swimming engine in Star Wars The Old Republic.

In many ways, this is not completely unsurprising. For decades many games have done without swimming, preferring to just have players that fall into water die. This saves a lot of space as the 3d engines and animations required are usually quite complex, which may be why the lack of this skill in video game characters has been so prevalent.

Even big blockbuster games such as Assassins creed did not have swimming engines, and the edition of one in the sequel was one of the major selling point. We remember 1/4 of the back panel being dedicated to just telling reads that in this game ‘You can swim!’

Without swimming in TOR we are likely to just see water as impossible to enter. This means the developers will probably not put much liquid in their terrain designs, and if pushed may try adding it in the form of Lava or Acid so they have some reason for killing off players who would be foolish enough to enter.

Many players have been complaining on the forums about the lack of a swimming engine, and fingers have been pointed in the directions of a number of developers who evidently must be responsible for this particular outrage.

SWTOR’s major predecessor Star Wars Galaxies got around the need for a swimming engine by just allowing players to traverse the surface. Although unrealistic, this did work quite well and is a perfectly viable option for Bioware to implement if they feel like adding swimming as a minor expansion some time after release.

Regardless of our characters aquatic abilities, we are still eagerly awaiting Star Wars The Old Republic and are keen to hear any news of development advancements!

We'll see none of this in SWTOR.

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