Will swimming in games ever be good?

It was good in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Because all the water was frozen over and if you broke through the ice you went into shock and died.

I always liked swimming in Quake II. Not because the physics were anything special, but because the level designers used water to create many side areas, secrets and alternate passages.

Tetzlaff said:

I always liked swimming in Quake II. Not because the physics were anything special, but because the level designers used water to create many side areas, secrets and alternate passages.

Those grenades. <3

GTA 5's swimming is pretty cool. I bet anybody scared of deep water exploring wouldn't want to touch that one though.

MetroidJunkie said:

Many games let you swim, games that don't let you swim are mostly just to set invisible barriers. Half-Life 2 had an interesting variant, you can swim just fine but venture out into the ocean and you get torn to shreds by very aggressive piranha.

Actually they're the leeches from the first game, only now you can't kill them.

While Quake style swimming is pretty alright, I always preferred to be able to look up and down without influencing my swimming direction. I feel that separate Z-axis control via the jump button alone is better.

@MetroidJunkie: Regarding HL2, remember that there were many actual swimming sections long before the beach areas. Swimming controls were just like HL1, which were just like Quake. The leeches were more of a "how do we prevent the player from venturing too far into non-level territory" than anything.

^ You could just briefly stop pressing the move forward button and look around instead, then look back into the original direction and move forward again. Especially if the game has high inertia while you aren't pressing any movement controls, so that you could briefly look around without much influence on your movement direction and speed.

scifista42 said:

^ You could just briefly stop pressing the move forward button and look around instead, then look back into the original direction and move forward again. Especially if the game has high inertia while you aren't pressing any movement controls, so that you could briefly look around without much influence on your movement direction and speed.

Yes, I could, but I prefer maximum control at all times, I'd rather not stop moving just to aim.

It's not swimming but I was blown away by crysis's zero g controls.

Sodaholic said:

I prefer maximum control at all times, I'd rather not stop moving just to aim.

You know, it's the same like if you wanted to aim separately while running on the ground as you normally do in an FPS. Maximum controls would be cool, but your computer doesn't have 2 mouses and you don't have 4 hands.

Swimming as a zora in the original version of Majora's Mask felt super fluid (har har) and being able to leap out of the water was hugely fun. Also swimming around in Ecco The Dolphin felt pretty fun (one would hope so given its the only means of getting around, really). Generally swimming in 2D seems to be a more commonly done-right thing, with games like Donkey Kong Country having some of the most memorable stages in the game. There are certain water levels on the other hand that just aren't particularly fun at all, usually due to needing to mash to move (looking at you, Keen 4), or being immensely slowed (see: Labyrinth Zone from Sonic 1).

In DOOM swimming is neat because you can just walk over the liquid because doomguy is actually jesus in disguise. What a saviour.

joe-ilya said:

In DOOM swimming is neat because you can just walk over the liquid because doomguy is actually jesus in disguise. What a saviour.

He's "OUR HERO" in the cast call.

In all seriousness, I've always interpreted liquid in Doom to be shallow.

Jello said:

It was good in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. Because all the water was frozen over and if you broke through the ice you went into shock and died.

Quoting for truth. I hate swimming in real life and it is usually slow and boring in games.

In the first Assassin's Creed, water just killed you instantly. That was all right with me. It was basically the only surface you could land on and expect to die. Once you got enough health, falling from skyscrapers was no big deal. I loved the 1st Assassin's Creed game though, not trying to bash it. I'm just saying that sometimes realism in games is completely wasted on me. Might as well let me be a titan walking the earth except when I fall into a little puddle. Serves me right, I say

TheCupboard said:

Quoting for truth. I hate swimming in real life and it is usually slow and boring in games.

In the first Assassin's Creed, water just killed you instantly. That was all right with me. It was basically the only surface you could land on and expect to die. Once you got enough health, falling from skyscrapers was no big deal. I loved the 1st Assassin's Creed game though, not trying to bash it. I'm just saying that sometimes realism in games is completely wasted on me. Might as well let me be a titan walking the earth except when I fall into a little puddle. Serves me right, I say

I agree, the only Assassin's Creed I liked was the first one. But in any open world game it just gets irritating. GTA San Andreas/4/5, oh I dropped in water, now I have to swim very slowly for several minutes to get back to land. I'm a little bit hypocritical because I always bitched about dying as soon as I hit water, but swimming back to shore is more annoying. At least in Saints Row 4 you can get an ability to let you run across water, because there's nothing in it, that's why you can just press Y to go back to land.

And then in games like Far Cry it just becomes an ordeal. I keep having to press sprint to swim fast, there are animals attacking me, and when I'm on land I don't have to keep pressing sprint to move fast, but in water I do.

I do still like the Grisly Grotto from Quake, because it was neat. At that point the only FPS I had played was Doom, so to be forced to dive into a deep chasm of water was neat, and aside from Descent was the first game I had played with that level of movement. But the idea wore thin quickly, and iD was right to play it down in Quake. Usually if you ended up in water, you either fucked up, or were bold, and got rewarded. /Dopefish.

And I just remembered Cryostasis. Same idea. The water is cold, you can't jump into near freezing water and not go into shock. So you jump in it, you die. Or in Cryostatis I believe if you could find a heat source quickly you could warm up, but that was the same idea with most of the game. You had to constantly find some kind of fire to warm up with. Neat game.